Free Republic

By June 2016, same-sex marriage is likely to be the law of the land. What will Republican candidates do then? My how times change.Marriage was the dog that didn’t bark, not even whimper, in the midterm elections. It certainly wasn’t a centerpiece, and it didn’t even surface as a sideline issue. Silence was clearly the preferred strategy of Republican candidates up and down the ballot. After the Supreme Court effectively green-lit marriage for same-sex couples in 11 new states last month, we barely heard a peep from the GOP. High-profile candidates in deeply conservative states, like Senator Mitch McConnell (KY)...

There is an idiom that parents and employers likely put in practice when an important task has to be completed correctly; “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” President Obama certainly understands that sentiment with a slight variation; if the nation wants anything done at all, the President has to do it himself due to Republicans who have done nothing since January 2009. Sometime next week, after waiting patiently for Ted Cruz to order House Republicans to take up, and pass, the Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform, the President will take action on immigration reform. The...

The party’s economic populism doesn’t reach that far.The Democratic Party styles itself a fighter for the working class. But a substantial part of that class—the white part—wants nothing to do with it. If we count the white working class as whites without college degrees, then congressional Democrats lost them by 30 points in last week’s elections, contributing to losses in states as diverse as Iowa, Maine, Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida. But then none of this is new. Democrats lost working class whites by a similar margin in 2010, with almost identical results: A wipeout of Senate seats, House districts,...

Political prognostications are a risky business. But I have been thinking about what the Republicans might do if Hillary Clinton announces in early 2015 (since she has indicated that is when she will make her decision) that she is running for president. While Republicans dislike this prospect because they know she might win, not to mention take most of the available oxygen out of the race along the way, they understand that they have no woman in their ranks who is qualified to be president, and it is a stretch to say they even have a woman qualified to be...

The Republican sweep of November 2014 is now fully in the rearview mirror. And the focus in D.C. is squarely on the 2016 presidential election. Who will win the biggest prize of all and finally replace Barack Obama? With Hillary Clinton perched high atop the Democratic Party polls, it appears as though she’ll sail to her party’s nomination almost unimpeded. On the Republican side, the race is as divided and contentious as ever… Of the prospects, though, one particular man stands out from the crowd. And for this reason, I followed him all the way to Poland so I could...

Twenty years ago, emboldened by Newt Gingrich's triumphant "Republican revolution" in the midterm elections, a raft of Republicans--some famous, some not so famous--readied their campaigns to take on a Democrat named Clinton in a race that may well echo in 2016, albeit with a different Clinton. The 1994 "Republican Revolution," had just taken hold, and Republican party scrambled for the GOP presidential nomination and the chance to take on President Bill Clinton in 1996. It turned out to be more difficult than some of those candidates anticipated. "My name-face recognition was pretty low," said former Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, one...

At certain moments during the past year’s long and often tedious march to November, the political class, already bored with discussing a GOP Senate takeover most considered nearly certain, started debating a few post-election hypotheticals. With Republicans in control in both the House and the Senate, would the president try again to strike the elusive grand bargain?(No.) Would Senate Republicans retaliate against Democrats for choosing the so-called nuclear option? (Maybe.) Would Democrats filibuster relentlessly, like Republicans did when they were the minority party in the Senate? (Probably not.) Of all the questions about a Republican Senate that hovered over the...

And who didn't take notice? If that is the manner of how Nancy Pelosi speaks, with the pauses, stuttering, stammering and "Brain Stoppages" as she was trying to explain to us that she never heard of Jonathan Gruber, you would think it was time for her to retire. And to think there was once a time when she was third in line for the Presidency? And this also applies to Harry Reid, then again, we all share the same opinions of "Prince Harry".

Not a perfect strategy but if you’re grasping for last-minute ways to deter Obama from dropping the A-bomb, this may be your best shot. Impeachment’s not happening. If it did happen, Obama would welcome it as a post-landslide deus ex machina that turns the country against the GOP. Defunding’s probably not happening either, I hate to tell you. McConnell and Boehner will have no choice now but to insert language defunding executive amnesty in the new continuing resolution next month, but Obama will veto that CR. And I just don’t believe B&M have the stomach for a protracted shutdown so...

In this year's midterms, Jews voted for Republican candidates more than they have in any election in the last decade. First, some raw facts. In the 2006 midterm elections, 87 percent of Jews voted for Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. Last week, in the 2014 midterm elections, 66 percent cast ballots for Democrats. That's a 21-point drop in eight years—and, it might seem, a major cause for celebration among the likes of the Republican Jewish Coalition and philo-Semitic political strategists everywhere. But while Jewish support for Democrats has definitely declined over the last decade, the context is important....

