Douglas Holtz-Eakin is everywhere. This week, the conservative economist and former director of the Congressional Budget Office co-authored a widely read--and widely panned--prescription for Republican health care reform. And for months, the President of the American Action Forum has used his perch on The Guardian op-ed page to slam President Obama over the U.S. national […]

As things now stand, Senate Republicans will carry through on their threat to filibuster Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee for Secretary of Defense. As the GOP's number two man John Cornyn declared Wednesday, "There is a 60-vote threshold for every nomination." Two votes short of the needed filibuster-breaking tally, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called […]

With Barack Obama's 2013 State of the Union address just hours away, the media conventional wisdom machine is already busy warning about an "aggressive" and "partisan" speech from the reelected President. Despite four years of unprecedented Republican obstructionism, Politico alerted readers to beware a speech that is "less a presidential olive branch than a congressional […]

Back in December 2005, John Yoo was asked if any law or treaty could prevent the President of the United States from torturing someone, "including by crushing the testicles of the person's child." Yoo, then head of President Bush's Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, responded, "I think it depends on why […]

Rice may be out as Secretary of State, but soon she'll be on your television screen. Not, that is, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, but former Bush National Security Adviser, Secretary of State and rumored 2016 GOP presidential candidate Condoleezza Rice. Joining her former Bush administration counter-terrorism colleague Juan Zarate, Rice will be a regular contributor […]

While Congressional Republicans are threatening to trigger a U.S. default if their debt ceiling blackmail is not paid, their allies in the conservative blogosphere are deploying the same chart to attack President Obama's supposedly out-of-control spending. But their horrifying picture of the yawning gap between in federal receipts and outlays between 1999 and 2012 isn't […]

If the broad sweep of President Obama's gun control proposals wasn't enough, conservatives on Wednesday found another reason for their blood vessel-bursting apoplexy. The President was joined at the White House by several children who had written letters to him pleading for action on gun violence, some of which were released to the press. In […]

One day after New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman described Republican brinksmanship on the debt ceiling as "hostage-taking," President Obama used his Monday press conference declared, "They will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy." But you don't have to take their word for it that […]

As McClatchy and the New York Times among others have documented, Senators and Representatives in the minority party have often voted against debt ceiling increases. Whether motivated by opposition to larger spending or tax legislation, or as a symbolic vote to embarrass the president and his Congressional majority (as Senators Obama and Reid did in […]

As President Obama and Congressional leaders negotiate in Washington, the American people need to keep a couple of things in mind about the looming "fiscal cliff." For starters, the issue is not that the national debt will go up (which roughly half of those in one poll believe to be the case), but that it […]