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And who hasn't seen Jeb Bush over the last few months speaking to the media on either his views on current events or a possible run for President? He just comes off as rather dull. And a candidate's charisma/personality is generally the first aspect we look for in choosing a candidate. Jeb Bush would be the Vanilla Candidate if he chooses to run. We have not had a very entertaining President since Bill Clinton. And we also have not had anyone that would compare to Reagan as well.This time around we definitely have several candidates with intriguing personalities and would...

Jeb Bush does. The Democrats’ Castro brothers do not. Ted Cruz knows ‘Spanglish.’ But fluency and being able to talk to Hispanics are two entirely different matters.The ability to speak Spanish is a prized commodity on the campaign trail, a way to prove your bona fides with Hispanics—the fastest-growing bloc of voters—and to show your inclusiveness in a rapidly changing country. Lots of Anglos are proficient in Spanish. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a potential presidential candidate, speaks nothing but Spanish at home, and has for years. His wife, Columba, is from Mexico. A more recent phenomenon in the political...

The Post reports: The Senate on Saturday night approved a sweeping $1.1 trillion spending bill to fund most of the federal government through the next fiscal year, turning back a conservative rebellion against President Obama’s immigration policy. On a vote of 56 to 40, senators passed the spending bill and sent it to Obama, who plans to sign it. The bill’s passage eliminates the threat of a government shutdown and capped days of acrimonious debate on Capitol Hill over the omnibus agreement. A small group of conservatives, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), had sought to slow debate on the...

It’s enough to make you feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Well, almost. Her presidential campaign of celebrity and inevitability got off to a rocky start, mostly through her own mistakes, as when she claimed they were “dead broke” when she and Bubba left the White House. But her gaffes were mere speed bumps compared to the real threat forming now. Massachusetts firebrand Sen. Elizabeth Warren emerges from Washington’s budget clash as the undisputed champion of the rising left, and will almost certainly challenge Clinton for the 2016 nomination. The polls say it’s Hillary’s turn, but I’m starting to believe 2016...

When you take a stand on principle in the unprincipled world of Washington, D.C., you’re sure to upset a lot of people, as U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz found out Saturday when he forced a vote on the constitutionality of President Obama’s overreaching executive order on immigration. In a move that pitted Cruz in a head-to-head matchup with outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the Texas senator prevailed in getting a point-of-order vote on whether Obama’s action was constitutional, before the Senate passed a massive $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill. Cruz would lose that vote overwhelmingly — 22 to...

Sen. Kelly Ayotte returned home to New Hampshire Friday, planning to see “The Nutcracker” with her daughter this weekend. But there was an unexpected conflict: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz, along with Utah Sen. Mike Lee, took to the floor Friday night to demand Republicans stop President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration and scuttled a bipartisan agreement to push back votes until Monday, effectively forcing the Senate to return for a rare weekend session and cast a marathon series of procedural votes. Senior Republicans say there’s a problem with Cruz’s strategy: The GOP lacks the votes to stop Obama...

Other members of the Senate fumed Saturday over objections by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) that held up a $1.1 trillion omnibus bill meant to keep the government open. The objection was fueled by the two conservatives' desire to fight President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration. The objections by Cruz and Lee mean that the Senate must slog through procedural votes Saturday on nominees and also vote to end a filibuster on the omnibus bill at 1 a.m. on Sunday. It was too much for Democrats and even Republicans to bite their tongues over....

Early Friday evening Sen. Elizabeth Warren took to the Senate floor and gave a plain-spoken, barn-burning speech that could make history and put her into serious contention to be the next President of the United States. There are only a handful of political speeches that have such historic impact. Barack Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention comes readily to mind. It's what catapulted an obscure Illinois state Senator into the national limelight and put him on the path to becoming President. Warren's Senate speech was different, but just as electrifying. Obama's rhetoric was lofty, high-minded, and general, with...

Or may have decided. We won’t know for a few months whether the Massachusetts senator will challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, but if she chooses to run, we’re going to look back at this week as a pivotal moment in Warren’s decision-making. Warren has been waging two battles against mainstream Democrats over the past month in an attempt to reduce Wall Street’s influence within the party. Both of those battles hit inflection points this week. The first is over President Barack Obama’s nominee for the under secretary for Domestic Finance, the number three position at the Treasury Department....

In Timothy Carney's Dec. 9 article, the Washington Examiner senior political columnist makes the case that the conventional wisdom is wrong when it comes to why white Southerners have fled the Democratic Party. It's not because of the GOP's very successful Southern Strategy, which played up the racial fears and prejudices of white Southerners in response to an increasingly empowered black population. For Carney, the South no longer has a white Democrat in the U.S. Senate for two reasons and two reasons alone: the Democratic Party is hostile to guns and God, two things that every Southerner hold dear. Carney...

