Free Republic

I … guess this makes sense? Paul’s got the same problem here as he has on most issues not related to cutting spending, trying to find a spot on the Venn diagram where libertarians and conservatives overlap. He signed Cotton’s letter, obviously, because he knows he’ll be attacked in the primaries as a squish who can’t be trusted as commander-in-chief and he can’t hand any more ammo to the competition on that point. Now, when Rubio or Ted Cruz or whoever slams him for being dovish, he can point to the Cotton letter as rebuttal. Having pandered to conservatives, though,...

Kentucky is one place in America where a tea-party firebrand and a Republican from the governance wing amicably meet.For two Republican senators from the same state, Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell could not be more mismatched. Senator Paul is a man in a hurry, with presidential stars in his eyes after a mere four years of serving Kentucky in Washington. The loquacious libertarian is a darling of young conservatives – a relaxed jeans-and-boots kind of guy. Senator McConnell, after three patient decades in office, has finally reached his dream job of Senate majority leader. A man of few words, he’s...

As Matt Welch noted Wednesday, pediatric neurosurgeon and next Republican president of the United States Ben Carson both "lived down to stereotype" and articulated some truths about the GOP field for 2016 when he argued that gay sex among heterosexuals in prisons proves that being gay is a "choice." (Carson's very existence, by the way, proves my general about Republicans' "long love affair" manifestly unqualified candidates.) Here's something else to think about while mulling over whether any of this matters more than a tinker's ding-dong: Ben Carson has apologized for his comments and is already being taken to the woodshed...

One of the least interesting news manias of the week has been former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani discussing his opinion that President Obama doesn't really love America (or you, or me, or him). Obama has been the very living embodiment of American government power for the past 7 years, and not too reluctant to use it against enemies, and just random citizens, both foreign and domestic—whether it comes to foreign policy, spending, taxing, regulating, and arresting. Thus, I doubt any alleged lack of love for the U.S. of A matters in any way that Giuliani or the people delighted to...

The United States’ political parties have always been amalgams of factions rather than vehicles for any single interest. Partly because of the pressures of the electoral system and partly because of the republic’s vastness, forging either of the two major parties into a political monolith has been impossible; the need to cater to a wide base of Americans tends to keep the parties broad and relatively inclusive. This embedded pluralism of the U.S. party system has diminished somewhat in the current era of polarization but it has not evaporated entirely. The parties are still relatively broad churches. This is clearest...

Fun stuff via BuzzFeed, portending an exciting “whose close relative is more of a devastating electoral liability?” primary for the GOP if the two men left standing are Jeb Bush and Rand Paul. I don’t understand this even within the parameters of the Ron Paul worldview. I thought hardcore isolationists — sorry, “non-interventionists” — believe that the war machine will always find a new pretext to keep rolling even if the current one goes bust. Obama, for instance, did eventually get Bin Laden, along with many other Al Qaeda capos … and yet at this very moment there’s an AUMF...

It's still early, but the future candidate is in serious trouble. Here's why his beloved Tea Party is to blame. Just before sundown on Monday, Politico unveiled a report on how Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s support for auditing the Federal Reserve has been received thus far on Wall Street. “Very poorly” seems to be the answer. According to Politico, in fact, the likely presidential candidate’s attempts to bring “the Fed” into the light may have permanently lowered the stock of “the most interesting man in politics” — at least among the conservative members of the 1 percent. “The Fed is...

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has a Ron Paul problem. Or maybe it's a Ron Paul opportunity. Both sides of that particular coin were on display Friday, when Ron - Rand's father - spoke to the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, DC. It was the elder Paul's kind of audience - young and enthusiastic about the libertarian emphasis on robust individual freedoms and miniscule government. Crowds like this had fervently supported the former congressman's quixotic bids for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2012, where he proved to be a pesky participant in the debates and a headache...

Ted Cruz claims to be a “constitutionalist,” but expects us to believe that the issue of gay marriage should be left to “debate…in the legislative chambers.” In response to President Barack Obama’s comments about gay marriage in the State of the union, the Texas senator said: I think the proper place to debate those issues is in the legislative chambers. I’m a constitutionalist…From the beginning of this country, marriage has been a question of the states, and we should not have the federal government, or unelected judges, setting aside the policy judgment of the elected legislatures and imposing their own...

