In the weeks since the election, the general consensus has been that Republicans got hammered. From Mitt Romney’s Election Day collapse to the party’s failure to take back the Senate and prevent ballot initiatives legalizing same-sex marriage, Republicans took big hits up and down the ballot. But the results actually weren’t all bad for the GOP. AP reporter David […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It’s puzzling how much the definitions of “compromise” and “balance” have changed since the November election. The message out of the White House, dutifully repeated by the press corps, is that the GOP’s stubborn refusal to compromise on President Barack Obama’s balanced approach to attacking the budget deficit is what’s holding up a deal to […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
When the last key vote was taken in the out-going 112th Congress, a marked sectional divide was made clear. Non-Southern GOPers voted in favor of the compromise by 70 to 67. Among the Republicans from the South, however, the vote was overwhelmingly against the deal, only 15 for to 84 against. While the conservative nature of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Politically speaking, we live by caricature. Particularly in the age of satellite TV news and Internet fulmination, the temptation is to melodrama. So I wasn’t terribly surprised to read a recent article in the online magazine Salon arguing that “even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Republicans continue to argue about whether the party needs to take steps to prevent the next Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Todd Akin and Ken Buck, as well as how it might do so. Those inept and seriously flawed candidates lost races that other Republicans would have won easily. Now, American Crossroads, the brainchild of Karl Rove and […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
“This is the last time anyone will try to do this,” said a Republican strategist during the 2012 campaign. He meant that was the last time that a Republican presidential candidate would focus largely on white voters in order to win the White House. This single-minded focus on the white vote was proved to be wholly inadequate, because […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Last Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul rose on the Senate floor to declare a filibuster and pledge he would not sit down until either he could speak no longer or got an answer to his question about Barack Obama’s war powers. Does the president, Paul demanded to know, in the absence of an imminent threat, have […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Here’s a big news alert: House Republicans oppose Obamacare. That’s why they’ve shut the government down. No, doing so won’t actually stop Obamacare. To a great extent, the program is on autopilot. The Republicans shut down the government, but the exchanges are open for business. The last time the Republicans shut down the government, they […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…