What can the people who run super PACs do with all the cash they have collected when their favorite candidate drops out of the race?

“They can do pretty much anything they want with the money,” said Viveca Novak, communications director at the Center for Responsive Politics. “They can have a margarita party in the Bahamas.”

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum’s decision to suspend his presidential campaign Tuesday means the “Red, White and Blue Fund” super PAC, which supported him, is without a candidate. The organization and its benefactors helped the under-funded Santorum stay in the game.

The group will continue to advocate for conservatives, but there’s no rule that says it has to.

“Pretty much any use of super PAC money — other than coordinating expenditures with candidates or contributing to candidates – would be a legal and permissible use,” said Paul Ryan, an attorney at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

Practical considerations would likely prevent super PAC operatives from doing something extravagant — like buying a yacht or taking a junket to the Caribbean. Such a purchase would be “career suicide,” Ryan said.

Red, White and Blue founder Nick Ryan said the PAC will work to defeat President Barack Obama, “strengthen the conservative majority in the House of Representatives” and “oust the liberal leadership in the Senate.”

Super PACs are permitted to collect unlimited sums from individuals, unions and corporations and spend the money on ads and other materials supporting or opposing a candidate. The only prohibition is that they cannot coordinate their expenditures with the candidates’ campaigns.

Through February, the Red, White and Blue Fund raised nearly $6 million, which provided Santorum with a significant boost. After a ...

Who will speak for the rights of the unborn now that Rick Santorum is gone from the race? Let me give it a whirl from the perspective of one whose own unwed mother had several abortions before yours truly was permitted to emerge.

My arrival came during the U.S. economy’s previous great crash, back in 1936. My father, who was already supporting an earlier family with two teenage children, had every intention of providing well for me, but he was laid off that very day and informed my mother of the unhappy fact within moments of setting eyes on me in a Bronx hospital. My father held on to part-time jobs in garment industry sweatshops (where my mother, too, worked), but it would be four years before he had a full-time paycheck again. He stood by both families during that dark period, seizing every opportunity to work, mostly in government-sponsored employment. And yes, we lived in part on government welfare—or home relief, as it was then called. All of which made President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the New Deal he fashioned to save tens of millions of impoverished folks just like us throughout the country, objects of veneration.

So why am I bringing all this ancient history up now? Because I was dumbfounded by a headline Saturday in The New York Times that reminded me of how far we have gone wrong: “Welfare Limits Left Poor Adrift as Recession Hit.” And by “we” I mean not only the heartless Republicans who love the fetus and then shun the child but also the “progressives” who dare not use the word “liberal” because concern for the poor conflicts with the opportunism that defines their politics.

The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to ...

Mitt Romney will be the Republican to face President Obama in the fall. Tuesday night was the clincher, as the former Massachusetts governor won in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington D.C. He may stumble on, but the Catholic zealot Rick Santorum is finished, wiped out by Romney's vast financial resources.

Eight years ago, Romney began his bid to win the Republican nomination, only to be crushed by John McCain. In that campaign, he was tagged as a crypto-liberal former governor of Massachusetts and author of a health plan derided by Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Week after tedious week in his second bid, Romney has had to stab his own plan in the back, lashed by his Republican opponents as the true originator of "Obamacare," now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Whatever tincture of liberalism he might once have exhibited has long since vanished. His conservatism is of a harshness way beyond the positions of the last Republican challenger to a Democratic president, Bob Dole, who was thrashed by Bill Clinton in 1996.

Romney's opportunism in junking previous positions when under conservative pressure has been unremitting. Take the single biggest issue in American politics today, the minimum wage.

If you adjust for inflation, median personal income in America hasn't moved for almost half a century. Nearly a quarter of U.S. households have zero to negative net worth. It just takes one unlucky turn of the cards — an illness, an accident, and a brush with the law — to put them under.

In 2005, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott called on Congress to raise the minimum wage, since "our customers simply don't have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks." The boss of the largest corporation on the planet, which employs 1.3 million Americans and has 850,000 customers in its stores at any given moment, was identifying what was then and is now America's No. 1 problem: A huge chunk ...

For an example of the fluidity of campaign finance rules, as well as the tangled web of connections between candidates and super PACs, look no further than the digital consulting firm Targeted Victory.

So far, the firm’s hauled in $4.1 million working for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and American Crossroads, the super PAC launched by GOP strategist Karl Rove. Just down the hall, its neighbors in Arlington, Va., include an office housing four other companies working for Romney, American Crossroads or the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future.

With the rise of super PACs, the jet-fueled political action committees that can take unlimited contributions, many campaign finance watchdogs have focused on the hundreds of millions of dollars being raised this presidential election cycle. But after the most recent campaign filings came in last week, ProPublica decided to track the other side of the equation: Where the money goes.

