Even as Mitt Romney was introducing Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, his campaign was preparing a defense of the House Budget Chairman's draconian Medicare proposals. With good reason. After all, in April 2011 the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecast that Ryan's scheme to convert today's guaranteed Medicare insurance program into an underfunded […]

At a $1.7 million fundraiser in Jackson, Mississippi, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney declared that the GOP is not "the party of the rich," insisting instead that "we're the party of people who want to get rich." Sadly for Romney, there are two small problems with his assessment. For starters, Mitt's proposals (like those from […]

This week, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives voted for the 33rd time in 18 months to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But even if that act of political theater is over for now, Republicans will keep repeating their favorite parts of the right-wing script well past Election Day in November. That their tried and untrue […]

Even with four months to go until Election Day, Mitt Romney's shameless lying has already become one of the defining storylines of the 2012 campaign. Theories abound as to why Romney has emerged as a reverse George Washington, a man who cannot tell the truth. Jonathan Chait turned to Freud, explaining there's a clinical term […]

With the Affordable Care Act having passed constitutional muster, Republicans are once again targeting the Internal Revenue Service in order to deny funding for the ACA's implementation. Hoping to repeat the GOP's successful 1990's war on the agency, Republicans like Maine Governor Paul LePage are resurrecting terms like "the new Gestapo" to slander the IRS. […]

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 […]

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, the greatest threat to enabling health insurance for 30 million uninsured Americans may come not from Republicans in Congress, but in the states. With the Court's ruling that the federal government cannot penalize states who refuse to accept the expansion of Medicaid, Republican […]

Few battle cries rally Republicans more than the demand for "states' rights." But for today's Party of Lincoln, that ideological bludgeon once used to deny millions of Americans their freedom for the first century of the Republic and ignore their rights in the second has a new purpose. When it comes to helping Americans realize […]

Congressional Republicans on Thursday dispatched some of their best and brightest to the Supreme Court in heady anticipation of the GOP triumph that never came. But when Chief Justice Roberts announced the decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch "folded his arms across his chest, his mouth slightly agape." His slack-jawed response […]

In the wake of this week's Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act, Republican governors are talking tough about turning down expanded federal Medicaid spending that would enable insurance coverage for millions of their residents. Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, who warned the "frightening" Court decision could lead to penalties for those who "refuse to eat […]