Free Republic

In his latest book, Collision 2012, Dan Balz, a Washington Post writer, expresses his incredulity over “the inability” of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign to “humanize” its candidate. This is one reason why, in Balz’s estimation, Romney lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama. Yet there are two other reasons that he supplies to account for Romney’s defeat. The one pertains to the “technically superior” character of his rival’s campaign. The other is in regard to Romney’s “ambivalence” concerning his bid for the presidency. The first thing that should be noted is that if Romney’s consultants had difficulty in “humanizing” their...

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio warned Tuesday that some on the Republican side of immigration reform could come up empty-handed if the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” plan fails. In an appearance on WFLA’s “The Morning Show with Preston Scott” in Tallahassee, Fla., Rubio explained that President Barack Obama will be tempted to enact his own immigration reform measures by executive order if Congress does not pass an immigration bill. An Obama executive order would legalize 11 million undocumented immigrants, he said. “I have been saying now for over a year I believe that this president tempted, will be tempted, if...

Sen. Rand Paul outlined his fears about President Obama’s health care law on “The Daily Show” late Monday, arguing “dinosaur syndrome” has prevented well-intentioned authors of the law from crafting effective reforms. “I’m afraid it’s going to be unaffordable and that’s the real problem,” the Kentucky Republican told John Oliver, interim host of “The Daily Show” in Jon Stewart’s absence. “I’m afraid that everyone will pay a lot more for insurance. And I think precisely the people it was intended to help it may well hurt, because they may not be able to afford it.” Mr. Paul, a potential presidential...

Nearly a hundred top Republican officials sent a letter to the House GOP on Tuesday urging lawmakers to pass a bill that legalizes illegal immigrants, arguing that the current system is already allowing them to stay and so it makes sense to register them and bring them into the system. The donors, led by former Bush administration Cabinet officials Carlos Gutierrez and Spencer Abraham, also said that immigrants are potential Republican voters who can be won over — if the party can be seen as welcoming to immigrants. “Doing nothing is de facto amnesty. We need to take control of...

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio warned in an op-ed on Thursday that there is “mounting evidence” Obamacare creates more problems than it solves and he called on lawmakers to stop the “disastrous” law from taking effect. “It is time to admit that Obamacare isn't going to work, decide not to waste a single cent more on it, and replace it with market-based reforms that will give people more health insurance choices and options,” Rubio penned on the Fox News website. “It's still not too late. This September may be our last best chance to do anything about this disastrous law.”...

ObamaCare is at the center of a rapidly escalating fight that threatens to shut the government down this fall. Republicans have tried this maneuver in Obama’s first term, only to back off later to the chagrin of Tea Party leaders. This time, GOP lawmakers are emboldened by problems plaguing the administration’s ObamaCare implementation.

Two ranking Republican members of the US Senate Armed Services Committee urged the Obama administration on Sunday evening to take “decisive” action against the Assad regime in Syria. Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina spoke at a news conference in Jerusalem after meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders.

Earlier this year, Jeb Bush told ABC that both his father George H.W. Bush, and brother George W. recommended he run for president in 2016. Mama Barbara Bush is not keen on the idea, declaring in April that “the nation’s probably had enough Bushes.” But in the constantly shifting equations of potential Republican hopefuls for future president and vice president, the former Florida governor’s name has been tied with another former governor: Sarah Palin. The pair have now been framed as a “the GOP’s only chance” in the race by American Thinker contributor Michael Sheppard. “Would Jeb Bush have as...

Ready for the kicker? Discussing #immigration and why border security MUST come first on this issue in 25 minutes on @FoxNews #AZ #tcot— Jan Brewer (@GovBrewer) June 24, 2013 Stupidity or something worse? Border security doesn’t “come first” in the Gang of Eight bill, of course; it comes before green-card eligibility but after probationary legalization, which is why Rand Paul, for instance, can’t support it. Illegals are granted a legal claim to staying here before anything happens on the border. Which leaves three possibilities. One: Brewer’s confused about what the bill says. That seems … doubtful. She’s the governor of...

EXCERPT “I don’t think we have a definitive on that yet,” Bachmann said. “I think there’s still a loophole that the speaker might allow himself — that he won’t hold himself to the Hastert rule. In the shorthand, this is what I think is going to happen — the very bad bill is going to be in the Senate. We’re going to have a Trojan Horse bill that will look very good. It will look like border security in the House. Conservatives will vote for it in the House. Both bills will go to conference committee. The guts will get...

