Free Republic

A conservative outside group whose efforts Sen. Ted Cruz backed has called for defunding the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Cruz, an NRSC vice chairman and Texas Republican, has not rebuked the effort. This weekend, Senate Conservatives Fund launched a campaign calling on conservatives to pledge not to give any money to the NRSC in the aftermath of last week’s runoff in the Mississippi Senate race. As is typical, the NRSC backed Republican Sen. Thad Cochran, while the SCF and other outside groups backed his failed challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel. “The Senate Republican establishment betrayed the grassroots and recruited Democrats...

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today released the fifth report on the Obama Administration’s attempts to expand federal power that documents the many times the Supreme Court has unanimously rejected its legal arguments. Legal Limit No. 1 documented cases decided unanimously against the Obama Administration from January 2012 to June 2013. Today’s fifth report includes all other cases, dating back to January 2009 when Obama was sworn into office, that the Obama Administration has lost unanimously. Four of those cases were decided by the Supreme Court in its most recent term. “When President Obama’s own Supreme Court nominees join their...

Two Texans may be vying for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016: Sen. Ted Cruz and Governor Rick Perry. Cruz overwhelmingly won the Texas GOP 2016 convention straw poll, confirming his position as the conservative grassroots candidate. He fires up crowds unlike any other politician today, and the power of motivating voters and volunteers should not be underestimated. But will he run in 2016? The signs point to yes. One of his staffers left his office to start a committee to draft him into running. He has visited the early states and spent many weekends during his first 18 months...

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz is taking heat for his anti-gay views and vocal opposition to marriage equality by none other than a fellow Republican figure. Prominent Republican lawyer, Ted Olson, who is a strong supporter of LGBT rights, thought Cruz's comments on marriage equality were "very, very sad." Cruz had a lot to say to the crowds at the Texas GOP convention about the "threat" that is gay marriage. His speech appeared on an article of The New Yorker (emphasis mine): "Marriage is under assault," Ted Cruz said to the crowd. "It is under assault in a way that is...

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, today released the following statement commending the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. “Today the Supreme Court handed our nation a landmark victory for religious liberty. The decision affirms that Americans, contrary to what the Obama Administration attempted to impose, have a right to live and work in accordance to their conscience and can’t be forced to surrender their religious freedom once they open a business. “This ruling is a repudiation of the Obama Administration’s untenable position that people with sincerely held religious beliefs should be forced to comply with an unconstitutional mandate...

Christopher Hitchens got a chance to analyze the Tea Party in 2011, the same year cancer took his life. In a Vanity Fair article titled "Tea'd Off," the great polemicist explains that populist movements like the Tea Party are a reaction to social and political change. Hitchens writes that before the Revolutionary War costumes, America had seen a somewhat similar phenomenon with the John Birch Society: The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message--the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States--that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It...

It’s not too uncommon for Republican leaders from the House and Senate to occasionally meet, trade notes, and work out bicameral strategies, but as a rule, rank-and-file members tend to stick with colleagues from the same chamber. When they have ideas or grand plans, GOP lawmakers usually turn to their chamber’s leadership or committee chairs. Which is why it’s odd to see House Republicans huddle so frequently with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Last September, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) presented a plan to avoid a government shutdown. Cruz met directly with House Republicans, urged them to ignore their own leader’s...

Last fall, not long after the federal government’s partial shutdown ended, The New Yorker’s David Denby alleged that shutdown point man Ted Cruz seemed to be pursuing the presidency “by sowing as much confusion and disorder as possible—playing the joker in a seemingly nihilistic charade whose actual intent is a rational grab for power.” There’s nothing as pointed or nasty as that in “The Absolutist,” Jeffrey Toobin’s 8,400-word New Yorker profile of Cruz, but Toobin does paint Cruz as an extremist – more of a Goldwater figure than a Reagan figure – as well as a hypocrite regarding judicial activism....

SAN ANTONIO -- Senator Ted Cruz was introduced as a friend and public servant at the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce luncheon where he was the guest of honor. Sen. Cruz addressed the crowd of 157 for about 47 minutes. He spoke of his father coming to Texas from Cuba with $100. Sen. Cruz said his father went on to own a small business. "As Americans we are the children of those who risked everything," said Sen. Cruz. Sen. Cruz said his father's story used to be common, but for the first time people are scared for the country. Sen....

'Boys and girls forced to cut off the fingers or cut off the ears of other boys and girls' Only days after the stunning report from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, of threats and torture illegal alien children endure en route to the southern U.S. border, a member of Congress is charging that President Obama, through his statements and actions, is complicit. Cruz’s statement came in a news conference after he, Rep. Michael C. Burgess, R-Texas, and others visited a dorm at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas that serves as a temporary home to some of the tens of thousands...

