When you give in to hostage-taking, you set a pattern that just encourages people to take more hostages, and ask for bigger ransoms every time. This is exactly what is happening thanks to President Obama previously declaring that he must give in to Republican hostage taking tactics. From the Hill: House Republicans are considering a [...]

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 [...]

As last week drew to a close, the Republicans that control only the House of Representatives clearly bested President Obama and the Democrats that control the Senate in the budget fight.  Speaker John Boehner, despite controlling only one third of the relevant institutions in the budget fight, was able to get the President to agree [...]

Paul Ryan’s Republican budget plan would privatize Medicare and dramatically slash Medicaid over time. The result: senior citizens, poor children and the disabled paying dramatically more for care, getting worse health insurance coverage and/or losing coverage altogether, according to a report by the CBO. Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their [...]

There are two very simple, straight forward things you can do with Medicare if you want to make a big reduction in the deficit: you can either destroy Medicare, or vastly expand it. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has stepped forward for the Republican Party to endorse the “destroy Medicare” solution as the best way to [...]

For the Republican Party, there seems to be no limit to the amount of beloved personal freedoms they are willing to shred to simply make abortions more inconvenient. The latest example is the GOP’s push to actually increase the power and scope of the IRS. From Mother Jones: Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail [...]

Much of the political debate in Washington over the next year is going to be dominated by two potential pending crises: a government shutdown and a failure to raise the debt ceiling. If Congress fails to actively and regularly avert them, these crises could significantly disrupt our society, cost money and hamper the economy. Yet [...]

Senate Democrats had an opportunity to get together and make the Senate a working, majority-rule-based chamber. They could have recently used the “Constitutional Option” at the start of this new Congress to rewrite the Senate rules to either eliminate the filibuster outright or at least make staging a filibuster more difficult. Yet, due to a [...]

In case it wasn’t clear to everyone after watching two years of politically driven lockstep obstructionism in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, fresh on the heels of Tuesday’s big Republican victory, has again directly stated that his top goal is to make sure Obama loses in 2012. From The Hill: “Over the past week, [...]

Democrats in Congress were prepared to absorb defeats last night. But there were some surprise losers who shared the honors with them: 1. Sarah Palin An enormous GOP wave swept across the country, and it should have delivered the Senate to the Republicans. Sarah Palin interjected herself into primary races in Delaware and Nevada, however, [...]