Our analysis found that more than $306 million has been spent so far by major super PACs and the five leading presidential candidates. In some cases, payees serve both candidates and the super PACs aligned with them, raising the specter that groups may be working together in ways that violate the rules, campaign finance experts said. We also found instances in which ...

Supreme Court justices on Tuesday will enter the second and most crucial day of historic, closely watched arguments that could determine whether most Americans will have to buy health care coverage or pay penalties.

The legal and political world will be watching closely. Monday was a preview _ while justices heard arguments on a tax-related case in chambers, lawyers, politicians and protesters gathered outside, arguing their own cases. And to add punctuation, Republican presidential candidate Rick

Santorum stopped by, using the forum to tout his staunch opposition to the health care mandate.

Inside, Chief Justice John Roberts offered a signal of his own.

"We cannot avoid a decision simply because the case has political implications," he said on Monday morning, while summarizing an unrelated decision.

The 90-minute health-care argument Monday morning had little to do with the merits or even the substance of the 2,700-page health-care law passed by congressional Democrats in 2010. Instead, opening-day arguments centered on whether lawsuits challenging the case are premature.

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The Republican presidential primaries this year have turned into a religious census. There is little precedent in modern politics for the extent to which a state’s choice for a nominee has coincided so closely with how many of its ballots were cast by white evangelical voters.

Where evangelicals cast a minority of the ballots, Mitt Romney has won. Where evangelical voters predominated, Romney has lost, in most cases to Rick Santorum.

Romney’s victory Tuesday in Illinois fit snugly within this pattern. The result pointed to a continuing problem for Santorum: He has yet to break through in places where evangelicals were not the principal force.

While the exit polls did not question voters directly about their attitudes toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is indirect evidence that Romney’s faith may be holding down his vote among non-Mormons for whom a candidate’s religion matters.

But it’s also true that Romney’s Mormonism has had a positive electoral side. Solidarity among Mormon voters, eager to break a historical barrier, helped Romney win Arizona, Nevada and Idaho. Romney won 96 percent among self-identified Mormons in Arizona and 88 percent in Nevada. In Idaho, Romney carried counties in the southern part of this state where the bulk of its Mormon population resides, even as he lost most of the state’s northern counties to Santorum or Ron Paul.

But outside of Mormon strongholds, voters ...

A February increase in financial support for underdog Rick Santorum was too little and too late to slow the far-better financed Mitt Romney, who coasted to an easy victory in the Illinois Republican presidential primary Tuesday.

Santorum’s campaign raised $9 million in February compared with $4.5 million in January. The “Red, White and Blue Fund,” a super PAC supporting former Pennsylvania Sen. Santorum, raised $3 million, 41 percent more than what it raised in January.

Romney’s campaign, meanwhile, raised $12 million in February, nearly doubling its January total, while the super PAC supporting the ex-Massachusetts Gov., “Restore Our Future,” brought in $6.4 million, $3 million of which came from Texas homebuilder and Republican super donor Bob Perry of Texas.

Romney drew 47 percent of the vote in Illinois, former Pennsylvania senator Santorum garnered 35 percent, and Texas congressman Ron Paul of Texas drew 9.3 percent while Gingrich lagged in fourth at 8 percent.

Santorum’s recent financial surge has been aided by Wyoming businessman Foster Friess, who donated $600,000 to the pro-Santorum Red, White and Blue Fund in February, and retired Louisiana energy executive William Dore, who gave the group $500,000 last month.

The pro-Santorum PAC also received a $1 million contribution last month from Annette Simmons, wife of GOP mega-donor Harold Simmons, a billionaire investor who hails from Texas.

All told, the Simmons family donated to each of the top three GOP presidential candidates’ super PACs in February, with Harold giving $100,000 to Restore Our Future and another $100,000 to “Winning Our Future,” a super ...

Unless Ron Paul somehow wins the nomination, it looks as if a vote for the Republican presidential candidate this fall will be a vote for war with Iran.

No other conclusion can be drawn from parsing the candidates’ public remarks. Paul, of course, is basically an isolationist who believes it is none of our business if Iran wants to build nuclear weapons. He questions even the use of sanctions, such as those now in force. But Paul has about as much chance of winning the GOP nomination as I do.Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have all sought to portrayPresident Obama READ FULL POST 17 COMMENTS

SNELLVILLE, Ga. — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich dismissed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney Sunday as a "not very convincing frontrunner" and challenged former Sen. Rick Santorum's conservative credentials ahead of Tuesday's 10-state Super Tuesday Republican presidential primary.

As Romney waged a quick campaign tour through Gingrich's Georgia backyard and Tennessee, Gingrich appeared on four Sunday news shows to proclaim that he's still a viable candidate and try to dispel the notion that the quest for the GOP nomination has boiled down to a race between Romney and Santorum.

