Free Republic

The emerging conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is being vanquished by the GOP establishment, based solely on the fact they are beating primary challengers, is exceedingly myopic. If you believe that, you have a very superficial view of what constitutes “winning.” These primaries are forcing the allegedly mainstream candidates to move far to the right and the performance of the past few years proves that when this happens the Party stays far right as a result of this threat. Primaries can be very effective tools if used properly — and if they are backed up by money and influence,...

Conservatives are literally praying that the Texas senator will be the 2016 nominee. The rest of the Republican Party isn't so sure. FORT WORTH, Texas—After finishing his speech, Ted Cruz announced he would take questions from the audience. But instead of asking him anything, they just wanted to tell the Republican senator how great he was. "When I look at you, I can imagine you would be just like one of the founding fathers of this country," one woman said from the microphone stand in the middle of the hotel ballroom. "Honor to you, Ted Cruz," said the next. "We...

There is this notion, one we hear more and more, that the Republican Party has to shed the social issues to seize the future. “Social issues are not the business of government!” says thoroughly modern millennial. It’s a seductive cry, one repeated this past Tuesday in an article about how some young libertarians dubbed the “Liberty Kids” are taking over the moribund Los Angeles GOP. Oh, wouldn’t the political landscape be simple if we could just boil things down to fiscal responsibility? But life is seldom simple.If you would claim to be purely fiscal, or assert that “social issues” should...

Last week, my colleague David Frum argued that conservative welfare reformers need to focus on simplification. As a young crop of conservative policymakers announce a range of proposals, there’s some movement in that direction. Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s plan would move most of America’s existing welfare funding into a single “flex-fund” to be disbursed to the states. Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, partly inspired by the “universal credit” reforms of Britain’s Conservative government, proposes allowing states to combine different forms of federal anti-poverty funding—food stamps, housing assistance, and more—into a single funding stream. In a recent speech about fighting poverty, Utah...

Should be an interesting night.

Conservative writer and CNN talking head S.E. Cupp recently put out a video describing how she has been welcomed among conservatives even though she is an atheist. This led Hot Air's Allahpundit to chime in with his own experiences, citing myself and National Review's Charles Cooke as other examples of atheists on the Right. And we're not the only ones. There's Heather Mac Donald and Walter Olson, and a whole website devoted to the issue. Among marquee names, there are a few famous agnostics/atheists like Charles Krauthammer and George Will. When you start looking, we're everywhere. I pretty much agree...

Sarah Palin and President Barack Obama probably won’t be getting together for a beer anytime soon. Palin joined the chorus of those assailing the president for taking the time to drink beer and play pool during an interlude in his recent big-ticket campaign fundraising trips to Colorado and Texas, yet refusing to schedule a visit the southern border for a first-hand look at the ongoing illegal immigration surge. Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/1348369/sarah-palin-obama-getting-buzzed-on-suds-while-country-drowns/#ee7VBoasVzk1rJKW.99

WASHINGTON | A few recent developments have revealed the tea party temperament in its most distilled, potent form. Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin called for the impeachment of President Barack Obama on the theory that his border policies are "the last straw that makes the battered wife say, ‘no mas.' " (excerpt)

Sen. Mark Kirk’s (R-Ill.) office said the centrist senator has no plans to co-sponsor bipartisan legislation to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank. The move comes after Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced Senate Democrats would organize a vote on reauthorizing Ex-Im, a top priority for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, soon after the July 4 recess. Schumer’s move highlights how renewing the Export-Import Bank is becoming more of a partisan issue. Republicans are divided over renewing Ex-Im, with Tea Party conservatives arguing the bank’s financing of loans and loan guarantees is a form of crony capitalism best left...

The Roberts Court certainly seems like a conservative juggernaut. And, yes, from campaign finance to race to religion, it has moved the law dramatically to the right. But Wednesday's Supreme Court decision on cell-phone privacy shows that this isn't the entire story. In a number of significant areas of law, a majority of the Roberts Court will line up behind rulings that are not so much conservative as libertarian, often with a surprisingly progressive bent. That is certainly true of Riley v. California, in which Chief Justice John Roberts, on behalf of his unanimous colleagues, concluded Wednesday that police may...

In Mississippi on Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran defeated state Sen. Chris McDaniel in a runoff election to determine who would be the state Republican PartyÂ’s nominee for Senate in the extremely conservative state. Despite the fact that the two men were more or less indistinguishable on issue positions, the race was remarkably contentious and largely defined by dueling allegations of impropriety and fraud. Indeed, while non-conservatives may consider the differences between the so-called establishment and Tea Party wings of the GOP to be slight, the primary battle that reached its culmination last night is clear evidence that Republicans themselves...

