A hearing this week before the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging shows what happens when Republican obstruction of the Affordable Care Act moves from the ridiculous to the sublime. When Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) tried to demonize the single payer Canadian system by asking Dr. Danielle Martin how many people die on Canadian […]

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney must be laughing their asses off. President Obama has a budding constitutional crisis on his hands, with a leading Senate Democrat accusing Obama's CIA director of spying on Intelligence Committee staff. But at the heart of the issue is a still-classified, 6,000 page report said to catalog abuses and […]

Last month, Republican House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) introduced his proposal for a major overhaul of the U.S. tax code. But among Republican leaders in Congress, its arrival was about as welcome as an ill-timed fart. Hoping to focus the 2014 midterm elections on Obamacare instead of controversial new tax provisions, […]

For three straight years, 95 percent of Republicans in Congress voted for the Paul Ryan budget and its overhaul of the tax code to just two rates of 10 and 25 percent. But while Ryan refused to identify a single tax break he would end in order to make those lower rates possible, on Wednesday […]

A funny thing happened on the way to the demise of Medicare Advantage. The program under which 16 million seniors purchase federally subsidized coverage through private health insurers, the carriers and Republicans warned, would be jeopardized by the $150 billion in cuts to providers over 10 years used to help fund the Affordable Care Act. […]

Word that Speaker John Boehner will bring a "clean" debt ceiling bill up for a vote in the House On Tuesday brought a sigh of relief to Washington and global financial markets. After all, a U.S. default arising from a refusal to pay the bills Uncle Sam has already incurred would have meant, as Boehner […]

Despite their trumpeting of its latest budget report, it's no secret that Republicans hate the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). In 2011, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) denounced the CBO's forecast that the Affordable Care Act will reduce--not increase--the U.S. national debt, calling its projections "budget gimmickry." That November, momentary GOP presidential frontrunner Newt […]

Along with his fellow GOP Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Richard Burr (R-NC), Utah's Orrin Hatch this week unveiled a new Republican plan to replace Obamacare. Due to its lack of a health insurance mandate, less generous tax credits to purchase coverage and stricter eligibility for Medicaid, the Hatch plan yet to be scored by […]

This week, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warned Congressional leaders that the federal government will hit its debt ceiling in late February. But just days after House Speaker John Boehner declared Uncle Sam "shouldn't even get close" to the edge of its borrowing limit, his spokesman Michael Steel warned a "'clean' debt-limit increase simply won't pass […]

Even as American and international negotiators were finalizing the interim agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, both houses of Congress were moving to tie President Obama's hands in the future. While a bipartisan bill mandating harsh new sanctions nears a veto-proof majority in the Senate, House Republicans announced they would take up the legislation […]