Free Republic

The Republican Party, broadly speaking, is comprised of many factions that are often at odds with one another. Prominent examples are the battles between the grassroots and the national party establishment and between defense hawks and non-interventionists. Perhaps fiercer than any of these fights is the long-standing conflict between social conservatives and libertarians. But when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage last month, they created an opening for a wedding between these two groups, which could benefit the Republican Party ahead of the 2016 election. To be clear, libertarians come in many stripes. There are those who reject the political...

DENVER (AP) - Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul courted donors from the new marijuana industry Tuesday, making the Kentucky senator the first major-party presidential candidate to publicly seek support from the legal weed business. Paul's fundraiser at the Cannabis Business Summit - tickets started at $2,700, the maximum donation allowed for the primary contest - came as the marijuana industry approached its first presidential campaign as a legal enterprise....

It's past time the government stop treating the tax code as a tool for social engineering.It’s happening. Less than a week after the Supreme Court ruled that gays have the right to marry, the argument in favor of polygamy as the "next advance"(in the words of Fredrick DeBoer at Politico) in marriage equality is beginning to be deployed. He writes: Now that we've defined that love and devotion and family isn't driven by gender alone, why should it be limited to just two individuals? The most natural advance next for marriage lies in legalized polygamy—yet many of the same people...

Former FOX and CNN commentator and show host Glenn Beck appeared on the Howard Stern show last week. What follows is a partial transcript of those segments where he discussed “Third Party” voting as well as those portions where he explicated (his version of) libertarianism. Stern: It’s Glenn Beck who used to be on FOX news. . . Beck: It’s good to see you. . . . Beck: One of the reasons I’m here today is because we’ve got to stop. We have to find the people who may vote different, may be different, have different philosophies, but we’ve got...

RED OAK, Iowa — Sen. Ted Cruz wound his way through the small towns and rolling hills of western Iowa last week, doing the gruntwork of retail campaigning: shaking hands, posing for photos, giving stump speechesand, most importantly: making entreaties for support in a state that could determine the trajectory of his presidential campaign. “Whether we win or lose, this race will be decided by the men and women gathered here,” he said last Friday to a group of mostly older people sitting on folding chairs in a conference room. Iowa’s first-in-the nation caucuses are often a high-stakes event for...

“… I think to every African-American in the country it’s a symbolism of slavery to them and now it’s a symbol of murder for this young man and so I think it’s times to put it in a museum.” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul says he believes the Confederate battle flag is “inescapably a symbol of human bondage and slavery” and needs to go. “No, I agree, I think the flag is inescapably a symbol of human bondage and slavery, and particularly when people use it obviously for murder and to justify hated so vicious that you would kill somebody I...

The senator from Kentucky continues to takes the road less traveled through the GOP primaries.Sen. Rand Paul took a risk Thursday. Speaking to an audience of religious conservatives in the wake of a racially charged shooting in South Carolina, Paul delicately suggested that Republicans might want to start focusing on other parts of the Bill of Rights than the Second Amendment. "Everybody is for the Second Amendment. All 55 candidates running for president are for the Second Amendment—on our side," Paul told the crowd. "But the thing is that a lot of young people, that might not be their primary...

Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the funding arm of the political network backed by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, wants a lot more hard information from the crowded field of presidential contenders before deciding what to do with its considerable resources. The group is pressing every 2016 candidate to detail on the record their plans for economic growth, deficit reduction, entitlement reform, criminal justice and even foreign policy. The tax-exempt entity, a key node in a constellation of conservative entities that aims to spend $889 million before the next White House election, distributed a detailed survey Thursday to...

Are there libertarian-leaning Republicans who think Rand Paul is too soft on ISIS?At National Review, Joel Gehrke reports that the Ted Cruz campaign "thinks it has identified a way to begin" to "pick off enough libertarian votes to hobble Rand Paul." How? By running to the right of Paul on national security: Perhaps surprisingly, Cruz's [analytics] team discovered that national security is a prominent and growing concern among libertarian voters. "There is a plurality of libertarians whose top issue is national security today," [Cruz campaign director of research and analytics Chris] Wilson says, pegging the figure in the mid-30s. "Now,...

At Powerline this week, Steve Hayward penned a post aptly entitled “The Insincerity of Rand Paul.” The senator’s legal arguments against the Patriot Act, he posits, mimic papa Ron Paul’s 2003 calls for a formal declaration of war against Iraq: mere “constitutional punctilio to cover his real feelings.” Steve is right. Congress statutorily authorized the use of military force in Iraq. Nothing more was constitutionally required. The real reason for Representative Ron Paul’s formalistic nattering about a declaration of war was his opposition to American intervention in Iraq. That, in turn, was driven by his theory that it was American...

