Free Republic

With 2735 votes counted, Scott Walker came out on top in this survey in more ways than one: he swept the first choice, second choice, and consensus pick votes. Ted Cruz is a close second, and Mitt Romney came in with a strong third place showing. Other than Ben Carson, no other candidate broke 5%. Rick Perry emerged as a strong second choice behind Walker and Cruz. The consensus choice top 5 belonged to Walker, Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Perry and Carson.Some notable issue votes are below. Over sixty percent of primary voters are at least somewhat satisfied with the field,...

Sarah Palin has called out Beltway Republicans for “deflated balls.” Pointing to the New England Patriots as a cautionary tale, the conservative starlet warned her party to stand up to President Obama’s agenda. “That GOP leadership, that establishment, they’ve got to get their stuff together. I love what they believe in, I believe in it too. But they’ve got to get tough, man. You know what? It’s not just the New England Patriots who are dealing with deflated balls right now,” the former Alaska Governor told The Blaze on Thursday. Palin was referring to the controversy over whether the NFL...

GOP elites want Americans to think the party's boring and safe again. Maybe someone should notify the Tea Party. If you’re understandably perplexed by the Republican Party’s apparent decision to enter the post-Obama era by nominating either another member of the Bush dynasty, or another version of Mitt Romney, there’s at least one way to think about it that might help explain the seemingly inexplicable. Put simply, the leaders of the GOP, the people who tend to be referred to as “the establishment,” fervently believe that in order to win in 2016, Republicans will have to convince voters that the...

Erick Erickson, the man described by The Atlantic as the Most Powerful Conservative in America, swung his verbal hammer on the Republican Party’s abandonment of the pro-life movement.  The blow hit directly on the fissure separating the party’s money and influence-peddlers from its principled core.  This single statement “[maybe] it is time for a third party to give the GOP competition” marks a cataclysmic shift in RedState.com, a media site dedicated to Republican principles, whose own posting rules prohibit its readers from posting the very statement Erickson made on its front page. 6. It is forbidden to promote or give...

For now, senators say it’s not a problem that one of the most powerful Republicans in D.C. already has a likely presidential candidate. “I work with Sen. McConnell on stuff, I make sure he knows what I’m doing to try and get it across the finish line,” Paul said. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made no secret that he’ll support his fellow Kentuckian, Sen. Rand Paul, should Paul run for president in 2016. And Paul has also made no secret that he very, very likely will do just that. But there’s a lot of time between now and the...

A new Congress means change—change in the way that votes swing, legislature is pushed past, and committees are formed. With the 2014 midterm elections, the Republican Party took control of Congress, and subsequently, new senators were named to positions in congressional committees. Recently, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R.) was named chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space, while Fla Sen. Marco Rubio (R.) was named chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard. Interestingly enough, neither seem to have the education or beliefs necessary to head such influential positions. Cruz is infamous for his...

One thing you can say about Sen. Rand Paul’s burgeoning presidential campaign – he’s not scaring anybody out of the race. The Republican National Committee reports that the 2016 primary field has mushroomed to about 25 legitimate contenders — the size of a major league baseball roster — and growing, which certainly could make for an interesting party debate where you quite literally won’t be able to tell the players without a scorecard. Despite the RNC’s claims of legitimacy there are a few apples in the barrel who have about as much chance of moving into the Oval Office two...

The GOP accepts the notion of climate change - but not the way Democrats wanted them to.Senate Republicans head-faked Democrats on climate change Wednesday, agreeing in a floor vote that the planet’s climate was changing, but blocking language that would have blamed human activity. In a complicated maneuver that was the first politically perilous test for Senate Republicans, the new majority party split up the votes that Democrats had hoped would force the GOP into an awkward roll call on whether they believed in the science behind climate change — just hours after President Barack Obama slammed Republicans in his...

Following is the full text of the Republican Address to the Nation by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), as prepared for delivery: "Good evening. "I'm Joni Ernst. As a mother, a soldier, and a newly elected senator from the great State of Iowa, I am proud to speak with you tonight. "A few moments ago, we heard the President lay out his vision for the year to come. Even if we may not always agree, it's important to hear different points of view in this great country. We appreciate the President sharing his. "Tonight though, rather than respond to a speech,...

Watching Sen. Joni Ernst Tuesday night, I found myself thinking: If there’s a GOP establishment, it must consist of secret Democrats, because they so reliably sabotage their rising stars by assigning them the reply to President Obama’s annual State of the Union address, way before they’re ready. Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. Marco Rubio moved from 2016 contenders to punch lines in moments. Ernst seemed headed the same way, with her robotic sing-song delivery and her head-scratching anecdotes about bread bags on her shoes and working the biscuit lines at Hardees. She was clearly working to show voters that she’s...

