The GOP response to the President's call for higher tax rates on upper income Americans came fast and furious. His proposal, Republicans warned, was "class warfare" and a "job killer" which will "kill the current recovery and put us back in a recession" and still "not give you deficit reduction." As it turns out, the […]

Back in 2010, Republicans swept to power in no small part by scaring the bejesus out of elderly voters over supposed Democratic cuts to Medicare. But now that the Supreme Court has preserved the Affordable Care Act, Mitt Romney and his GOP allies on Capitol Hill are once again darkly warning that "Obamacare cuts Medicare […]

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. […]

It's rare that a criminal publicly announces his intent to commit a felony. But when it came to their scorched-earth campaign of obstructionism to destroy the Obama presidency, GOP leaders weren't shy about their plans. While 15 top Republicans schemed in private on the night of Obama's inauguration to "challenge them on every single bill […]

In the wake of the debt ceiling crisis he helped manufacture last summer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell boasted it was "a hostage that's worth ransoming" which "also is a new template" for the future. As it turns out, those threats were among the few true words McConnell has uttered. Because while he's promising once […]

This was a very bad week indeed for employees of the federal government. The shameful Secret Service prostitution scandal, the GSA's Vegas boondoggle and the grisly pictures from Afghanistan rightly brought bipartisan condemnation from Democrats and Republicans alike. But you'd never know it reading the headlines from the AP, The Hill, the Washington Post and […]

Now for a thought experiment. Suppose that I told you I had a plan which over the next decade would slash $6 trillion from the national debt of the United States. Imagine further that I promised I would achieve those savings just by closing some tax loopholes and deductions, so-called tax expenditures that all told […]

"Conservative commentators." "Commerce." "New Deal." Only if you pretend Barack Obama never uttered those three phases this week can you manufacture a controversy in which the President supposedly questioned the authority of the Supreme Court to overturn the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA). But in the hands of his Republican opponents and a lazy and […]

On Monday, President Obama unsurprisingly expressed confidence that the Supreme Court would uphold the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Even less remarkable, Obama rightly reminded Americans that "conservative commentators" have for year said "the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint -- that an unelected group of people would […]

After the Republican controlled House passed Paul Ryan's budget plan by a 228-191 party line vote, Speaker John Boehner lauded his GOP colleagues for laying out "a real vision of what we were to do if we get more control here in this town." But Boehner's "we" isn't limited to Republicans in Congress. As it […]