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) argued Wednesday that the United States should pass immigration reform because the U.S. economy needs the labor of young immigrants, and immigrants are “more fertile.” “Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans,” Bush said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to the Majority conference. “Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity.” Bush said immigrants are an advantage that the United States has over China, Europe and Japan, which don’t have the same...

(CNSNews.com) - In his prepared text for a speech he is delivering today at the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, Sen. Rand Paul (R.-Ky.) said to illegal aliens who want to live and work in the United States: “[W]e will find a place for you.” Paul also said he envisions today’s illegal aliens becoming additional “taxpayers.” “Imagine 12 million people who are already here coming out of the shadows to become new taxpayers,” said Paul. Illegal aliens working in the United States today are not exempted from complying with the nation's tax laws anymore...

In his prepared text for a speech he is delivering today at the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, Sen. Rand Paul (R.-Ky.) said to illegal aliens who want to live and work in the United States: “[W]e will find a place for you.” Paul also said he envisions today’s illegal aliens becoming additional “taxpayers.” “Imagine 12 million people who are already here coming out of the shadows to become new taxpayers,” said Paul.

A week ago, he noted on his Facebook page that his poll numbers after voting no on Toomey/Manchin put him somewhere south of “pond scum.” Today, this. He won’t face the voters again for five and a half years, but he shares a home state with Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly. They can hurt him by campaigning against him in 2018 more than they can anyone else in the Senate. No wonder he’s looking for ways to flip: Republican Sen. Jeff Flake told CNN he is willing to reverse his opposition to expanding background checks for guns if the Senate...

WASHINGTON (AP) — You don't see this very often: a majority of Senate Republicans voting to make people who buy stuff on the Internet pay state and local sales taxes. The Senate could vote as early as Thursday on a bill to empower states to require online retailers to collect state and local sales taxes for purchases made over the Internet. Under the bill, the sales taxes would be sent to the states where a shopper lives. On Wednesday, the bill passed a test vote in the Senate, 74 to 23, with 27 Republicans voting in favor. Senate Majority Leader...

Alex Conant @AlexConant: "We haven't had a cohort of people living permanently in US without full rights of citizenship since slavery". Mind you, he isn’t talking only about illegal immigrants. He’s talking about any non-citizen who lives in this country permanently, including millions of Green Card holders. And by implication: Conn Carroll @conncarroll: For those of you keeping score at home, Rubio spokesman @AlexConant just compared all Schumer-Rubio opponents to slave owners If this is Team Rubio’s strategy for winning over conservatives, good luck with that.

When confronted with the Republican Party’s poor standing among minority communities, GOP politicians have usually taken one of two approaches: claim these communities constitute “natural conservative constituencies” or advocate a broad change in policy or ideology to attract minority voters. Neither one of these tactics has been effective, for various reasons–chief among those reasons is that the communities under consideration are usually not “natural conservative constituencies.” Take Hispanics, for example. It is often noted by GOP politicians that Hispanic immigrants are hard-working, family-oriented strivers who tend to be religious. That may be true, but polls showed that while Mitt Romney...

Sen. Rand Paul R-Ky. delivered an effective speech at Howard University, even though he rhetorically stumbled at points. The audience was mostly silent through Paul’s prepared speech, which highlighted traditional Republican policies such as school choice, free markets, and limited government. Paul’s more libertarian ideas, however, appeared to resonate with the audience, as they applauded for his views on reduced jail penalties for non-violent drug users and a more humble foreign policy. “Republicans are often miscast as uncaring or condemning of kids who make bad choices,” Paul said. “I, for one, plan to change that.” Paul admitted that Republicans had...

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Tuesday said he doesn't understand why gun owners fear the registration of their firearms. "I don't get the fear of registration," Steele said on MSNBC. "I don't get the, the concern about trafficking. Are we saying that we want criminals to, you know, make … back-alley sales out of the trunks of their cars?" Steele was part of a panel on MSNBC's "The Daily Rundown," during which former Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) said that responsible gun owners insure their guns, which means they're registered. "I mean, I don't understand," she said. MSNBC...

Sources inside the Senate tell me that the Republican Conference is scared to death of the tactics of Senators Lee, Cruz and Paul – that it is supposedly putting them in a tough spot. Several of the Republicans are using the Manchin-Toomey compromise plan as an excuse to cave on the gun filibuster. They claim that Senators Lee, Cruz, and Paul are running ahead of the conference in their insistence on a filibuster. What they fail to see is that the cloture vote is the vote to stop the gun legislation from passage. Several Republican Senators intend to vote against...