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Just in case you were hidden under a rock yesterday, Texas Senator Ted Cruz officially threw his hat into a run for presidency in the 2016 election. He announced his run initially on Twitter (a nod to the younger generations) and followed it up with a speech at, of course, Liberty University. So, what is it that has the establishments on both sides of the aisle so worked up about Cruz running for President? Firstly, unlike the Jeb Bushes, Chris Christies and Hillary Clintons of the world who are expected to run (and you know how I feel about Hillary),...

<>Politico writes that Rand Paul is losing support among key followers. One of the most prominent defectors is Drew Ivers, chairman of Ron Paul’s 2012 Iowa campaign, who says he will not endorse Rand Paul for president. On Tuesday, three members of Iowa’s Ron Paul-aligned Liberty movement — state Sen. Jason Shultz and former Iowa Republican Party central committee members Chad Steenhoek and Joel Kurtinitis — announced the same, adding that they will support Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Ivers, who had dinner with Rand Paul in August, said the Kentucky senator has abandoned many of the stances that made Ivers...

Exclusive: Doug Wead says 1 candidate represents the past, the other the future. So what’s the difference between Republican presidential candidates Rand Paul and Ted Cruz? Ted Cruz is running against Barack Obama. Rand Paul is running against Hillary Clinton. One represents the past. The other represents the future. Both men are U.S. senators running for president in 2016. Rand Paul is from Kentucky, Ted Cruz from Texas. (Rand Paul is expected to announce his candidacy April 9.) Both men are conservatives whose careers were launched during rise of the tea party. Both are born-again Christians. And both signed the...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was on “The Kelly File” tonight to react to the news that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) will seek the Republican nominee for president in 2016. Megyn Kelly asked Paul about some of his supporters who were in the audience at Cruz’s announcement, sporting “Stand With Rand” shirts. “We were glad to see them there and organized and excited about the possibility of me running,” he said. Paul said that he didn’t hear much that he disagreed with during Cruz’s speech today. “We kind of come from the same wing of the party,” he said. “If you...

I did … not think we’d be seeing Rand, of all people, making electability arguments at the expense of other candidates, but if there’s any guy in the field whom Democrats would demagogue more gleefully than they would him, I suppose it’s Cruz. The money line here comes when he talks about “not just throwing out red meat, but throwing out something intellectually enticing to people who haven’t been listening to our message before.” That’ll be his core attack on Cruz throughout the primaries, partly of necessity since there’s not much that divides them on policy (by Paul’s own admission)....

There’s a reason Ted Cruz kept asking his Liberty University audience to “imagine” a conservative president: no one of normal college age has ever lived under one. If Cruz wins the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, he will only be the third movement conservative to do so, after Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. (Liberals will count George W. Bush, but he wasn’t a product of the movement in the same sense as Reagan or Goldwater even if you think he was a conservative.) Republican primary voters are starting to imagine a conservative president. In 1999, Dubya led the field by...

Texas Senator Ted Cruz just made it official: He's running for president. He made the announcement in a tweet, accompanied by a video, shortly after midnight, eastern time. Ted Cruz ✔ @tedcruz I'm running for President and I hope to earn your support! (VIDEO-AT-LINK)Cruz believes he has a path to the GOP presidential nomination by winning the Tea Party vote, and doing well enough with both social conservatives and libertarians to knock out potential rivals, according to a Houston Chronicle report published over the weekend: Cruz's senior advisers, however, see a path to victory that all but ignores [the GOP...

With the formal announcement of his presidential run on Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz officially kicks off his 2016 rivalry with fellow Republican Sen. Rand Paul.Sen. Ted Cruz will not only become the first person to officially enter the 2016 race to the White House on Monday—he will also formally kick off a new rivalry: Cruz v. Paul. When the Texas Republican launches his campaign for president at Liberty University, he will do so ahead of an upcoming electoral confrontation with Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. Cruz and Paul are vying for the same post—the insurgent Republican frontrunner—who will eventually face...

