Not since LeBron James announced "The Decision" to "take my talents to South Beach" have so many Americans waited with bated breath for one man to declare his intentions. Hoping for white smoke from the chimney of his Janesville, Wisconsin home, most Republicans and even some Democrats are hoping that Paul Ryan will decide to […]
Category: Congress
On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned that the federal government will run out of cash on November unless Congress raises the debt ceiling to increase Uncle Sam's borrowing authority. Under pressure from hard liners in his own party, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is returning to his role as hostage-taker, threatening to block the […]
On October 22, 2015, Democratic frontrunner and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. The supposed scandal has already claimed one scalp--just not hers. Would-have-been House Speaker Kevin McCarthy abandoned his campaign for the gavel after providing Clinton and the Democrats with a talking point that exposed […]
House Speaker John Boehner shocked the political world last week when he announced his resignation less than 24 hours after hosting Pope Francis on Capitol Hill. As it turns out, his timing was altogether fitting. After all, Boehner's life had become a living hell precisely because he had a done a deal with the devil […]
On September 8th, Dick Cheney will deliver an address at the American Enterprise Institute in the hopes of torpedoing the Iranian nuclear agreement. As his Wall Street Journal op-ed this week suggests, Cheney will argue that "the U.S. Congress should reject this deal and reimpose the sanctions that brought Iran to the table in the […]
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pledged this week to fast-track a bill defunding Planned Parenthood. But the move to strip the organization of some $528 million in annual funding from the federal and state governments is more than a little ironic. It was about Planned Parenthood, after all, that the then number two ranking […]
If nothing else, the Republican Party is an irony producing machine. In the very week that some GOP leaders reversed course on displaying the Confederate battle flag in the wake of the Charleston slaughter, the party's best and brightest protested that the Supreme Court's decision in the King v. Burwell was its "worst since Dred […]
For all of the disputes and controversies over the Affordable Care Act, one thing has been consistent. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly forecast that Obamacare would reduce the national debt. Nevertheless, when CBO told Congress in July 2012 that a repeal of Obamacare would raise the national debt by $109 billion over […]
From the very beginning of the debate over what would become the Affordable Care Act, the conservative crusade to kill health care reform has been defined by an inescapable irony. For years, health care has been worst in those reddest of states where Republicans poll best. Study after study has shown that red state health […]
For four decades, American public opinion on the issue of abortion has been largely unchanged. As the numbers from Gallup, the Pew Research Center and other polls show, roughly half of Americans have identified themselves as "pro-choice" even as consistent majorities support keeping abortion legal in all or many circumstances. But now, a new survey […]