Free Republic

Washington (CNN)Rand Paul isn't endorsing same-sex marriage, but said Sunday that "people ought to be treated fairly under the law." The Kentucky Republican senator who launched his 2016 presidential campaign this week talked about the semantics of marriage equality in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union." He said the decision on whether to allow same-sex marriage should be left to the states, and that he believes in "the traditional religious connotation" to marriage -- which religious conservatives believe should be reserved for one man and one woman. "I also believe people ought to be treated...

There’s already plenty of bad punditry regarding the chances of Hillary Clinton — who officially announced her candidacy on Sunday — to become the 45th president. You can find Democrats boasting about their “blue wall” in the Electoral College and how hard this will make it for any Republican to win. Or Republicans warning that the Democratic Party rarely wins three elections in a row. Most of this analysis is flimsy. So is the commentary about the ups-and-downs in early swing state polls. And when you see some pundit declaring a minor misstep to be a “game changer,” find someone...

One of the U.S. Senate’s most outspoken conservative leaders, Sen. Ted Cruz, officially confirmed today for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SRLC) in Oklahoma City in May. Cruz is the ninth national leader and 2016 presidential candidate to confirm for the conference behind Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, former Sen. Rick Santorum, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Dr. Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Donald Trump and Ambassador John Bolton. OKGOP Chairman Dave Weston noted, "Sen. Cruz’s recent announcement for president has created quite a buzz among Republican voters. We’re excited he’ll be joining us for the SRLC, as...

I just love it when a Republican candidate who is currently serving in Congress explains why Republican policies fail. Lindsey Graham did it twice on CNN's State of the Union this morning. First, when asked about Ted Cruz, Graham criticized his decision to shut down the government over Obamacare, saying it "hurt our party." He also intimated that Cruz doesn't have the temperament or experience to bring about consensus on policy issues. He begins by blaming Hillary for everything that's wrong in the Middle East, as though she was a puppetmaster while serving as Secretary of State. When he gets...

Riddle me this, fellow Republicans. An NBC survey April 9 reports that a huge majority (70%) of Americans doubts that Iran will abide by any agreement to limit its nuclear arms–but a majority (54%) still thinks Obama will do a better job than the Republicans in dealing with Iran! A majority of Americans – 54 percent – trust Barack Obama to do a better job handling an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, compared to 42 percent who say they trust the Republicans in Congress. But nearly 7 in 10 Americans say that Iran is not likely to abide...

Yesterday, in a somewhat useful exercise, my Democratic friend and sometimes sparring partner Carter Eskew compiled a “Republican Nutcase Check List” for Republican presidential candidates to take. (If you want to see how you’d rank, you can take that survey here.) With his quiz as motivation, and in the same spirit, I wrote a corresponding checklist for Democrats in general, given that their presidential candidate bench is so weak. In order to slant his test and present Republicans as Democrats want them to be, Carter had to scour some remote corners of the country in search of narrow positions and...

Lawrence Wilkerson is a contradictory figure. Wilkerson is a career military man, who served as chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell; but he has also voiced reluctance to involve American forces in foreign conflicts, and slammed the Bush administration for its handling of the Iraq War. He is also a lifelong Republican who, far from just criticizing his party, has actually gone on the warpath against it at times. When Powell was attacked by conservatives in 2012 for endorsing Barack Obama for reelection — Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu famously suggested that the endorsement was motivated by...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz chose a conservative, evangelical Christian university as the setting for his announcement that he was running for president. This underscored his apparent strategic decision to focus relentlessly on the conservative, highly religious segment of his party, both in terms of attempting to become their candidate of preference, and also in terms of maximizing their turnout in the 2016 primary elections. The Republican Party in general has a disproportionate percentage of conservative and highly religious Americans in its ranks, so Cruz's strategy would appear to make numerical sense -- as it would for other conservative politicians, like...

Cal Thomas's column in the March 29, 2015, Quad-City Times is intriguing. He starts by quoting Goldwater’s famous presidential slogan, “In your heart you know he’s right,” and then advises us not to believe the labels people are applying to Ted Cruz as being “extreme, far right, out of the mainstream.” He goes on to warn Republicans not to be fooled into “nominating a mushy moderate from the party’s moderate wing”, someone like Sen. John McCain or Mitt Romney. He doesn’t warn them against nominating someone from the "extreme, far right, out of the mainstream," like Sen. Barry Goldwater, a...

Senator Ted Cruz’s announcement he’s running for president during a March 23 speech at Virginia’s Liberty University made him the first candidate to declare his candidacy official in the 2016 cycle. Here are five things to know about Cruz and his presidential run: 1. He wanted to be the first candidate to announce because he thought it would bring him attention. Being first out of the gate, his campaign hopes, will catch the eyes of both high-engagement Republican primary voters and the media—and, in the process, might slow or stop Governor Scott Walker’s rapid rise. From The New York Times:...