Prepare yourself at 9 p.m. ET for the magic that only a seventh-year State of the Union speech can create. Every SOTU is a political Groundhog Day but tonight’s looks to be more repetitive than usual — tax hikes on the rich, some whining about the Citizens United decision, a few studiously vague sentences on “progress” made in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, etc. Seventh verse, same as the first. What’s novel is the new reality in Congress and Obama’s reaction to it. Having just seen Democrats obliterated in an election which he himself sold as a referendum on his...

I'm going to confess an unpopular opinion (among liberals at least) and say that as much as I enjoy The Daily Show, Jon Stewart is usually not that good an interviewer when it comes to political figures. He's about two-thirds of a good interviewer—there are always some good questions, but he usually misses opportunities to ask critical follow-ups, and when his interviewee is struggling, he'll often jump in with a joke. Which is his job, of course—it's a comedy show, and he's a comedian—but it also has the effect of letting his subject off the hook. Last night though, Stewart...

When President Barack Obama speaks tonight during his State of the Union address, all Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) will be hearing is actor Christopher Walken’s iconic voice. Asked by a reporter Tuesday whether he found anything to like in Obama’s proposal to impose new fees on big banks, Politico reported that Cruz compared the president’s ideas to Walken’s most famous “Saturday Night Live” sketch where the actor plays a music producer. “To every problem his solution was, ‘more cowbell, more cowbell.’ This president, to every problem his solution is ‘more taxes, more government,'” Cruz said. “He’s not listening to the...

Paul’s claims about judicial activism raise fundamental doubts about his positions on social issues. He says he is for judicial activism, but he also asserts he is pro-life. So does that mean he is for or against Roe v. Wade, perhaps the ultimate case of judicial activism in conservative eyes, a case where even liberal heavyweight scholar John Hart Ely said, “It is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Paul claims to be against gay marriage. So does he support the Court’s activism in United States v. Windsor in 2013, which...

Much of the 2016 political oxygen on the Republican side of the aisle has been sucked up by establishment-leaning figures so far -- Jeb Bush forming his exploratory committee, Mitt Romney heavily weighing launching version 3.0, Chris Christie making telltale moves, etc. On the more conservative end of the spectrum, we have Bobby Jindal almost assuredly running (do read his hard-hitting speech on radical Islamism delivered in London yesterday), Scott Walker staffing up and sounding like a presidential candidate, and Marco Rubio reportedly inching closer to taking the plunge. And then there's Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson,...

South Carolina has been where underdog Republican presidential candidacies die and front-runners begin to look toward November. The only asterisk to its 32-year streak of picking the eventual GOP nominee came in the whack-a-mole 2012 contest that placed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich over eventual nominee Mitt Romney. “Romney never closed the deal with the voters,” said legendary South Carolina Republican strategist Chip Felkel about Romney's inability to win the first-in-the-South primary. “Voters cast with their hearts, not their heads, in that cycle.” Everyone understandably focuses on who is coming and going in Iowa, the first contest of 2016's presidential...

Four leading Republican presidential prospects are expected to appear this weekend in the California desert before an exclusive gathering of rich conservatives convened by the Koch brothers’ political operation, several sources tell POLITICO. Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida, and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, received coveted invitations to speak to the vaunted network assembled by the billionaire industrialist mega-donors Charles and David Koch, the sources said. The meeting, set to be held at a Palm Springs hotel, is the annual winter gathering of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the nonprofit group...

We need to notice and be aware of the injustices embedded in our criminal justice system.In his 1967 address to Stanford University, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of two Americas. He described them as, “two starkly different American experiences that exist side by side.” In one America, people experienced “the opportunity of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all its dimensions.” In the other America, people experienced a “daily ugliness” that dashes hope and leaves only “the fatigue of despair.”(continued)

With 2016 rumblings abounding, we forgot about Rick Santorum. The former Pennsylvania Senator threw some early punches last week at his potential rivals, calling Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) “bomb throwers,” who had no real accomplishments on their resumes (via NYT): Discussing Mr. Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and winner of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, Mr. Santorum raised four policy issues that he said would prompt questions about Mr. Huckabee’s fealty to conservative principles. Mr. Santorum was even harsher when discussing Mr. Paul of Kentucky and Mr. Cruz of Texas, both first-term senators, dismissing them as...

As Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney battle behind the scenes for big money donors, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz is working to portray himself as the presidential candidate of the conservative base. Speaking to tea partiers in South Carolina over the weekend, Cruz cautioned that Republicans will lose the White House in 2016 if the nominee is insufficiently conservative. “If we nominate a candidate in that mold, the same people who stayed home in 2008 and 2012 will stay home in 2016 and the Democrats will win again,” Cruz told the crowd. His comments come as the Texas senator —...