By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff

Texas Rep. Ron Paul has no chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination, but the libertarian iconoclast has pressed on with his national campaign. And he has done so even as he faces a more pressing challenge to his political future back home: a challenge in his March 4 Republican House primary in the state’s 14th District, located in and around the southeastern Texas cities of Victoria and Galveston.

The 72-year-old Paul, who is allowed to run simultaneously for president and for re-election to Congress under Texas law, is being opposed in the 14th District primary by Chris Peden, a certified public accountant who serves on the city council in the community of Friendswood. They are battling over whether Paul will maintain his domination in a district that is so Republican — President Bush took 67 percent there in 2004 — that the Democrats did not even field a candidate in next Tuesday’s primary.

This is the second consecutive election, and the second election ever, in which Paul has been challenged for renomination in the Republican primary. He easily rebuffed the challenge, defeating lawyer Cynthia Sinatra by 78 percent to 22 percent en route to winning a 9th full House term spread over three separate tenures (1976-77, 1979-85, 1997-present).

But Paul’s high visibility in his quixotic run for president has elevated the unorthodox elements of his political agenda, which he had earlier honed as the Libertarian Party nominee for president in 1988. He has called for reductions in the size and scope of government that go well beyond those advocated even by others in the conservative-leaning Republican presidential field. Perhaps most controversially within Republican ranks, he has described the Iraq War as the type of foreign entanglement that the United States needs to avoid and has called for a rapid disengagement of American troops from that conflict.

There is some irony in the fact that Paul won his race for a House comeback in 1996 after winning a primary in which he portrayed incumbent Greg Laughlin — then a recent convert to the Republican Party after long serving as a conservative Democrat — as too liberal. Now Peden is trying to portray Paul as insufficiently conservative, pointing to Paul’s contrarian voting record. Peden’s campaign Web site has prepared a chart that compares his views to the congressman’s and which says Paul “votes against our conservative values” and is a “liberal in disguise.”

In the 109th Congress (2005-06), Paul had the lowest presidential support score among House Republicans, backing Bush only 37 percent of the time on votes on which the president took a public position, according to a Congressional Quarterly study. Paul, an obstretrician, has been dubbed “Dr. No” for his frequent lone votes against spending bills and other pieces of legislation that are overwhelmingly supported in Congress but which Paul says are not authorized by the Constitution.

Paul’s disagreements with the Bush administration, and most of his Republican colleagues, include but are not limited to issues of foreign policy and the ongoing Iraq War. Paul was one of six House Republicans who voted against the original 2002 authorization to wage war in Iraq, and he and John J. “Jimmy” Duncan Jr. of Tennessee are the only two from that group still serving. He was one of two Republicans who voted last May for a measure that called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, with limited exceptions, to start within 90 days of enactment and to be completed 180 days after. ( Walter B. Jones Jr. of North Carolina was the other).

Paul says that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had nothing to do with Iraq, and that the best course of action to support U.S. troops is to bring them home.

Peden also has sought to draw out differences with the incumbent on social policy. Peden disagreed with Paul’s vote in September 2004 against a constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as consisting only of the union of a man and a woman, a move Paul portrayed as being not a matter of moral values but rather one of adherence to the principles of federalism.

Paul, who was one of 27 House Republicans to vote against the amendment, attributed his “no” vote at the time to the “dangers to liberty and traditional values posed by the unexpected consequences of amending the Constitution to strip power from the states and the people and further empower Washington.”

“Dr. Paul’s oath of office calls for him to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and he does so in each and every vote he casts,” Mark Elam, Paul’s campaign manager, told CQ Politics.

That explanation doesn’t wash with Peden, though, who told CQ Politics that Paul’s votes on issues such as the gay marriage ban “are the kind of things that we don’t believe are really in line with the conservative values of his core constituency, and we believe we’re better aligned with those core values.”

Peden scoffs at the Paul campaign’s contention that he is among the most effective members of Congress, saying that his legislative record is threadbare. “We don’t have anything bad to say about Ron Paul as a person, he’s just not a very good legislator,” Peden said. “It’s time that this district gets effective, aggressive conservative leadership and representation in Washington, D.C., and we have not had that in quite some time.”

A 1999 Congressional Quarterly publication, titled “50 Ways to Do the Job of Congress,” has been drawn into the candidates’ fight over the incumbent’s degree of clout. Paul, who was among the members profiled, claimed in campaign literature that the publication had described him as one of the 50 “most effective” members of Congress. Peden rebuked Paul, noting an explanation in that publication that it was intended to illustrate the different styles and methods used by lawmakers and was not a list of the “50 best” or “50 most effective” members.

Peden also has been frustrated by Paul’s refusal to appear at House candidate forums or debates. Peden sees this as hypocritical, noting that Paul’s presidential campaign protested his exclusion from a Republican presidential debate that was held just before the Jan. 8 New Hampshire primary.

But Paul’s campaign has focused on touting the congressman’s support for cutting taxes, overhauling the federal tax code and scaling back on federal spending at home and abroad. The incumbent’s organization also circulated a January 2007 story in the Galveston Daily News in which Peden was quoted as saying that he has “an immense amount of respect for Ron Paul .”

Paul, who appears on the primary ballot in both the congressional and presidential races, raised more than $32.9 million for his presidential campaign through Jan. 31, an amount that dwarfs his fundraising for his House race. Nonetheless, he has been ramping up his efforts to raise money for his House campaign, and his presidential bid has helped draw him financial support from his relatively small but loyal following nationwide. An interim filing from the Paul campaign on Feb. 25, for instance, yielded three contributions from individuals: a woman in North Carolina, a physician in Iowa and a court reporter in Alabama.

In the six-week period that between Jan. 1 and Feb. 13, Paul reported raising $481,000 for his House campaign, composing the vast majority of his campaign receipts since the two-year election cycle began at the beginning of last year. And the money continues to pour in: Paul’s Web site says that he’s actually topped $1 million this quarter.

In a lengthy fundraising letter to supporters last month, Paul painted an ominous portrait of his possible defeat, saying, “The loss of my congressional seat would be something the enemies of freedom would revel in and hold up as a symbol of success in their never-ending effort to socialize America and make us all totally dependent upon big government from cradle-to-grave.”

Peden reported raising a total of $241,000 through Feb. 13, of which $149,000 came in the form of personal loans from the candidate himself.