Gallup on June 19 published a poll that dealt with American confidence in institutions, alleging that public faith in Congress reached the lowest point since the question had been polled. Was that the real story? An analysis of the polling results of American confidence in different institutions, and a review of those results over time suggests something much more significant: Americans overwhelmingly express confidence in those institutions historically connected with conservatism and overwhelmingly express little faith in those institutions historically connected with leftism. The June 19 poll story itself provides a clear picture of how conservative Americans feel when identifying...

"..........The survey also showed that Republican divisions are not the invention of right-wing talk-show hosts or bloggers. Republicans who support the tea party are well to the right of others in their party. As NBC’s First Read reported, 68 percent of tea party Republicans said that immigration hurts the United States, compared with only 47 percent of non-tea party Republicans and 42 percent of all Americans. And a PRRI/Brookings survey (with which I was involved) found that while 41 percent of tea party members favored identifying and deporting illegal immigrants, only 26 percent of non-tea party Republicans preferred this option....

College campuses across the country are filled with professors that strive to enhance the lives of their students through education. However, it’s no secret that many of these educators teach their courses from their own left-of-center perspective. Accuracy in Academia is launching a new online education initiative called “Conservative University” to promote conservative principles that aren’t part of the debate at many schools. The program will launch this Friday at the Network of enlightened Women’s national conference in Washington, D.C., and will be offered for free online. The first course is entitled “Sex, Lies & Women’s Studies.” “We’ve been covering...

No matter what happens next week, the full slate of leaders will face another vote in November or early December after the midterms. Conservative challengers who passed on this rapid race now have more than five months to prepare anew and build up their base of support within the conference. In his Thursday statement announcing his decision not to run, Hensarling said he had concluded that this was “not the right race at the right time” – a signal he is keeping his options open and could challenge McCarthy or Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in the fall. Even before Cantor’s...

In covering the killings in Las Vegas by Jerad and Amanda Miller this week, mainstream media commentators once again displayed their hypocrisy and double standard regarding Islamic terrorism and terror attacks that are supposedly “right-wing.” CNN’s national security analyst Peter Bergen wrote Tuesday the Millers “appear to have been motivated by extreme far-right views. The couple left a flag at the scene of the crime with the words ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ a Revolutionary War symbol used by some anti-government extremists.” Bergen went on to emphasize that “countering violent extremism cannot simply be a demand placed on Muslim communities to...

It began in the early 1940s. FDR had launched the New Deal’s collectivization of America, and a small but prescient group of libertarian and conservative intellectuals were in rebellion – such thinkers as Richard Weaver, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, John T. Flynn, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand, to be followed a decade later by the likes of Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, and Murray Rothbard. Out of their cerebral and activist efforts there began the movement to repeal the overweening statism that was infiltrating America from Europe via Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. The infamous year...

This speech was presented by Willes K. Lee, Vice President Western Region, National Federation of Republican Assemblies at the Alaska Republican Assembly State Convention and Straw Poll on May 24, 2014, in Menard Sports Center, Wasilla, Alaska.Aloha. Good morning. Thank you for that generous introduction. Thank you [organizers, hosts, officials], President Angle, conservatives. Thank you, Adele. We are blessed with your music. I am having so much fun being with Alaska conservatives. Are we among friends? Are there any liberals here? It is Memorial Day weekend. We’ve already met our veterans who are present. I suggest that sometime this weekend,...

I have written a great deal about the solid conservative majority in America. Most conservatives seem to think that Americans describe themselves as “conservative” when in fact they are not – but polling data on the public policy question of abortion shows that this is not true. In fact, this data strongly suggests what I have long suspected: many Americans decline to call themselves “conservative” when in fact they are conservative. When we grasp the madness and wickedness of leftism, this makes sense. No sane or moral person could ascribe to that that toxic misology. What do people mean when...

All over Europe, voters are turning in a conservative direction, and against the autocratic European Union and its big government enablers. New York Times reporters Steven Erlanger and Stephen Castle write a dripping-with-disdain account of local election results in the UK, which will be followed tomorrow by results for the European Parliament. To them, conservatgives are “right wingers” or “far-right” and those who object to EU takeover of sovereignty are “anti-Europe.” Voters in Britain sent a forceful message of discontent to established political parties on Friday, as returns from local elections showed an even stronger following than expected for the...