"This is going to go on for a good while," Gingrich said on ABC's "This Week." "Gov. Romney, who's outspent all the rest of us by multitudes, is a front-runner, without question, but I think he's not a very convincing front-runner, and he's a long way from having closed out this race."

As for Santorum, Gingrich predicted that the former Pennsylvania senator's campaign will suffer once it moves beyond Ohio, another Super Tuesday state. Santorum and Romney are in a statistical dead heat in Ohio, according to a new NBC News/Marist poll.

"Santorum has been historically a labor union senator from Pennsylvania," Gingrich told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "... And when you get him out of the industrial states, I think it gets tougher for Rick to put together a majority, so we'll see how it goes after next Tuesday."

Santorum, appearing on "Fox News Sunday, said that he and Gingrich are vying for the same pool of conservative voters but stopped short of calling on Gingrich to drop out.

"We have the anti-Romney vote, if you will. Both Gingrich and I are slugging away," Santorum said. "As you know, it's always harder when you get two conservative candidates to go head-to-head. And if you look at all the races, it's ...

Say what you will about this era's Republican presidential candidates; they at least have chutzpah.

Millionaire blue-blood George W. Bush pretended to be a down-home cowboy. Two-time divorcee and longtime Washington influence peddler Newt Gingrich struts around preaching about traditional family values and insisting he's a D.C. outsider. Now, topping them all is Rick Santorum, who last week declared that only "snobs" support efforts to make a college education more accessible to all Americans.

Santorum, of course, has not one, not two, but a whopping three separate degrees, two of which come from public universities — that is, two that were taxpayer-subsidized, courtesy of the "Big Government" Santorum now claims to loathe.

Hypocritical — and dare I say, snobbish — as it is for someone with such a pedigree to attack President Barack Obama's college affordability initiatives, Santorum did inadvertently stumble into a significant question: Is higher education for everyone? The answer today is "not necessarily," but that's precisely because of the affordability problem Obama aims to solve.

N+1 magazine notes that since the late 1970s, when Santorum was ...

A week ago, Rick Santorum looked as though he might give Mitt Romney a thrashing in the Michigan primary, which would have unleashed a wave of grim assessments of the Mormon's prospects: his failure to lock up the race for the Republican nomination, his inability to connect with the common man or woman, the looming possibility of a brokered convention.

Romney's put such a fate behind him, at least till the next time he falters, which could be in the Washington state caucuses on March 3, Saturday, or in any of the 10 states having primaries or caucuses a week from today.

So Romney's a survivor. He recovered from a defeat at the hands of Newt Gingrich in South Carolina in time to win Florida; he routed Santorum last night. But each comeback has come with a huge price tag. Not just the millions Romney had to pour into negative ads against Santorum in Michigan but in the whole character of his battle with Santorum.

What nearly sank Romney in Michigan was his refusal to concede that he was totally wrong four years ago in opposing bailouts — initiated by Bush and carried through by Obama — for General Motors and Chrysler. Both companies were thrown life belts of government loans and are now doing well, giving jobs to thousands of autoworkers and suppliers in Michigan and Ohio. At the convention of the United Auto Workers last week, Obama had rare sport with Romney on this issue, eliciting howls of merriment and derision for Romney from his blue-collar audience. They could easily pull both Michigan and Ohio into the Democratic column next November. No Republican has ever won the White House without prevailing in Ohio.

If Romney is to have a decent chance of defeating Barack Obama in the fall, he has to make a strong general showing among Hispanics, women and middle-of-the-roaders. The growing Hispanic vote in states such as California and Texas is one of the core truths of politics in the coming era. In the early ...

While Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum flew to Washington state ahead of its Republican presidential caucuses Saturday, Newt Gingrich tended to business in his old stomping ground of Georgia.

Gingrich represented Atlanta suburbs in the House of Representatives for 20 years, ending in 1999. His business these days is trying to keep his presidential campaign alive in what's been shaping up lately as a two-man race for the Republican nomination that doesn't include him.

"I have to win Georgia, I think, to be credible in the race," Gingrich candidly told the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce on Thursday morning. "But if I win Georgia, the following week we go to Alabama and Mississippi, and I think I'll win both of those and we have a good opportunity to win Kansas," which votes March 10.

Gingrich is pinning his hopes for a third comeback in this primary cycle on a Southern strategy. His only victory so far came in South Carolina. His camp thinks that winning Georgia on Tuesday could slingshot him to Southern victories the following Tuesday in Mississippi and Alabama, and they in turn could serve as a springboard into later contests in delegate-rich Texas and elsewhere.

Gingrich leads in Georgia by 9 percentage points, according to an average of recent state polls compiled by the website ...