The Republican primary battle has been called a wide-open contest — the “deepest” and “strongest” field in many cycles. It is full of the party’s rising stars and hopefuls, like Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal, alongside the most formidable name in Republican politics: Bush. But the campaign is not nearly as open as it looks. Many of the candidates who have received the most news media attention have little or no chance of winning the nomination. Instead, two figures — Jeb Bush and Mr. Walker — have quickly moved to...

Five reasons why the Kentucky senator trails Ted Cruz in fundraising, but is still stealing the spotlight. If you’re a member of the Washington media, odds are you’ve spent at least some time over the past 48 hours discussing Rand Paul’s entry into the presidential race and his testy exchanges about abortion with an Associated Press reporter. Reporters and pundits have covered Paul’s debut for The Washington Post, NPR, The Huffington Post, and the Today Show. The Daily Beast offered space to the libertarian Cato Institute’s David Boaz to argue that yes, Paul can do it. In The Hill, Dick...

<p>WASHINGTON — Riding a wave of conservative fervor over gay marriage and “traditional” social values, Texas Republican Ted Cruz has rocketed upwards in national presidential polls and major donor support.</p>

Rand Paul's entry into the 2016 Republican presidential primary is good for the GOP. I won't proclaim that Paul, 52, has the gravitas or character to occupy the Oval Office -- that remains to be seen -- but I do believe that all the other Republican hopefuls should watch and learn from Kentucky's junior senator. His take on issues could make independents and Democrats take a second look at a party where they have not felt welcome. Paul describes himself as "libertarian-ish." He's not an apologist for the GOP. "It seems to me that both parties and the entire political...

Below are a few video clips as well as the transcript from Ted Cruz’s latest interview with CNBC’s John Harwood. After having watched and read all of it, I must say that Cruz did an excellent job refuting the liberal nonsense and making his case for what he believes. He even weighed in on Social Security and did a masterful job with it. Watch and read (transcripts DO NOT correspond to the videos so you should watch and read everything): Harwood: First of all, what happened to you in your childhood that you do not like guacamole avocado?Cruz: My Dad...

Yesterday Ed shared the news that the community of political experts was rather gobsmacked to find out that PACs associated with Texas Senator Ted Cruz had brought in a “record haul” in no time flat following his campaign announcement. While it would be lovely to pretend that money in politics doesn’t mean all that much and what really counts is grassroots support and a solid message, that’s simply not true. Does anyone really think Mitt Romney would have survived the 2012 fight without the mountains of cash behind him, both internally and through associated PACs? That’s a doubtful proposition at...

Indianapolis may go down in history as the Gettysburg of the culture wars, the place where forces flying the flags of modernism, diversity and individual rights outflanked the would-be upholders of traditional values, forced them into a tactical retreat — and maybe even set them on the road to long-term defeat. Not since Pickett’s Charge has a group of Americans misjudged their strategic situation more completely than did Gov. Mike Pence and his fellow Republican backers of Indiana’s religious freedom restoration law. They thought they could define conscientious objection to same-sex marriage as the moral high ground, then seize it; they...

The list of politicians appearing at the 2015 NRA annual meeting this weekend illustrates how the NRA has ceased being a gun rights group and has become little more than a puppet organization for the establishment wing of the Republican Party. The NRA-ILA Leadership Forum on Friday will include a number of political insiders with questionable records on guns, like Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal. Truly pro-freedom legislators like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Utah Senator Mike Lee were not invited. This comes after an election year where the NRA endorsed several establishment types (like Mitch McConnell and Thad Cochran)...

WASHINGTON – Sen. Marco Rubio has filed legislation to repeal gun control laws he considers too restrictive — not in his native Florida but specifically in Washington, D.C., despite overwhelming support for the statutes by residents of the nation’s capital. “In order to achieve the American dream, people need to be able to live in safe communities and be able to protect themselves, their families and their properties from danger,” Rubio said. “The lawful exercise of the Second Amendment is part of what makes this possible. For years, the District of Columbia has infringed on its residents’ Second Amendment rights...

(VIDEO-AND-AUDIO-AT-LINK)MILFORD, N.H. — Sen. Rand Paul claimed he’d be the Republican with the best chance of picking up black voters in the 2016 presidential campaign — and suggested a major scandal will soon threaten Democrat Hillary Clinton’s likely candidacy — during a stop here one day after announcing he’s running for the White House. “I’ve tried to expand the Republican Party by taking the message to places Republicans haven’t gone,” Paul said yesterday when asked by the Herald whether he is the Tea Party candidate in the race. “I’ve spent the last several years going to historically black colleges, going...