President Rand Paul will keep you safer than the president who brought America into Iraq and Afghanistan, the same man who in 2000 argued against nation building and foreign military entanglements. He'll keep you safer than the president who just doubled America's military presence in Iraq, yet in 2011 promised, "The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year." Rand Paul will also keep you safer than Hillary Clinton, a centrist with a neoconservative advisor named Robert Kagan who is quoted in The New York Times as saying, "I feel comfortable with her...

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is not running for president, but he thinks any Democrat who is – including his “old friend” Hillary Clinton – should worry about Republicans outflanking them on populism. Reich, now a professor at the University of California Berkeley, first met Hillary Clinton when she was a freshman at Wellesley and they marched in civil rights demonstrations together. He met Bill Clinton around the same time at Oxford, when they were both Rhodes Scholars. He went on to work on both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns, and joined the administration. In the Clinton cabinet, he was...

Republican Sen.-elect Joni Ernst easily won her race in Iowa last Tuesday, beating Democrat Bruce Braley by 8.5 percentage points. Her victory wasn’t shocking, but its size was (to everyone except pollster Ann Selzer, that is). The final FiveThirtyEight projection had Ernst winning by just 1.5 percentage points. What the heck happened? Here’s one explanation: White voters in Iowa without a college degree have shifted away from the Democratic Party. And if that shift persists, it could have a big effect on the presidential race in 2016, altering the White House math by eliminating the Democratic edge in the electoral...

Nancy Pelosi does not believe the midterm results were a Republican wave; she says they were more of a Democratic ebb. And in a new interview, the House Minority Leader says that it didn’t help that voters were distracted during the final leg of the campaign by various international crises. In an interview with Politico out today, Pelosi continued to insist there was “no wave of approval for the Republicans” and even admitted that Democrats need to do a better job mobilizing voter turnout on their side the next time around. But when pressed on whether the Democrats lost because...

Looking ahead to the 2016 presidential election, how influential were each of the potential GOP candidates during the midterm election? The Appinions study I wrote about on Monday provides great data to answer this question. The midterms continue to be a highly salient topic, despite the fact that it’s been just over a week since voters drew the curtain on the campaign. Indeed, Appinions "Active Attention Index," a metric based on the quantity and quality of reactions on the topic from opinion leaders across multiple media venues, grew 34 percent, from 129,000 the day after the election to 173,000 on...

HOUSTON, Texas – An article by the New York Times Editorial Board appears to agree with Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) that Attorney General Nominee Loretta Lynch must answer about whether she approves of President Obama’s threatened executive amnesty. Cruz and Lee came out quickly after the announcement of Lynch’s nomination demanding that Lynch provide her analysis of the president’s legal authority to issue amnesty for illegal immigrants through an executive order. “Several Republicans, including Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, have said Ms. Lynch must disclose her position on, among other things, the president’s announced plan...

Just days after Salon.com published a tasteless screed in which a relatively unknown author attacked the military and insisted that his freedoms were more threatened than protected by the armed forces (a piece delightfully eviscerated by our own Jazz Shaw), this online magazine has the strange honor of publishing an exclusive interview with incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Beyond McCain’s odd decision to give the race and sex-obsessed Salon an exclusive interview, the senator made the even more perplexing decision to obliquely attack a fellow Republican in that interview. McCain spoke with Salon’s...

It sure looks like Ben Carson is running. And if we want to win in 2016, we need to take a good chunk of the black vote. Ben Carson can "Woo Black Voters" into the Republican Party. All he has to do is tell them the truth regarding how Dem's actually feel about them. More like using them as pawns. Adding Ted Cruz to the ticket would be our best bet. Now we have a "Black/Latino Ticket". The Carson/Cruz or Cruz/Carson ticket is considered a Dream Ticket for many conservatives. That's the ticket that will bring in lots of minority...

It's finally happening. The time of the Cruz-pocolypse is nigh. We tried to pretend it wasn't going to happen. After all, the Republicans gained control of both the House and the Senate and there was talk that Congress might actually do things going forward, instead of just constantly fighting. That would mean that everyone, even Sen. Ted Cruz, would have to stop yammering, sit down and actually do some legislating. But then we read some tea leaves and examined the astrological signs and all the other harbingers and forced ourselves to face the inevitable: Cruz isn't going to slide back...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)With the Democrats still licking their wounds from last week’s election losses, the Republican National Committee has pivoted to the 2016 presidential election and is offering up a list of 32 potential candidates, including Sarah Palin, Sen. Ted Cruz, Ron Paul, his son Sen. Rand Paul and Condoleezza Rice. “In 2016, we will have the opportunity again to elect principled conservative leaders, including one Republican qualified to take on the Democrat running for president,” said an email from the party, in an apparent reference to Hillary Clinton. “Voters proved our country is in need of qualified and strong Republican leaders...