Free Republic

In the straw poll at the annual Values Voters Summit for right-wing Republicans, Democrats actually did well. In fact, some Democrats did better than some of the leading… Wait, what? Yup. You heard me right. Vice President Joe Biden, Gov. Chris Christie, and 2016 Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton finished in a three-way tie. Behind them? New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez and Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin. The GOP has such awful candidates that even their own most ardent supporters aren’t believers in half of their candidates including Chris Christie who is in the midst of an extended PR campaign stumping...

On Tuesday morning, The View’s “conservative” co-host Nicolle Wallace gave a ringing endorsement for Governor Chris Christie (R-N.J.) should he decide to run for president in 2016. Unfortunately for the New Jersey governor, her reasons for supporting him probably won’t help him win over many Republican primary voters. During a discussion about Chris Christie’s 2016 prospects, Wallace eagerly threw her hat in for the New Jersey Republican and proclaimed that “his politics are an interesting and progressive and modern swath of the country and I’d like to see him in.” (VIDEO-AT-LINK)The segment began with a discussion of Governor Christie’s weight...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Pat Buchanan predicted Mitt Romney will run for president on this weekend's broadcast of The McLaughlin Group. "There is no doubt Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Mitt Romney are in the establishment category or bracket that are headed for the finals," Buchanan said. "I think Mitt would come out first but I really don't see Bush as really having the drive or inner drive. And I think, then you get Mitt Romney against someone like a Cruz, or someone like that, and I think that would be the finals. And I think that Mitt has got it in his heart...

Influential Republicans in early presidential primary states believe New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is poised to once again become a frontrunner for the party’s 2016 nomination, following a news report that federal scrutiny of a bridge-closing scandal has not implicated him. “If he had been found in the wrong, he would have been irreparably damaged,” said Matt Moore, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. “This is hugely helpful.”

President Barack Obama’s impotent approach to the international crises proliferating around the globe has resulted in a bipartisan barrage of criticisms directed at him and his administration, and it’s all getting to be just too much to handle for Obama’s remaining supporters. The latest to offend the sensibilities of those for whom the Islamic State is a threat only to our ability to craft convincing moral equivalencies for their abhorrent acts is New Jersey governor and 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie. According to a report from New York Times journalist and Christie tracker Michael Barbaro, the governor had the...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)There are 65 prominent people who might run for president in 2016. The Democratic and Republican fields contrast sharply. Hillary Clinton is the clear front-runner, while there is no front-runner on the Republican side. Twenty-three Democrats have been mentioned as a candidate or are eyeing a bid, according to an analysis by The Hill. The GOP side has 42. Most of the people on this list won’t run, and some have adamantly claimed that they’re not interested. But many politicians have changed their minds on seeking the White House. Before mounting his 2008 bid, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said he...

Twenty years before he killed a cap on magazine rounds, the Republican entered politics explicitly to fight for an assault-weapons ban and bullet limit. A gun control bill landed on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s desk on July 2, the same day that two parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, took to the Trenton State House to try to convince him to sign it. When Christie vetoed the bill instead—not even blinking at the pleas from the victims’ families—he sent a message to conservatives and gun-rights groups that he is still a...

Joe Scarborough on Tuesday slammed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s refusal to meet with the parents of the Sandy Hook shooting, calling his defense one of the “stupidest arguments” he’s ever heard. The Republican governor declined to meet with the families of children who were killed in the December 2012 shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, who wanted to discuss gun control legislation. Christie last week vetoed a state bill that would have banned ammunition magazines that held more than ten rounds. The governor said that it would have been “really hypocritical” to meet with the families who wanted...

TRENTON — Democratic state Senate President Stephen Sweeney has been traveling all over the state, pitching his "Sandy Bill of Rights" bill — a tour many see as laying the groundwork for a run for governor. Republican lawmakers who never dared challenge Gov. Chris Christie this month openly opposed a series of tax and fee hikes in his budget, including a tax on e-cigarettes first proposed by the governor. Nobody knows if the Republican governor will prepare a White House run in the next year. But already, lawmakers from both parties have been staking claims and thinking of a post-Christie...

For Jeb Bush, who I believe really wants to be president, the theory of the case has always been this: At some point, his party, the Republicans, will break from the tea party. The angry fever that overtook the party when Barack Obama’s election produced its intended result: a universal healthcare bill, would break. And the movement, born on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to slag underwater homeowners, and harnessed by the GOP to break the spell of bipartisanship Obama rode into town on, would have so consumed the party base, that cooler heads within the party would...