It turns out that Republicans in Washington are united on one issue: their hatred of Rand Paul. John McCain says that he is “the worst possible candidate . . . on the most important issue.” Marco Rubio opines that “he has no idea what he’s talking about.” Lindsey Graham concludes that it would be “devastating” for the party to nominate him. Conservative commentators are even more vicious and ad hominem. The obsession with Paul is striking. In a Post op-ed last summer, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry mentioned Paul 10 times. I cannot recall an instance in recent decades when so much vitriol...

He’s turning out to be a lot like his father, unable or unwilling to adjust to changing political realities within his party.There are many reasons to be bullish about Rand Paul's unconventional campaign for president. He's relentlessly courting support from young voters and African Americans, making the explicit case that outreach can translate into wider support. He's embracing issues that Republicans usually don't dare touch, such as criminal-justice reform, drug decriminalization, and reining in government surveillance. And based on the early polls, he's finding himself in solid shape, running competitively against Hillary Clinton and in the top tier of Republican...

Rand Paul is in trouble. At least, it looks like Rand Paul is in trouble. When answering questions about fundraising posed by Politico last week, spokesmen from both the official campaign and America’s Liberty PAC couched on their actual numbers. PAC spokesman Jesse Benton may have revealed much more than he intended when he said, “Results to date have been solid and give us lots of room for optimism as we continue. We also know this is a marathon, not a sprint.” Oof. Marathon-not-sprint is never where you want to be when other candidates are charming the multimillionaires who make...

Can we all stop pretending that there’s any real suspense in this presidential race?As the children’s book says: Voters, it’s time to “Go the [expletive] to sleep.” You can turn off Fox, MSNBC, and CNN; you can close Twitter; you can sign off your crazy uncle’s Facebook feed. I am going to tell you, right now, what the political landscape of the future looks like so you don’t waste your time over the next year listening to a parade of pundits or watching those ridiculous primary debates. The 2016 election is going to come down to Hillary vs. Jeb, of...

DAVENPORT, Iowa — Rand Paul would notch a big victory in Washington just after midnight Monday if he follows through on his promise to block the renewal of the anti-terrorism law used to justify domestic spying programs. But back in Iowa, where Paul has tried to use the issue in recent days to revive his struggling presidential campaign, many Republican voters have responded with unease. Even some who stood in line to see Paul as he traveled the state last week said that they simply could not agree with his argument that the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection was...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)’s America’s Liberty Super PAC is out with a new ad attacking Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as a “Canadian” who supports President Obama on domestic surveillance extensions in the Patriot Act. The extreme-style smackdown ad features Paul as the shirtless hero of a Sunday brawl in the Senate over the NSA and the right to privacy. Featuring a picture of Cruz with Obama and the backdrop of a Canadian flag, the ad calls the Texas Senator a “capitulating Canadian” who is “backing Barack’s bill.” Technically, the ad is not endorsed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)'s campaign, but...

Many Americans are taking on more liberal views but Ted Cruz is sticking with his social conservatism. But will his grassroots bible belt base be enough to get him elected in 2016? The 2016 presidential primary season is shaping up to be very interesting. And although some Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have already announced their candidacies, all eyes have undoubtedly been on the GOP field, which seems to be growing every day. The GOP has been struggling in recent years, with Americans becoming increasingly more liberal, especially when it comes to social issues like the war...

“Here in front of Independence Hall, I call for the president to obey the law,” Paul said when he took the microphone, as hundreds of his supporters shouted “President Paul! President Paul! President Paul!” outside Independence Hall after a separate event inside the Constitution Center across the street. The crowd went wild. “The court said last week that it is illegal to collect all of your phone records all of the time without a warrant with your name on it,” Paul said. “I call on the president today to immediately end the bulk collection of our phone records.”

Ted Cruz is intellectually arrogant, like Ronald Reagan. The difference is that Reagan masked his arrogance with self-deprecating humor. Sen. Cruz does a Reagan impression that would do a nightclub comedian proud, but he doesn’t have Reagan’s easy and spontaneous humor. One doesn’t think of Reagan as arrogant, but he was in fact the most arrogant leader we have had since Lincoln. He ignored the whole of the foreign policy establishment in his conviction that America stood to win the Cold War and bring down Communism. Then as now, the foreign policy establishment resembled Jonathan Swift’s scientists on the floating...

Release dull, ultra-sanitized, uncontroversial autobiography that folks will own but never read. Check. Buy and memorize The Quotable Ronald Reagan. Check.Lose the beer gut. Camouflage the bald spot. Hire writers to concoct explanation for all that weed smoked in high school? Check. Check. Check.It is now safe to enter the Republican primary. But there is still one major problem left: the current state of the Republican party. Tea Partiers, evangelicals, establishment RINOs, Libertarians, neocon foreign policy hawks, and moderates. According to Dr. Stella Rouse, associate professor and Director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of...