Free Republic

LEBANON, N.H. -- Can you discern, deep in the new Republican Party -- amid the conservative warriors and tea-infused crusaders -- a faint moderate heartbeat? Hardly anyone is asking that question this month, in the wake of the Republican tsunami that swept Democrats out of office and swept a Republican majority into the Senate chamber. But two unrelated events this month make the question worth posing, if only to explore the possibility and to understand the political landscape here in the state that only 15 months from now will hold the first presidential primary. The first of those events took...

The Tea Party didn’t knock off any incumbent GOP senators this year in primaries, but last night it proved just how riled up voters are against the Washington establishment. Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander won re-nomination last night with just 49.7 percent of the vote. His main opponent, state representative Joe Carr won 41 percent despite an erratic campaign and being ignored by the major national tea-party groups. Alexander was able to convince just enough conservatives to back him with his rallying cry: “I’m not in the shut-down-the-government crowd, I’m in the taking-over-the-government crowd.” Alexander becomes the third GOP senator in...

Should higher-education be subsidized? Friedman: 'You have a case in which you are imposing taxes on relatively low-income people to confer very large benefits on upper-income people...' Brooks: 'I think as soon as you start offering people economic incentives to get educated -or to use the education that they get for economic means- in other words when you put a price-tag on knowledge, I think that you're gonna be... Friedman: 'What are you talking about? You mean to say that the graduates of colleges and universities don't use their capacities in a direction influenced by the money they can earn...?...

The Ted Cruz vs. John McCain feud is on, so proclaimed the Washington Post on May 24, 2013. The two senators have already clashed on raising the debt ceiling, with Cruz proclaiming that he does not trust Republicans like McCain and then betting the older senator that he could not get a majority of the GOP senate caucus to sign on to a debt ceiling increase. McCain has more than once expressed irritation at Cruz and his uncompromising version of conservatism. But it an ironic way, the former maverick from Arizona has only himself to blame. In a fit of...

One bonus for Republicans in the trifecta of pseudo-scandals ensnaring the Obama White House this month is that it distracted the party from its looming civil war. It’s even possible that the Senate immigration reform got as far as it did partly because wingnut radio talkers and Tea Party xenophobes were consumed by their hatred of Obama, and paying less attention to GOP immigration sellouts. But with the easing of scandal fever on the Potomac, Republicans are back to fighting one another, and the week-long Senate clash between freshman Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. John McCain over the budget is...

There are two power centers in the Senate Republican Conference. One is the official leadership under Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The second is the Tea Party Troika of Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul. It's not that there are two Republican parties. Nor is there a chasm running along ideological lines. The new dynamic is this: The official leadership has even less power than Senate leadership typically has, and the Tea Party Troika, mastering what's called the "inside-outside game," has more power to swing their colleagues than backbenchers normally have. Senate floor leaders are typically called "cat herders." Individual...

How stupid does the Senate background-check vote look now, I ask the pundits and others who thought it was dumb politics for Obama and the Democrats to push for a vote that they obviously knew they were going to lose. I’d say not very stupid at all. The nosedive taken in the polls by a number of senators who voted against the bill, most of them in red states, makes public sentiment here crystal clear. And now, for the first time since arguably right after the Reagan assassination attempt—a damn long time, in other words—legislators in Washington are feeling political...

In his short time at the Capitol, Senator Ted Cruz, a freshman Republican from Texas, has shown little regard for long-standing rules of decorum. But on Friday, he publicly discussed the closed-door dealings of the Senate Republican Conference — and trashed his colleagues in the process. Stopping by a Texas meeting of the Tea Party-aligned group FreedomWorks, Mr. Cruz called many of his colleagues “squishes,” forced to stand on conservative principles by the uncompromising stands of a triumphant trio of Republican “constitutionalists”: himself and Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky. At stake was the gun control...

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