On the same week that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin doubled down on waterboarding remarks she made, the campaign of CD3 GOP Primary candidate Steve Lonegan said it would welcome Palin in to campaign with the movement conservative candidate. “Darn right I’d do whatever it takes to foil [terrorists’] murderous jihadist plots – including waterboarding,” Palin, a Republican, wrote in a Facebook post Monday night, following up on controversial comments made last weekend at the annual National Rifle Association meeting in Indianapolis. “Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we’d baptize terrorists,” Palin told...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie delivered a message to his fellow members of the Republican Party on Thursday: being pro-life means reforming America’s drug laws and criminal sentencing procedures. Christie has long advocated for drug treatment programs as a means of reforming the country’s prison system, but Christie took a new tactic on Thursday when he framed that advocacy as a pro-life argument. “I’m pro-life, and I believe strongly in the sanctity of life,” Christie told an audience in Jersey City on Thursday. Addressing his fellow Republican governors, Christie said that “it’s great to be pro-life, but you need to...

Editor's note: Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" and "Governing America." (CNN) -- ...The weaknesses of both men—Cruz in terms of his style and Paul in terms of his rhetoric—point out how desperate the GOP is to find someone who can build a broad coalition, something that is essential for a presidential victory, particularly when Republicans will likely be facing a formidable candidate. The problems of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have been a huge blow to the party, and there are not many alternatives at...

Though Karl Rove, Ronald Reagan, and Barry Goldwater weren’t in attendance at the 2014 edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, the contrasting visions each had for the Republican Party were well represented. Championing Rove’s cynical realpolitik wing that believes in winning simply for winning’s sake was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who essentially told the CPAC audience the GOP should keep doing what lost the last two presidential elections — but do it even worse. Showing he’s either out-of-touch with reality or really just a liberal, Christie even said Republicans have lost because they’ve been nominating candidates...

Who’s likely to do well in New Hampshire’s 2016 first-in-the-nation presidential primary? It’s a preposterous question, here in 2014, but what the heck? We asked six experts to weigh in on some of the biggest political players. Our analysts are Wayne Lesperance, political science professor at New England College; Phil Boynton, president of the University of New Hampshire College Republicans; Peter Burling, Democratic national committeeman; Dante Scala, professor of political science at UNH; Jess Steever, vice president of the Plymouth State University Democrats; and Brandon Lemay, public relations officer for the PSU Democrats. Today, our panelists consider the Republicans. Tomorrow,...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Dallas, Texas (CNN) -- In the afterglow of Chris Christie's smashing re-election win last November, a chorus of big-name Republicans heralded the charismatic New Jersey governor as the party's savior in 2016. Not everyone was so enamored. Just days after the election, Texas Gov. Rick Perry appeared on national television and poured cold water on Christie's impressive victory. "He was a successful governor in New Jersey," Perry said on ABC's "This Week." "Now does that transcend to the country? We'll see in later years and months to come. We're all different states. Is a conservative in New Jersey a conservative...

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (Reuters) - Outspoken real estate magnate Donald Trump said on Tuesday he may seek the Republican presidential nomination for 2016, adding that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's prospects for a White House run have dimmed since a scandal erupted. A run for the presidency "is something I would certainly look at," Trump told Reuters. "You know why? I'm unhappy with the way things are going in America." Trump gave the telephone interview before making a breakfast speech at the "Politics & Eggs" forum at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire - an event that tends to...

The Republican Party put all of their 2016 eggs in the Christie basket. Now the basket has George Washington Bridge size hole, Hillary Clinton has opened up an 8 point lead and Republicans are panicking. The first whiff of GOP panic came from a recent New York Times story, Of all the new realities that Mr. Christie must confront, perhaps the most humbling is a sense of losing the momentum that surrounded him just a few months ago. Last year, the governor’s staff had begun building up his foreign policy bona fides, quietly reaching out to Brian H. Hook, a...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie strode to the microphones in Trenton Wednesday night and took an hour of reporters’ tough questions about a plot by staffers to punish Fort Lee’s Democratic mayor by snarling his city’s traffic for four days. Penitent, occasionally defiant, Christie insisted he didn’t know about the scheme. But he said he took full responsibility for the scandal, apologized to the citizens of Fort Lee and promised to get to the bottom of what happened. Oh wait. That’s not what Christie did at all. The famously fearless governor canceled his one public appearance of the day, ignored...

Democratic Party donor Rosemarie Arnold boasts that she’s the “Queen of Torts” based on a history of filing suits like a $30 million dollar dog bite lawsuit. Other attorneys don’t seem to think too highly of the Queen of Torts and her tactics. Which brings us back to Rosemarie Arnold and her claim on behalf of the child that he suffered a $30M injury to his ear. There are only two reasons for Ms. Arnold to do this: 1. The Queen of Torts is actually ignorant of the law; or 2. Rosmarie Arnold willfully elected to ignore the law, in...