Free Republic

News 4 San Antonio's Randy Beamer shows you the all-but-official kickoff of the 2016 Presidential Race at the Iowa "Freedom Summit" over the weekend. And he wants to know what you think of the Texans fighting for support of the GOP right. Sen. Ted Cruz and former Rick Perry are in a very crowded field of Republicans. With so many candidates, the race may get heated (and interesting) earlier than ever. So which of the Texans do you think has the better chance? And who would you put money on to get the most money from donors? Go to our...

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...

Scott Walker climbs the rankings after a great start to the year, while Paul and Christie stumbled down the list.Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and a surging Scott Walker top Hotline's new GOP Presidential Power Rankings – in part because they're that good, and in part because the competition has been so bad. If you're going to make mistakes in the presidential race, it's better to make them early. But Rand Paul and Chris Christie have stumbled so often they've slipped from the top-tier slots they occupied in the first round of the Power Rankings we released last month. Walker is...

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney had a Galadriel moment. He appeared to be briefly seized by a vision of himself as an all-powerful, world-striding President Romney, before turning away from temptation and settling for the plain old Mitt Romney he has always been. It was political theater at its most bizarre, a flack-driven frenzy that doubled as a flashback to the self-delusion that blinded the Romney 2012 campaign in its final days. With Romney now out of the way, Jeb Bush has consolidated the support of the GOP's moneyed class with surprising alacrity. As Politico noted last week, the contest...

It’s far too early to guess intelligently about who will be elected president next year or whom the Republicans will nominate, but this doesn’t seem to be stopping many pundits. Fox News has its Special Report panels lay odds on the Republican field once a week. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza handicaps the Republican field once a week. And the Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes has just produced an assessment of that field so exhaustive that it includes Donald Trump. Memories of eight years ago prevent me from joining in the fun. At this time in 2007, and for a considerable...

The 2016 Republican presidential field is shaping up into a legendary free-for-all, with polls showing the race wide open and more candidates expressing interest by the day. Will it be Jeb Bush who consolidates establishment support? Can Rand Paul or Ted Cruz break through with a powerful grassroots coalition? Could Scott Walker thread the needle between both sides? What about Marco Rubio? And then there’s the Democratic side. Will it be Hillary Clinton who prevails? Or will – actually, you know what, it will probably just be Hillary Clinton. While the former secretary of state hasn’t even said whether she’ll...

There are plenty of things to criticize Scott Walker over. His lack of a college degree is not one of them. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has emerged as a modest front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination in the past couple of weeks. This may well be a temporary state of affairs. If the 2012 GOP primaries taught us anything about the presidential nominating process in the super PAC era, it’s that every candidate will be the front-runner for a few weeks. At some point this year, everyone from Huckles to Doctor-Citizen Ben Carson will serve a brief spell as the...

The Hill reports: “Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will be among the possible 2016 Republican presidential candidates speaking to a prominent group of conservatives in Iowa this spring. Walker and Cruz will speak at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition’s spring kickoff event on April 25, the group announced in a Monday statement.” Ironically, in an election cycle in which many pundits discount the influence of Christian conservatives, they could play a critical role in selection of the nominee. In past cycles, these values voters have split their vote, never managing to unite behind a single,...

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...

The chances of him winning the presidency are, um, slim. But what if Hillary just keeps him around a bit longer?In the financial world, inflation is defined as “too much money chasing too few goods.” In the world of political journalism, inflation is “too many pundits chasing too few scenarios.” Like the editors of Cosmopolitan struggling each month to find new sexual positions, implements, and erogenous zones, scribes are already running out of ways to chronicle the strategies and prospects of presidential contenders: “How Marco Can Stop Jeb”; “How Paul Can Block Cruz and Huckabee”; “How A Fiorina-Santorum Alliance Can...

In a move more reminiscent of Texas Senator Ted Cruz than Ohio Representative John Boehner, the House Speaker has pursued a strategy to defund President Obama’s executive action on immigration, leveraging funding for Homeland Security in the process. Bloomberg News reports: House Speaker John Boehner said he’s prepared to let funding lapse for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and blame Democrats if the Senate fails to pass a House-backed bill for the agency. … The Homeland Security Department faces a shutdown of nonessential operations if Congress does not reach agreement before current funding ends on Feb. 27. When asked...