‘Establishment Republicans,” writes Jeffrey Toobin, “remain in some level committed to uphold rudimentary operations of government and at least talk about broadening the Party’s appeal. Ardent conservatives, including those in the Tea Party movement, regard the Capitol as a cesspool of corruption, and they see compromise as betrayal.” The lines come from Toobin’s profile of Senator Ted Cruz, featured in the June 30 issue of The New Yorker. You will have no trouble guessing to which group Toobin thinks the senator belongs. Then again, compared with the last major New Yorker story on Cruz, “Is Senator Ted Cruz Our New...

“Just imagine if these were your children, or any children you know,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said on the floor of the Senate Thursday, making the case for the three abducted teens in Israel. “Just imagine if your child was kidnapped for 14 days –and you don’t know where they are, or even whether they’re still alive.” The three teens, Naftali Frankel, Gilad Sha’ar and Eyal Yifrah, ages 16 through 19, were taken from a bus stop after school June 12 in the West Bank near the city of Hebron. Frankel holds dual U.S-Israeli citizenship. “These are teenagers who were...

Attorney General Eric Holder should be impeached if he refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the targeting of tea party groups by the IRS, according to Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas). With the IRS claiming to have lost two years of former official Lois Lerner’s emails, Cruz is headed to the floor to introduce a resolution calling for the special prosecutor. “He’s going to say, if Attorney General Holder does not appoint a special prosecutor, he should be impeached,” a Cruz aide told National Review Online. “Eric Holder has been at the center of every big scandal in...

Tea Partyers keep blowing elections, but they're still remaking the GOP in their own extremist image. Last night was rough for the Tea Party. Sen. Thad Cochran beat the odds and the expectations and defeated Chris McDaniel in the runoff for Mississippi’s GOP Senate nomination. In Oklahoma, endorsements by Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Cruz did little to help T.W. Shannon, who was easily defeated by Rep. James Lankford in the race for the Republican nomination to replace retiring Sen. Tom Coburn. Both seats were all but certain to stay in Republican hands no matter who won, but the tea...

Chris McDaniel, onthe blatantly unethical and illegal tactics employed by Thad Cochran and Haley Barbour in the Mississippi GOP runoff Tuesday… “McDaniel: I am a two-term state senator, I have fought for this party my entire life, I’ve given money…I’ve done everything they’ve asked me to do– and last night, they pulled over 35,000 Democrats into a Republican primary to defeat me…we feel betrayed. … Hannity: Do you foresee any circumstance under which you would support this guy? Because I don’t think I could do it. McDaniel: I prayed about it last night…my core principle is gonna have a hard...

He’s not on any campaign payroll, but you could call him an informal adviser. Several of the GOP’s potential 2016 presidential candidates have, over the past few years, sought the advice of former president George W. Bush in Dallas. Although the former president has deliberately kept a low profile since he left Washington in January 2009, his door is always open for ambitious Republican politicians. He has welcomed a succession of likely 2016 candidates to his office in Dallas for private conversations about life, politics, and the all-consuming quest they will confront if they decide to seek the nation’s top...

The smarmy “Morning Joe” crew was having a grand time Wednesday morning mocking tea party candidate losses in Oklahoma and Mississippi on Tuesday, writing off the conservative groups that supported them. Former John McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt offered his take on the rough year the tea party is having. “When I was watching that, it just seemed like it had an American Idol, season thirteen feel to it,” he said. “You’re watching Ted Cruz in that video, it sounds like he’s talking about a TupperWare set coming with this.” “Sarah Palin sounded like she didn’t know who she was...

Reacting to news of Sudan re-arresting Meriam Ibrahim, the young mother who was sentenced to death for converting to Christianity, Sen Ted Cruz tells Fox News "This isn't a partisan issue"

Sen. Ted Cruz held another closed-door meeting with House conservatives Tuesday night, sitting down with insurgents over pizza in his office for a free-flowing discussion about immigration, leadership elections, the IRS and recent changes at the Republican Study Committee. Over the course of about an hour and a half, 14 of the most conservative members of the House piled into Cruz’s Dirksen office for what was described in an email as an off-the-record gathering of “discussion and fellowship.” The attendees were, in the order in which they first arrived: Doug Lamborn of Colorado, Trent Franks of Arizona, Mo Brooks of...

Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has found an unlikely ally in U.S. Senate in Majority Leader Harry Reid, at least on a measure which would return non-violent felons their right to vote. Paul has been pushing to restore the voting rights to non-violent felons in Kentucky, speaking to community members in West Louisville about the initiative and appearing in a state Senate committee meeting in February. The legislation, which was drafted in the form of a constitutional amendment, was changed by state Senate Republicans in Frankfort, and never made it to a floor vote in the Senate. In...