Free Republic

Sen. Rand Paul today took to the Senate floor to offer a unanimous consent request to separate the Syria rebel funding language from the Continuing Resolution. Senate Democrats objected to this request. Sen. Paul then delivered a foreign policy address outlining his opposition to arming the Syrian rebels. A video and copy of Sen. Paul's remarks as prepared for delivery can be found below. SEN. PAUL DELIVERS FOREIGN POLICY ADDRESS REMARKS: If there is one theme that connects the dots in the Middle East, it is that chaos breeds terrorism. What much of the foreign policy elite fails to grasp...

Frustrated with President Barack Obama’s reaction to Russian action in Ukraine, a group of Republican senators said Wednesday they will introduce legislation outlining a more muscular response. “What we’ve seen from the administration is a lot of rhetoric,” Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said on the Senate floor Wednesday morning. The White House has been dealing “with the situation after something bad has already occurred,” he said. Earlier this week, violence flared up in another area of Ukraine that hugs the Russian border, as the new government in Kiev criticized local police...

Republicans, I come in peace.Until very recently, Rand Paul’s project of insinuating himself comfortably within the Republican Party, and positioning himself as a plausible presidential nominee, had gone along with remarkable ease. Yes, the author of his campaign book turned out to be an unreconstructed neo-Confederate. That was a speed bump. (Who among us has not entrusted the explication of his worldview to a man who has cheered on the assassination of President Lincoln?) Paul had staged a masterful piece of political theater with his marathon Senate speech denouncing the Obama administration’s drone policy. He has assembled a top-tier campaign...

Lawmakers in Washington are debating whether to export more natural gas to combat Russian threats to cut off its gas supplies to Europe. Our D-C reporter Matt Laslo has a look at what that could mean for Wyoming’s economy – and environment… MATT LASLO: Wyoming's junior senator, John Barrasso, made waves when her first came to Washington. And while he's now in the Republican leadership team in the U-S Senate, he's starting to get brushed aside by many reporters and politicians because of his near singular focus on dismantling what he terms Obamacare. But this week lawmakers of all stripes...

March 29, 2014 4:00 AM Which Side Are You On? If you don’t care whether Republicans win, care that Democrats lose. By Kevin D. Williamson For conservatives, the story of the Obama years has been the depressing spectacle of Republicans fighting a rearguard action covering their retreat from a Democratic agenda backed by superior numbers. Republicans began the Obama administration with effectively no leverage: Barack Obama in the White House, Nancy Pelosi in the speaker’s chair, and Harry Reid running the Senate. The outcome of that was the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, the worst domestic defeat for the...

There are things you expect to see at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and there are things you don't. One of the things you probably don't is an audience cheering and applauding arguments for legalizing pot and bemoaning the war on drugs. A panel titled "Rocky Mountain High" held Thursday afternoon started out as a debate between Mary Katherine Ham of Fox and Hot Air and Christopher Beach a staffer for former Drug Czar William Bennett's radio show. But as the debate wore on it became clear the real disagreement was between Beach and the overwhelming majority of the...

[1]Last week, there was one of those mommy-and-daddy-are-fighting moments on Fox News as two powerhouse conservatives debated one of the most important issues facing the right. In one corner, was the dagger-sharp and stunningly beautiful and did I mention beautiful Ann Coulter. In the other corner, was the valiant, good-hearted and, you know, perfectly presentable in his own way Sean Hannity. No one can doubt either the patriotism or the fearlessness of these two. You may sometimes disagree with one or the other, that’s fine, but it seems undeniable that both have the good of the country first and...

<p>Wal-Mart’s wages are so low that many of its workers must rely on food stamps and other government aid programs, costing taxpayers as much as $900,0000 at just one Wal-Mart Supercenter in Wisconsin.</p> <p>So how did the report’s authors come up with the $900,000 figure? First, they took into account the number of Wal-Mart stores and employees across Wisconsin and the per-person costs of Badgercare, the state’s health care program, estimating that the cost of the publicly funded health care comes to $251,706 per year for a Supercenter that employees 300 workers.</p>

This week the Senate voted across party lines to pass a bill that would reduce the cost of living adjustment (COLA) for military retirees including disabled retirees and survivors. The Washington Free Beacon reported that a provision in the Ryan-Murray budget agreement no longer exempts disabled retirees. The original agreement stated that “This would not affect service members who retired because of disability or injury.” After the bill passed the House, the new summary removed the exemption granted to disabled retirees and survivors. It would be too easy to accuse just one party of this chicanery for remember, this was...

In a new fundraising email, the Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF) said House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is targeting conservatives in the same way that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status. "What these leaders are doing to conservatives is no different from what the IRS got caught doing to them this summer," Senate Conservatives Fund executive director Matt Hoskins wrote in the email sent to supporters on Monday. "They're using their power to discriminate against people they see as a political threat." The fundraising email on Monday follows Boehner strongly criticizing conservative outside groups for urging lawmakers...

