Recent News

Santorum: Obama determined to shut down coal-burning plants

President Barack Obama has a “quasi-religious” zeal to close down coal-burning power plants, past and potential Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Thursday.

The former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania was in Raleigh to speak to conservative groups and dropped by the state Legislature for an impromptu talk. He said he’ll decide by early summer whether to run for president in 2016 as he did in 2012.

Santorum criticized the Obama administration’s regulations aimed at reducing power plant emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants, which was part of a case heard in the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday.

A dispute over Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s position on immigration erupted on Thursday, highlighting the Republican’s struggle to appeal to conservatives on the explosive issue as he prepares to launch a Republican presidential bid.

The two-term governor has consistently opposed what he calls “amnesty” for immigrants in the country illegally, but his definition of amnesty has evolved. In a recent closed-door meeting with top New Hampshire Republicans, Walker said such immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country legally.

Jeb Bush’s tricky path to an economic plan

One of Jeb Bush’s biggest challenges in the 2016 campaign will be to come up with a fresh economic plan that doesn’t make him seem like a tool of deep-pocketed Wall Street donors or the second coming of Mitt Romney, whose big, expensive tax cut plan failed to catch fire and left him wide open to populist attacks.

Ohio governor John Kasich didn’t go to any lengths to play to his crowd on Wednesday night.

Dining with a group of influential pro-growth conservatives at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan on Wednesday — economists Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer, and Stephen Moore, Fox News hosts Bill Hemmer and John Stossel, and Gristedes Foods founder John Catsimatidis were all in attendance — Kasich voiced his support for Medicaid and for renewing a spirit of bipartisanship within the Republican party.

Kasich, a former nine-term congressman who won a resounding reelection victory in November, is eyeing a presidential bid but, at the dinner’s close, there was little appetite for a Kasich presidency among those who’d assembled to hear him.

Is Joe Biden ready for Joe?

Joe Biden isn’t not running for president.

That’s not a typo: Hillary Clinton is about to kick off her campaign, and the vice president has taken no steps to run, or to figure out a real plan for what happens if he doesn’t. But he’s not out of the race, either.

The Republican Presidential Race Is Shaping Up as a Marathon

The race for the Republican presidential nomination is shaping up to be one of the most drawn-out in a generation.

The candidate field looks unusually crowded, with more than a dozen contenders appealing to different slices of the GOP. The rise of super PACs allows candidates to stay in the race longer than before. And nominating rules meant to compress the process may complicate a front-runner’s ability to amass the delegates necessary to win.

Paul Courts Christian Conservatives

When he announced his candidacy for president this week, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, made a strenuous bid for support from Christian conservatives. But one of Cruz’s rivals, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is taking a different route to court the same constituency – waging an aggressive behind-the-scenes campaign rather than emphasizing a dramatic public appeal, and his aides say it will eventually pay big dividends.

For many months, Paul has been quietly meeting with scores of leaders from the Christian right to gain support for his presidential campaign, which he is expected to officially announce April 7. Some of the meetings have been held during dinner in the Senate dining room; other sessions have been in Paul’s Senate office, and still others have been conducted while he traveled outside Washington.