In a midterm campaign filled with affronts to voters and reality alike, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reached a new low in last night's Kentucky Senate debate. Declaring once again that the Affordable Care Act should be repealed "root and branch," McConnell pretended nothing would happen as a result to the 520,000 Kentuckians whose new […]

"Reality," Stephen Colbert famously explained to President George W. Bush, "has a well-known liberal bias." And for Republicans, reality bites most when it comes to tax cuts. After all, for over 30 years, tax cuts have been the GOP's one and only prescription for both economic booms and busts, recessionary slowdowns and budget surpluses, and […]

As the Washington Post explained Wednesday, Kansas Republican Senator Pat Roberts is in real trouble. And the consistently ineffective Senate veteran didn't help his reelection cause when he called Senate Minority Harry Reid (D-NV) a "dictator" and accused President Obama of leading the United States down the path of "national socialism." After all, it was […]

Until her current Oregon Senate run this year, millionaire neurosurgeon Monica Wehby's political career consisted of appearing in anti-Obamacare ads and pushing a ballot measure to limit medical malpractice awards. Now, Dr. Wehby is calling for upper class tax cuts, a balanced budget amendment and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the same Republican […]

Former Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords passed away Monday at the age of 80. President Obama eulogized Jeffords, whose departure from the GOP briefly handed control of the Senate to the Democrats. "Whatever the issue - whether it was protecting the environment, supporting Americans with disabilities, or whether to authorize the war in Iraq - Jim […]

With their 225 votes to sue President Obama, House Republicans provided one of the most ironic spectacles in recent U.S. political history. After waves of op-eds by Speaker John Boehner (here and here) and his legal puppet master David Rivkin (here and here) declared Obama guilty of almost every sin in the calendar, the House […]

Five years ago, I described Dick Cheney's strident defense of detainee torture as a strategy of "mutual assured destruction." The former Vice President's gambit was a simple one. In 2009, Cheney dared President Obama to either prosecute him and other Bush administration officials over their program of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (in which case massive Republican […]

Earlier this week, two federal appeals courts reached opposite conclusions as to whether Congress intended for the Affordable Care Act to provide health insurance subsidies to Americans purchasing coverage through both state and federally-run exchanges. While Romneycare architect and Obamacare consultant Jonathan Gruber seemed to create some confusion with remarks from 2012, for the drafters […]

After months of their much-hyped but still unproven charges of partisan skullduggery at the Internal Revenue Service, House Republicans this week took an axe to the IRS budget. The cost of the GOP vendetta is massive. Cutting the agency's funding for the fifth consecutive year, the House in a 228-to-195 vote slashed the overall IRS […]

Judging from the flood of articles with titles like "Has Darrell Issa gone rogue?" and "When Darrell Issa goes 'rogue'," the grand inquisitor of the Obama administration may have finally gone too far even for his Republican colleagues. Having lost the spotlight on the GOP's fishing expeditions on Benghazi and the IRS, the House Oversight […]