If I liked anything about John Boehner I’d be tempted to feel sorry for him. He has wanted on a number of occasions to make a deal with President Obama–on the debt ceiling, on unemployment insurance, on taxes–and every time he thought he had one the Tea Party balked. He wants to be the guy [...]

I’m still stunned, appalled and deeply disturbed by the last debate among the candidates for the GOP nomination for president. Not by the candidates themselves (although there was plenty there to dislike), but by the crowd, which cheered lustily when the number of people Texas has executed since Rick Perry has been governor was announced, [...]

Unless things change dramatically in the next few days, the Republican party will take this country into default on its obligations for the first time in history. The fanatical freshmen members of the House, elected in the depth of the recession in 2010, are in no mood to compromise in any way, even with their [...]

Unless there’s a surprise agreement, the government will shut down at the end of the day tomorrow, largely because of the intransigence of the Tea Party members of the House, who apparently see compromise of any kind as a betrayal of their core principles. This, of course, is no way to run a government. Compromise [...]

We may yet get a budget deal without a government shutdown, but it won’t be any credit to the Tea Party absolutists who see ANY compromise as a betrayal of their core principles. It will be because feckless Democrats caved on theirs. The last I heard, the Dems were so desperate for a deal they [...]

The leaders of the newly-empowered Republican Party in the House are having trouble keeping their members in line. They miscalculated the opposition of their young firebrands to intrusive government when they brought the Patriot Act up for renewal, and they were blindsided by the Tea Party demand for deeper cuts than the members of the [...]

The Supreme Court has always divided on ideological grounds, but I’m not sure if I’ve seen the Court divide on such politically partisan grounds in my lifetime. In the past, justices often ended up, after a few years on the Court, on the opposite side of the political divide from the presidents who nominated them. The [...]

I’ve always thought the official responses to the State of the Union address kind of silly. Few of the presidential speeches are substantive in any way–usually just generalities restating the philosophy and broad agenda of the president–with few if any specifics. Then the other party states its position, which inevitably (surprise!) is different than the [...]

Yesterday’s midterm election was nothing short of a catastrophe for the Democratic party. The combination of the worst economy since the Great Depression, a  jobless rate stuck at 10%, a president and a majority party unable to make a coherent case for their agenda or to articulate their vision, and the surprising uprising of the [...]

It’s not even a question that the national economic policies of the last few decades have favored the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. We’ve seen an astonishing increase in income inequality as taxes have become more regressive and the marketplace has been increasingly deregulated. The percentage of the nation’s wealth controlled by [...]