Free Republic

Now that the GOP is taking control of the Senate in 2015, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., offered up a resolution of sorts for the opposing party to abide by next year: Get Ted Cruz under control. Durbin’s suggestion comes days after Cruz’s disastrous maneuver last week that brought the Senate into session on Saturday, unwittingly opening the door to the approval of dozens of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees. That infuriated Republicans, leading Cruz to apologize days later. “It was classic Cruz. He knew how to get the headline, but he didn’t know how to close the deal,” Durbin...

Insiders agree the party has lost focus on ‘bread and butter’ economic issues.Elizabeth Warren may have captured the imagination of the Democratic Party’s base, but many in her party worry that it does not have a message that can reach beyond its most loyal supporters. In recent weeks, Democratic operatives have begun to voice concerns that the 2014 midterms made plain the limits of an approach that failed to reach beyond minority groups or those who are reflexively liberal. And yet what should come next is not yet totally clear. “You have to answer the mail about what people’s concerns...

Sen. Mark Begich can still return to the Senate.Even though lawmakers who will not be returning to Congress in January might feel downtrodden, they can find solace in the fact that they retain some congressional perks. Those perks, ranging from floor access to permanent identification cards, were outlined in the Congressional Research Service’s Dec. 5 report titled “Selected Privileges and Courtesies Extended to Former Members of Congress.” CRS American National Government specialist R. Eric Peterson wrote in the report, “Some [privileges] are derived from law and chamber rules, but others are courtesies that have been extended as a matter of...

Former Florida Governor and ex-First Brother Jeb Bush announced his plans to start a fundraising committee next month, and immediately some big names in GOP money — such as Florida developer Mel Sembler — got behind him. Bush has recently proven his ability to raise big bucks, but some of Bush’s likely competitors for the 2016 GOP nomination already have a head start. Three of them — Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Texas) — have the advantage of a national podium in the Senate and plenty of places to start stashing away cash. All three...

The last-minute vote to approve a long-term spending package cast a bright light on unusual splits in an otherwise unified Democratic congressional caucus. Following the lead of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), House and Senate Democrats voted against a bill that President Obama was personally advocating. It was similar to the insurgency faced by the Republican establishment last year, as many, many pundits pointed out, only with "no bank bailouts" replacing "no Obamacare" as a rallying cry. At ABC, Rick Klein, presumably with his tongue in his cheek, suggested that there are now "four parties that need to be...

Texan wants to win the presidency by rallying conservatives -- and hoping people forget why they dislike him. Ted Cruz shut down the government; now he wants to preside over it. The junior senator from Texas is apparently moving closer to announcing his presidential candidacy, and National Review’s Eliana Johnson spoke to the people involved in Cruz 2016 who think they’ve figured out a way to propel their boy to the Oval Office: rally the conservative base, ignore independents, and eat into some of the traditionally Democratic constituencies. It’s a strategy that’s very similar to the one embraced by Michele...

The symmetry was irresistible. Last weekend, as Ted Cruz almost blew up the budget deal over immigration and Elizabeth Warren almost blew it up over banking regulations, pundits seized upon an analogy. Both senators are articulate, ideological, media-savvy, beloved by party activists, and problematic for party leaders. Thus, Warren is the Cruz of the left. Bad analogy, argues Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, noting that it’s Cruz and the GOP that want “to use government funding as leverage to undo policy measures Democrats enacted in the 111th Congress.” Warren just doesn’t “want to pay the ransom.” The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan is...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Here's Bob in Nashua, New Hampshire, as we head back to the phones. Great to have you with us, sir. Hello. CALLER: Yeah, thanks, Rush. Yeah, this theme of the GOP establishment that the Tea Party and conservatives are the main enemy not the Dems, it's nothing new. It goes back, really, to the 2008 presidential election when the Republican establishment -- or at least many in the establishment -- sabotaged McCain-Palin. Because, to them, Palin was the bigger threat, the bigger enemy than the Democrats winning. You know, the funny thing is now more than six...

Most Americans don’t watch C-SPAN and I cannot blame them. More often than not, it seems as though the Senate is in a quorum call or a lone senator is debating something totally irrelevant to the issues that are important to most Americans. That changed a little bit on Saturday when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Utah Sen. Mike Lee forced the Senate to debate President Obama’s executive amnesty. I’ll save you the boring back-and-forth that occurred in our nation’s capital over the procedural stuff and cut right to the chase: Ted and Mike were attempting to carry out the...

Last year, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) stood front and center in the battle against President Barack Obama’s health care program, leading an effort that shut down the government because the budget bill did not include a provision to defund the president’s plan. This year, Cruz was the lead crusader against the spending bill again, this time because it did not include a challenge to Obama’s executive action on immigration, which could shield an estimated 5 million people who entered the country illegally from deportation for about three years....

