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 […]

So it's come to this. After five and a half years of setting records for filibusters, blocking judicial nominees, stonewalling executive branch appointees and holding the debt ceiling hostage, Republicans are planning a lawsuit "to compel President Obama to follow his oath of office and faithfully execute the laws of our country." The culmination (or […]

The revelation that the Internal Revenue Service lost two years of Lois Lerner's emails has Republicans and their right-wing echo chamber dredging up Watergate comparisons. Peggy Noonan, James Poulos and Paul Mirengoff are just some of the conservatives "paging Rosemary Woods" and gleefully making comparisons to Richard Nixon's 18 minutes of erased tape. But the […]

And now for today's quiz: When is $10 billion greater than $310 billion? When Republicans control the House of Representatives. Yes, the American people got another lesson in GOP math this week when House Republicans refused to budge on a $10 billion, five-month extension of unemployment benefits for 1.3 million long-term jobless workers while the […]

Last year, Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) sponsored a bill prohibiting the Internal Revenue Service from implementing or enforcing any part of the Affordable Care Act. "The IRS," Grimm charged, "has proven to be a scandal-ridden organization that has abused its authority by targeting individuals and organizations." Two years earlier, he called for the repeal (though […]

Stung by the blowback from his denunciation of the "tailspin of culture in our inner cities" bred by "generations of men not even thinking about working," Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) took to Fox News last week to declare, "I don't have a racist bone in my body." But the GOP's 2012 vice presidential pick needn't […]

Before the ink was even dry on the Affordable Care Act back in March 2010, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced his Republican Party's response. "I think the slogan will be "repeal and replace", "repeal and replace," Mr. McConnell said. "No one that I know in the Republican conference in the Senate believes that […]

And now a few words of advice to Paul Ryan: for your own sake if not ours, stop unveiling your House Republican budget proposals on April Fool's Day. It only draws attention to the fact that from top to bottom, your supposed "Path to Prosperity" is a joke. Here are just some of the reasons […]

Last week, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan announced that his party would not offer a "singular alternative" to the Affordable Care Act. For good reason. Four years after they first declared they would "repeal and replace" Obamacare, the CBO concluded the most recent House GOP trial balloon would increase the national debt and cause […]