The Appeals Court of the 11th Circuit just ruled that the individual mandate in the new Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. The ruling does, though, leave the rest of the law intact. From Politico: The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday ruled that the health care reform law’s requirement that nearly all Americans buy [...]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is the first congressional leader to pick his three members for Catfood Commission II. From Politico: In the first of what will be a closely watched selection process for a powerful new deficit panel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he will appoint Democratic Sens. Patty Murray (Wash.), Max Baucus [...]

Over at Politico Byron Tau and Ben Smith are raising the red flag about the possibility of Republicans using the expiration of the 18.4 cent per gallon gas tax on September 30th as their new hostage in the next stage of disaster legislating. The anti-tax Republicans are already making noises about not extending this tax. [...]

Congress is in a full blown austerity mode right now and any deal that comes out of these negotiations is likely going to be really bad news for regular people. That is why I suspect any deal will just happen to be reached at the last minute, so Congress will “need” to quickly pass the bill with effectively no public debate or time for scrutiny.

AARP is very much open to supporting cutting Social Security benefits. AARP’s push back and non-denial related to the recent Wall Street Journal article was simply that they didn’t want people to infer that AARP supported Social Security being part of the specific deficit ceiling negotiations going on at this moment. Separate from those exact [...]

The Senate is so broken that even a bipartisan agreement to limit the number of Senate confirmed appointees gets filibustered.

When basically the entire House Republican caucus voted for Paul Ryan’s budget, which includes a “plan” to destroy the very popular Medicare program and replace it with insufficient private vouchers, I couldn’t tell if they made such a terrible political move because they were so trapped in their own ideological bubble that they actually thought [...]

Regardless of whether or not you think it is a good idea, our Constitution was designed with multiple veto points meant to create a bias toward status quo. The basic idea is that if you want to make large changes, you either need broad concessions or to definitively win the support of the public in [...]

According to the Pentagon, in just this first week of our war “kinetic military action” in Libya, the military has already spent $550 million. From Politico: The Pentagon says it has spent $550 million on U.S. military operations in Libya since efforts to protect civilians from Muammar Qadhafi’s regime began 10 days ago. Details of [...]

After the health care law passed, we were promised a massive, $125 million PR campaign staffed with top quality talent that would really sell the new law to the American people. In a fascinating article, Politico found that this promised campaign essentially crashed and burned: Wal-Mart Watch founder Andrew Grossman unveiled the Health Information Campaign [...]