Good question, but the question Jeb should be considering is how do you survive two tons of ROMNEYMANIA dropping square on your head. ‘Cause it’s comin’, son. No, seriously, with each passing day this sounds more like Huntsman II. But with lots, lots, lots more money involved. “I just said to him, ‘I think if you look back, despite the far right’s complaints, it is the centrist that wins the nomination,’” Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, said he told Mr. Bush. In the past few weeks, Mr. Bush has moved toward a run for the White House. His family’s resistance...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Welcome back. Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network. Grab audio sound bite number one. The Drive-By Media is comparing Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz, but they're doing it the following way. Elizabeth Warren is wonderful. Ted Cruz is mean and nasty and a threat to the republic. It's about 25 seconds, and again, just a media montage to give you a flavor here. ED HENERY: Elizabeth Warren saying she may hold all of this up and do a reverse of what Ted Cruz did. TAMARA KEITH: She's sort of pulling a Ted Cruz. JOE...

When Thursday dawned, the conventional wisdom was that House Speaker John Boehner did not have the votes to pass the $1.1 trillion spending bill that would fund the rest of the government for FY2015. But, thanks to lobbying by the White House, the House scrapped up enough votes to pass the measure 219 to 206, according to a Thursday Washington Examiner story. The passage of the bill was a triumph of the establishment wings of both parties. However, Senate passage is by no means certain. Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Elizabeth Warren could still scupper the bill between them. The...

In the dark of the night, two weeks before Christmas, the GOP consummated their betrayal of our trust. We voted them a majority for the next two years, and they thanked us by a backstabbing so heinous, that it moved the seismic needle on the Democratic party

So Lindsey Graham is on the warpath ... again. In the past month, South Carolina's senior senator has been busy - which stands in stark contrast to most members of Congress this time of year. Or any time, for that matter. Not only has the hawkish Graham renewed his call to send troops into Syria, he also criticized the release of a report that detailed the CIA's rather torturous methods of extracting information from suspected terrorists. Graham didn't exactly endorse waterboarding, mind you, but he made it clear that enemy detainees really don't want to be locked in a dark...

The most immediate consequence of the Democrats’ midterm disaster was losing control of the Senate and ceding Congress to the GOP. For the next two years, Democrats will have to deal with conservative legislation, right-wing hijinks, and—in all odds—a vacancy crisis, as Republicans freeze confirmations and refuse to fill spots in the executive branch and on the federal bench. That is bad for the Democratic Party. What’s on the horizon is worse. As Amy Walter notes for the Cook Political Report, Democrats lost big at all levels of government, including the states. “Today,” she writes, “about 55 percent of all...

And here we go: Right off the deep end. It’s as predictable as the sunrise. As those who are genuinely and honestly outraged over the revelations contained within the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture” report strain themselves in the effort to adopt a posture of unparalleled indignation, they inevitably overreach. So far, the best example of this kind of indulgence in regrettable hyperbole in the pursuit of moral preening is Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA). In an appearance on MSNBC on Wednesday, Speier reacted to the release of the SSCI’s report on the CIA’s Bush-era enhanced interrogation program by saying America’s clandestine...

The most conservative candidates are, with the exception of 1964, invariably the bridesmaid and never the bride in the GOP presidential primary. (In 1980, there were candidates such as Rep. Phil Crane of Illinois to Ronald Reagan’s right.) Part of the explanation is that the most conservative voters divide their support among candidates, leaving a path for a more moderate figure to coast to victory. And part of the explanation is that they tend to set upon candidates who self-destruct, are not qualified or are simply too extreme — and often all three. In 2016, how can they break this...

Yesterday, Senator Ted Cruz gave a major foreign-policy speech at the Heritage Foundation critiquing the disastrous nature of what he labeled as the “Obama-Clinton” approach to the subject. His desire to lay out his foreign-policy views in detail at such a venue as well as his focus on Clinton was a clear indication of something that is not exactly a secret: he’s planning on running for president in 2016. Members of his party’s establishment, which generally despises him as much as his fellow senators and the liberal media, do not take Cruz’s ambition too seriously. But as much as it...

Have you heard the story of the first-term senator who is a hero to the party base and the subject of intense 2016 speculation -- the one who's willing to buck leaders on big bills, and has even lobbied House members to stand against a funding measure to keep the government running? It's the story of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). This week, it's also the story of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Warren has emerged as the torchbearer of the liberal resistance on Capitol Hill to a $1.01 trillion bill to fund the government, which is facing the threat of a...