We now know who Robert Sarvis is and certainly not a genuine libertarian and more like a LINO (libertarian-in-name-only). Like with the Republican Party, the Libertarian Party over the past couple election cycles has put up candidates with no real principle (Gary Johnson and Bob Barr). Robert Sarvis is no exception to the rule. For one thing when it comes to fiscal issues while he sounds conservative he really isn’t. He doesn’t support tax cuts (actually supports new taxes on roads), he doesn’t oppose medicaid expansion and isn’t part of the Austrian Economics crowd. Rather calls himself “pro-business” and not...

President Obama will meet with several LGBT groups during his trip later this week to St. Petersburg, a move likely to ruffle Russian President Vladimir Putin after the recent passage of a series of anti-gay laws. The president will meet with human rights activists Lev Ponomarev and Lyudmila Alexeyeva, legal aid NGO director Pavel Chikov, and Coming Out, a St. Petersburg-based LGBT organization, according to a report in BuzzFeed. The decision to meet with the activists in not unprecedented — Obama also met with human rights leaders in 2009 — but comes amid a period of heightened tension with the...

Tea Party activists are planning a rally outside Speaker John Boehner’s (R) Ohio office on Tuesday, vowing they will rebrand President Obama’s healthcare reform law “BoehnerCare" if he does not get behind a conservative effort to defund the legislation. “If he funds it, he will own it,” said Janet Porter, president of Faith2Action, one of the groups scheduled to participate in the rally, according to The Washington Times. Boehner, along with congressional GOP leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), has yet to voice support for the effort. A group of right-wing lawmakers vowed before the August recess to...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie conflated statistics when he claimed Sen. Rand Paul’s “pork-barrel spending” is the reason Kentucky receives more federal funds than New Jersey for every tax dollar it sends to Washington. The figures cited by Christie are affected very little by pork-barrel spending.Moreover, Senate Republicans have imposed a voluntary ban on earmarks — otherwise known as pork-barrel spending — since the Kentucky senator took office in 2011. So Paul hasn’t brought any of the traditional pork-barrel spending to Kentucky.Paul also added some confusion to the issue when he seemed to suggest that Kentucky’s ratio was the...

Unfortunately, the fall of Rome is a pattern repeated by empires throughout history ... including ours? A group of libertarians gathered in Las Vegas recently for an event called "FreedomFest." We debated whether America will soon fall, as Rome did. Historian Carl Richard said that today's America resembles Rome. The Roman Republic had a constitution, but Roman leaders often ignored it. "Marius was elected consul six years in a row, even though under the constitution (he) was term-limited to one year." Sounds like New York City's Mayor Bloomberg. "We have presidents of both parties legislating by executive order, saying I'm...

If Republicans don’t quash the libertarian streak shown recently by some of their members they risk following the destructive lead of Democrats in the 1960s, says GOP Rep. Peter King of New York. “When you have Rand Paul actually comparing [NSA leaker Edward] Snowden to Martin Luther King or Henry David Thoreau, this is madness,” King said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “This is the anti-war left-wing Democrats of the 1960s that nominated George McGovern and destroyed their party for almost 20 years. I don’t want that happening to our party.” …

Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes and Republican Matt Bevin may become unlikely allies in trying to tear down Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in the marquee Senate race of the upcoming cycle. Both are signaling plans to frame McConnell with similar themes, targeting his personality and "scorched earth" campaign style as much as his policy positions. The strategy reflects what his opponents believe to be his greatest vulnerability — McConnell's deep unpopularity among Kentucky voters of both parties. But it's also a strategy informed by the challenges Grimes and Bevin face in trying to defeat what many observers agree...

Republican rivals Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky are escalating their feud over national security policy and liberty. In comments at a forum of Republican governors in Aspen, Col. Thursday, Mr. Christie said the libertarian strain championed by Mr. Paul currently coursing through the veins of political parties — as evidenced by broad, although ultimately unsuccessful, lobbying in the House of Representatives against NSA surveillance programs this week — is dangerous. “This strain of libertarianism that’s going through parties right now and making big headlines I think is a very dangerous thought,” Mr. Christie...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Thursday took a big swing at libertarian-leaning lawmakers in both parties, calling the ideology, when applied to national security, “a very dangerous thought.” His comments come just one day after the House narrowly rejected a sweeping amendment to defund the National Security Agency’s surveillance program. Addressing the bipartisan coalition that joined together to nearly push the so-called Amash amendment through, Christie told lawmakers who harbor libertarian views on the issue to explain their position to the victims of 9/11, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake reports. He also included Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in...

ASPEN, Colo. — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Thursday offered a clear broadside against Republicans drifting toward a more libertarian view of foreign policy, lumping Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in with them and suggesting they explain their position to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The House earlier this week narrowly voted against a reduction in funding for the National Security Agency, as libertarian-leaning members from both sides joined together to vote for the amendment. “As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on