Top GOP fundraisers will reportedly join Grover Norquist and Michael Bloomberg’s Partnership for a New Economy group on a conference call next week to push for comprehensive amnesty legislation. According to a BuzzFeed report, the GOP fundraisers on the Tuesday call will include Mitt Romney’s “former finance director Spencer Zwick; California-based fast food CEO Andrew Puzder; and billionaire health care executive Mike Fernandez.” Fernandez is reportedly leaning toward Jeb Bush, who has said that illegal immigration is an “act of love” and has not backed down for his support of a comprehensive amnesty bill, while Puzder and Zwick are unaffiliated...

I tried to warn them. In addition, back in 2012, after Marco Rubio was asked about the age of the earth, I provided conservative politicians (and others interested) a primer for answering some of the “gotcha” questions that most every conservative running for political office in the U.S. will inevitably face. It seems that Scott Walker or his staff need to spend more time on my website, or on American Thinker (one of the top conservative websites in America). Byron York hopes Walker learned a valuable lesson. Silvio Canto at American Thinker doesn’t care what Scott Walker (or Hillary Clinton)...

President Obama is putting Republicans on notice that he plans to run through their cynical politics and opposition during his final two years in office. While speaking at a DNC fundraiser in San Francisco, the president said: "And one of the things I am absolutely determined to do over the next two years is not just consolidate the gains that we’ve made, not just move forward on new initiatives like free community colleges for young people around the country who need to be trained for the 21st-century economy, but part of my goal is also to restore a sense of...

Andrew Johnson of NRO reports that in 2002, as executive of Milwaukee County, Scott Walker signed a resolution that expressed support for “comprehensive immigration reform” that will “provide greater opportunity for undocumented working immigrants to obtain legal residency.” The author of the resolution says that Walker definitely supported it. Having signed it, he should be presumed to have supported, in any case. Will this news harm Walker’s chances of becoming the GOP presidential nominee? Standing alone, it shouldn’t. It’s one thing to sign a non-bonding resolution passed by the legislature in favor of “greater opportunity” for legal residency. It’s quite...

A neat scoop by Andrew Johnson, although I’m more interested in grassroots reaction to it than I am in the story itself. “Governor Walker does not support amnesty,” the governor’s spokesman, Tom Evenson, tells National Review Online. Evenson says the 2002 resolution was “stripped of references to amnesty before passage” and, in fact, reinforces the governor’s view that illegal immigrants should face penalties before they are granted citizenship. The resolution, viewable here, did not mention or spell out such penalties, and expressed support for “comprehensive immigration reform” that would have provided “greater opportunity for undocumented working immigrants to obtain legal...

The Walker surge in Iowa, Hillary’s Obama problem and other news from Week One of our yearlong insiders’ survey from the ground in 2016’s first-in-the-nation races.Most Iowa insiders believe Scott Walker would win their state’s Republican caucuses if they were held this week. But they’re not this week, and virtually none of the most influential thought leaders in the Hawkeye State believe that the Wisconsin governor will sustain his recent bounce in polls. This is one of several intriguing findings in the debut survey of The POLITICO Caucus. More than 100 of the most plugged-in activists, operatives and elected officials...

The early dinner crowd near the Capitol on Thursday yielded at least one notable pairing, with overtones of the presidential election cycle to come: Sen. Ted Cruz and former Ambassador John Bolton. Sharing a meal at Johnny’s Half Shell before Bolton was set to appear on Fox News, Cruz launched into a discussion of 2016 strategy audible to anyone within earshot, including a reporter for the Washington Examiner. Bolton has himself flirted with the idea of running for president in 2016, but his conversation with Cruz suggested the Texas senator, at least, views Bolton as a source of valuable input,...

Mitt Romney announced on Jan. 30 that he would not run for President in 2016, and immediately the commentariate ordained Jeb Bush the big winner. Bush was Romney’s heir, a thousand wagging tongues proclaimed. The donors would fall to him, and with them would go the Republican establishment, then the voters. The Republicans had a “frontrunner.” If there is a 2016 frontrunner for the GOP, he achieved that status six days before Romney’s announcement. On that day, Sat., Jan. 24, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker delivered a speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines, It vaulted him into the...

Since the U.S. Supreme Court rejected hearing Alabama’s appeal on gay marriage earlier this week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has taken the firmest stance of all potential Republican presidential candidate on the issue. Cruz introduced the State Marriage Defense Act just two days after the high court’s decision, which would allow states to decide on how to define marriage, rather than federal judges. While Republicans have long been the party supporting only traditional marriage, media reports have recently stressed how slow likely Republican 2016 presidential have been to speak out on the Alabama matter. The Supreme Court opted not to...