This year I took the SMC Republicans to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where we heard from many conservatives who were all on the 2015 CPAC Straw Poll in which we participated. The top five winners were Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Jeb Bush. Paul was a hit with the large number of young people at CPAC. He said, “We do a great job defending the Second Amendment, but we have to defend the whole Bill of Rights … we should have speedy trials.” He went on to talk about Kalief Browder who was accused...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2015/03/19/4195411/early-line-3-man-race-for-2016.html

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-03-12/can-231-445-people-who-want-tom-cotton-tried-for-treason-be-wrong-yes-

I … guess this makes sense? Paul’s got the same problem here as he has on most issues not related to cutting spending, trying to find a spot on the Venn diagram where libertarians and conservatives overlap. He signed Cotton’s letter, obviously, because he knows he’ll be attacked in the primaries as a squish who can’t be trusted as commander-in-chief and he can’t hand any more ammo to the competition on that point. Now, when Rubio or Ted Cruz or whoever slams him for being dovish, he can point to the Cotton letter as rebuttal. Having pandered to conservatives, though,...

Kentucky is one place in America where a tea-party firebrand and a Republican from the governance wing amicably meet.For two Republican senators from the same state, Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell could not be more mismatched. Senator Paul is a man in a hurry, with presidential stars in his eyes after a mere four years of serving Kentucky in Washington. The loquacious libertarian is a darling of young conservatives – a relaxed jeans-and-boots kind of guy. Senator McConnell, after three patient decades in office, has finally reached his dream job of Senate majority leader. A man of few words, he’s...

As Matt Welch noted Wednesday, pediatric neurosurgeon and next Republican president of the United States Ben Carson both "lived down to stereotype" and articulated some truths about the GOP field for 2016 when he argued that gay sex among heterosexuals in prisons proves that being gay is a "choice." (Carson's very existence, by the way, proves my general about Republicans' "long love affair" manifestly unqualified candidates.) Here's something else to think about while mulling over whether any of this matters more than a tinker's ding-dong: Ben Carson has apologized for his comments and is already being taken to the woodshed...

One of the least interesting news manias of the week has been former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani discussing his opinion that President Obama doesn't really love America (or you, or me, or him). Obama has been the very living embodiment of American government power for the past 7 years, and not too reluctant to use it against enemies, and just random citizens, both foreign and domestic—whether it comes to foreign policy, spending, taxing, regulating, and arresting. Thus, I doubt any alleged lack of love for the U.S. of A matters in any way that Giuliani or the people delighted to...

The United States’ political parties have always been amalgams of factions rather than vehicles for any single interest. Partly because of the pressures of the electoral system and partly because of the republic’s vastness, forging either of the two major parties into a political monolith has been impossible; the need to cater to a wide base of Americans tends to keep the parties broad and relatively inclusive. This embedded pluralism of the U.S. party system has diminished somewhat in the current era of polarization but it has not evaporated entirely. The parties are still relatively broad churches. This is clearest...

Fun stuff via BuzzFeed, portending an exciting “whose close relative is more of a devastating electoral liability?” primary for the GOP if the two men left standing are Jeb Bush and Rand Paul. I don’t understand this even within the parameters of the Ron Paul worldview. I thought hardcore isolationists — sorry, “non-interventionists” — believe that the war machine will always find a new pretext to keep rolling even if the current one goes bust. Obama, for instance, did eventually get Bin Laden, along with many other Al Qaeda capos … and yet at this very moment there’s an AUMF...

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...

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...

Ted Cruz claims to be a “constitutionalist,” but expects us to believe that the issue of gay marriage should be left to “debate…in the legislative chambers.” In response to President Barack Obama’s comments about gay marriage in the State of the union, the Texas senator said: I think the proper place to debate those issues is in the legislative chambers. I’m a constitutionalist…From the beginning of this country, marriage has been a question of the states, and we should not have the federal government, or unelected judges, setting aside the policy judgment of the elected legislatures and imposing their own...