The National Review reports: To hell with the independents. That’s not usually the animating principle of a presidential campaign, but for Ted Cruz’s, it just might be. His strategists aren’t planning to make a big play for so-called independent voters in the general election if Cruz wins the Republican nomination. Several of the senator’s top advisers said that Cruz sees a path to victory that relies instead on increasing conservative turnout, trying to attract votes from groups that have tended to favor Democrats (Jews, Hispanics and millennials), and, in the words of one Cruz strategist, “not getting killed with independents.”...

There’s no good reason for her not to run. When Elizabeth Warren rallied beleaguered House liberals to push back against a bank-coddling omnibus bill and the spineless White House that enabled it, she showed us some of her dynamic appeal. Her only leverage? An implicit threat to shut down the government. Hypocrisy? Sure. Consider the agitated criticism Warren and her allies threw at Republicans not very long ago. And yes, St. Warren’s righteousness was aimed at some inconsequential riders. Still, passing trillion-dollar pieces of legislation should never be easy, and disrupting the current cozy, bipartisan environment surely can’t be a...

The most dishonest advertising in The Washington Post isn’t selling soap or shoes or automobiles. It doesn’t come phonier than this: “Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.” Rubin spent 2012 insisting that every conservative presidential contender was unelectable except Mitt Romney, who was neither conservative nor electable, as it turned out. Rubin’s still at it, as in her latest screed from Sunday, headlined “Senate passes spending, GOP still despises Ted Cruz: The cromnibus passes despite Ted Cruz's ego trip.” Which part of the GOP? The wing of the party...

In the midst of the debate over a mammoth government spending bill, Republicans and Democrats found something to agree on: their dislike for Sen. Ted Cruz, who forced a rare weekend session for the Senate. But rather than back down, Cruz opted to call out Washington politicians during on Sean Hannity’s radio show Monday. “Enough is enough,” he told Hannity. The outspoken Texas Republican joined with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, to force the Senate to take a vote related to President Obama’s recent immigration actions. The measure was defeated, 22-74, after Cruz said Republican leaders urged senators to vote against...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has a plan for running for president in 2016, according to National Review: don't focus on winning over Independents, instead hedge on getting "Jews, Hispanics, and Millenials." That's according to a new report in National Review on Monday which said that the Texas senator, if he does decide to run for president as he's rumored to be planning on, has a strategy for victory that does not center around winning independents. As an unnamed adviser put it to National Review, "winning independents has meant not winning." The Cruz circle cited John Kerry in 2004 and Mitt...

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, doesn’t believe governors have an advantage over senators when it comes to winning the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. “It’s an advantage only if you think that the American people are looking for someone who is not standing up and leading on the great challenges of the day,” Cruz said Monday in an appearance on the Mark Levin Show. Cruz’s comments come as several Republican governors and former governors are considering running for president. That includes Jeb Bush of Florida, Chris Christie of New Jersey, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and John Kasich of Ohio. Cruz’s colleagues who...

At the height of the debate over a $1.1 trillion spending bill last week, we examined the similarities and differences between Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who protested the measure from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Later, as the bill approached passage and won approval over the weekend, we saw a key distinction emerge: Cruz was willing to hold up the process to make his point. Warren was not. Warren opposed the bill because of a provision that would relax a restriction on Wall Street banks. In press conferences and Senate floor speeches, Warren spoke out...

The Texas Republican has traveled to both coasts in the hopes of winning over skeptical donors.There's a downside to digging in. Just ask Ted Cruz. Since being elected to Congress in 2012, the Texas Republican has established himself as a conservative icon. On everything from spending fights to immigration policy and social issues, Cruz has been a powerful and reliable voice of the far right. His push last year to defund Obamacare—which shuttered the government—cemented his image as an uncompromising champion of the tea party. But now, as he prepares a presidential bid, Cruz needs to round out the rough...

Elizabeth Warren’s weekend heroics have endeared her even more to the Democratic base, and it’s time Hillary started getting worried.Are future historians going to look back on the past weekend as the one in which Elizabeth Warren took over the Democratic Party? She didn’t win the fight she led over the weekend to have the provision weakening the Dodd-Frank law stripped out of the spending bill, but she was never going to win that vote. What she did win, though, was the ever-more intense ardor of her growing number of liberal fans. They’d march with her over hot coals. There’s...

To hell with the independents. That’s not usually the animating principle of a presidential campaign, but for Ted Cruz’s, it just might be. His strategists aren’t planning to make a big play for so-called independent voters in the general election if Cruz wins the Republican nomination. According to several of the senator’s top advisers, Cruz sees a path to victory that relies instead on increasing conservative turnout; attracting votes from groups — including Jews, Hispanics, and Millennials — that have tended to favor Democrats; and, in the words of one Cruz strategist, “not getting killed with independents.” Twenty-three months from...