Despite what some people think, hero is not a synonym for competent government-hired killer.If Clint Eastwood's record-breaking movie, American Sniper, launches a frank public conversation about war and heroism, the great director will have performed a badly needed service for the country and the world. This is neither a movie review nor a review of the late Chris Kyle's autobiographical book on which the movie is based. My interest is in the popular evaluation of Kyle, America's most prolific sniper, a title he earned through four tours in Iraq. Let's recall some facts, which perhaps Eastwood thought were too obvious...

If you want to understand America's painful lurch toward plutocracy, look no further than these mega-millionaires. It is time to stop talking about the Koch brothers and instead talk about the Koch Party, the nation’s third largest political network that is a full-blown but private political operation. The Koch Party has come into view in 2014, as some of the country’s best investigative reporters have traced and exposed various elements of their operation. The Koch Party is not as large as the Democrats or the Republicans, but is still unprecedented in size, scope and reach. Like other political parties, it...

Sen. Rand Paul prefers exhausting diplomatic efforts in dealing with overseas conflicts, and on Sunday he highlighted the difference between his softer approach to foreign policy and that of two other senators who are likely 2016 presidential candidates -- Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The Kentucky Republican joined fellow first-term senators Cruz of Texas and Rubio of Florida on stage Sunday evening in California for a summit organized by Freedom Partners. That group is the central hub of the powerful network of organizations backed by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch....

UPDATE 3:11 P.M.: Copenhaver has also opposed the Pledge of Allegiance because it was “developed by Francis Bellamy, a socialist” as a way to “sell more issues of [the] magazine Youth’s Companion.” “The pledge was conceived as a way to promote nationalism in order to sell flags to schools as a premium to solicit subscriptions,” says an image she posted to her Facebook page. “I posted a picture and story explaining this when I first started my page but this sums it up beautifully,” wrote Copenhaver. In another post, she wrote, “The pledge of allegiance and the ‘roman salute’ was...

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...

Where his Republican rivals draw attention to themselves with a tuba or a trumpet, Rand Paul puffs his Highland bagpipe. This analogy has little to do with his support for medical marijuana: Paul's sound is so different, it's compelling. As his probable presidential campaign moves forward, don't lump him in with the conventionally conservative gadflies — former Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sen. Ted Cruz, or former Sen. Rick Santorum. The major activists and donors who chase those candidates are Paul skeptics. But he's not a governor (or former governor) with executive experience and a reputation for governing, like Jeb Bush, Mitt...

Rick Santorum may have his faults as a potential presidential contender, but he is dead right about Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.): “Do we really want someone with this little experience? And the only experience they have basically — not [Sen. Marco] Rubio, but Cruz and Paul because I don’t think Rubio is going to go — is bomb throwing? Do we really want somebody who’s a bomb thrower, with no track record of any accomplishments?” Cruz may suffer from a lack of consistency, an erratic foreign policy and a grossly inappropriate temperament, but he does, to...

Dear Mitt, I know we haven't always seen eye to eye. And I've been tough on you in the past but you need to hear this from someone...drop the idea of running again. It must stick in your craw that you lost to an idiot like Barack Obama. But that's the problem, you...lost...to….an…idiot…like...Barack...Obama. Yes, defeating an incumbent President is hard but it's a lot easier in times of economic distress (see Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, granted he invented his own time of distress but "it's the economy stupid" carried the day). Even with crushing levels of unemployment, anemic growth...

Tea Party champion and conservative firebrand Ted Cruz may be ready to embrace his libertarian side – and he may need to, if he hopes to find a path from Iowa to the White House. As it turns out, the death of the Liberty Movement in Iowa may have been greatly exaggerated. While an establishment resurgence in 2014 spearheaded by Governor Terry Branstad succeeded in purging the Ron Paul element from the leadership of the Republican Party of Iowa, members of the state’s robust and often-boisterous Liberty Movement are turning their attention to greater things – namely, the 2016 presidential...

If Rand Paul wants to have any chance of running for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, not to mention the presidency itself, there is one thing he needs to do immediately. Tell Dad to shut up. In response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, Ron Paul took a break from his usual blame-America-first rhetoric to blame France first. On an internet television show, Paul the Elder declared, “France has been a target for many, many years, because they’ve been involved in foreign affairs in Libya, and they really prodded us along in—recently in Libya, but they’ve been...

One of the biggest fallacies in politics today is the claim that we, as conservatives and libertarians, can only be effective if we stay loyal to the Republican Party and work to gain control of it by electing more free-market conservatives every election year. We at AFR believe such thinking to be tragically misguided. To expect the Republican Party to challenge the modern day juggernaut of statism is as foolish as expecting socialist professors to instill Americanism into our youth. It won’t happen anymore than the planets will one day reverse their orbits. This is because the members of the...