Free Republic

Donald Trump was asked this week, "Do you believe in raising taxes on the wealthy?" He replied, "I do. I do - including myself. I do." Yet Trump's own tax plan would cut the highest marginal federal income-tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. How does this tax plan square with Trump's newly professed support for "raising taxes on the wealthy"? This is similar to Trump's rampant inconsistency on Obamacare. Trump says he's for repealing Obamacare, but he's not for cutting Medicaid which, thanks to the efforts of those like John Kasich, accounts for most of Obamacare's coverage increases....

In winning Texas by 16 points, winning Oklahoma, winning (as of this writing) Alaska, and finishing second in Alabama, Arkansas, Minnesota, and Tennessee, Ted Cruz has now solidified his grip on second place in the ‎GOP presidential race. He increased his lead over Marco Rubio in states won, votes won, and delegates won--and unless Rubio can win in Florida in two weeks (or John Kasich can win in Ohio), Cruz may soon be battling Donald Trump one-on-one (more or less) for the Republican nomination. But how can Cruz beat Trump? The number-one thing that needs to be undone from the...

GOP voters are in a fighting mood. They aren't much interested in business-as-usual, political niceties, or even conservative purity. They want someone who will take it to Washington--someone who will go there and fight for change. Unfortunately for the rest of the Republican field, the candidate who voters overwhelmingly think will bring change to Washington is Donald Trump. South Carolina exit polling found that, among the large subsection of GOP voters who most want a candidate who "can bring change," a whopping 45 percent supported Trump, compared with only 19 percent for Ted Cruz and 16 percent for Marco Rubio....

You can get agreement from almost all points on the political spectrum that the worst aspect of our political system is the presidential nomination process. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is the one part of the system not treated in the Constitution. That’s because the Founding Fathers abhorred political parties and hoped that presidents would be selected by something like an elite consensus. But we have political parties, the oldest and third oldest in the world, and they are not going away.Surely a better system is possible. The current system of primaries, caucuses and national conventions is the...

In the wake of the 2012 election, one point on which practically all Republicans seemed to agree was that their party's presidential-nomination process was broken. Supporters of the GOP's eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, believed that the nature of the process weakened him for the general election. The party's base of conservative activists, meanwhile, believed that the process favored the candidates with the most money, and therefore the views of (often less conservative) wealthy donors. More moderate Republicans thought the process elevated a parade of unserious firebrands who were never real contenders, thereby damaging the party's image with swing voters. And...