In the wake of this week's Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act, Republican governors are talking tough about turning down expanded federal Medicaid spending that would enable insurance coverage for millions of their residents. Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, who warned the "frightening" Court decision could lead to penalties for those who "refuse to eat […]

In February 2009, President Obama delivered what Steve Benen rightly described as the largest two-year tax cut in American history. Nevertheless, the New York Times asked in the run-up to the 2010 midterms, "What if a president cut Americans' income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?" What happened, of course, was the Democrats' drubbing […]

Within days of the passage of President Obama's signature Affordable Care Act in March 2010, Senate Minority Mitch McConnell declared, "I think [our] slogan will be 'repeal and replace', 'repeal and replace.'" But now that the Supreme Court has largely upheld the dreaded Obamacare, Republicans have yet to decide what to replace it with. While […]

Among the myriad Republican myths about taxes, the most pernicious and demonstrably false - that "tax cuts pay for themselves" - is the mostly deeply held by the GOP faithful. As President George W. Bush famously (and erroneously) put it, "You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase." Now, a survey of leading economists conducted […]

Despite the overwhelming consensus of legal scholars regarding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the United States Supreme Court seems poised to strike down all or part of President Obama's signature health care reform law. If so, that would be the culmination of a decades-long conservative campaign to stop universal coverage at all costs. […]

Admittedly, the young Barack Obama was a pothead and tried cocaine. Apparently, the young Mitt Romney was a bully who liked to pretend to be a cop, a firefighter and a gangster. But whether or not early Obama dabbled in dope or Romney was, well, a douchebag, doesn't really matter. Or, at least, doesn't matter […]

As the Supreme Court prepares to decide the fate of the 2010 Affordable Care, recent polling from Reuters and the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that Americans support its major provisions except for one. The individual mandate to purchase private health insurance beginning in 2014, the part of the ACA most likely to be struck down […]

Back in 2007, Republican White House hopeful Mitt Romney declared that taking a big payment from a company that later failed "would make me sick, sick at heart." If so, Romney by now must be badly in need of a quadruple by-pass. Because as the New York Times became just the latest to report, through […]

"It is more blessed," Jesus said, "to give than to receive." That may be, but the billionaire backers of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and Super PAC plan to do both. As they gather this weekend for a three-day Romney conclave in Park City, Utah and a secret Koch brothers summit in San Diego, the deep-pocketed […]

Whatever ruling the nation's highest court hands down on President Obama's Affordable Care Act, Republican challenger Mitt Romney's prescription for health care is unchanged. "Now if I'm able to repeal it--or if the Supreme Court is able to get that job done for us," he announced last week, "We want to replace it." But what […]