I stand by the opinion – backed up by decades of evidence – that we’re in the midst of an inexorable shift to the right in our politics. But sometimes, that shift really defies any conception of ideology at all. It really is the case that conservatives often knee-jerk oppose absolutely anything the opposition supports. [...]

Robert Kuttner kicks off a discussion that progressives are going to have to hold among themselves between now and the upcoming lame duck session. Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s addressing it in a realistic way. Kuttner points out the trio of major fiscal changes that will hit at the end of the year if Congress [...]

Do read Jeffrey Toobin on last week’s Affordable Care Act arguments. I care less about what the display last week means for the individual mandate or health-related laws in the particular – laws that I’m concerned won’t work anywhere nearly as well as advertising by some of the most ardent defenders – than I do [...]

Late last week, the President signed a 90-day surface transportation extension, the ninth of his Presidency. This is getting to the point where we have to look at the failure to deliver a long-term transportation bill as an impediment to economic recovery. Think about the typical scenario. You’re a municipality that wants to build a [...]

Allow me to agree with Rand Paul. We already have significant sanctions on Iran, which mainly hurt the population rather than the regime. The Senate wanted to take another dip with an even more stringent set of sanctions. And Paul said no. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked an effort Tuesday to quickly pass a bipartisan [...]

After both houses of Congress passed it, the White House is finally recognizing that the deregulatory bill they proposed and pushed is distasteful to liberals who have actually looked at it for longer than two seconds: White House allies are in an uproar over pro-business legislation embraced by President Obama, exposing a new rift in [...]

It’s message vote season in Congress, that time where political parties try to make the opposition uncomfortable by scheduling votes that are difficult to oppose. And the first one, yesterday from Senate Democrats, concerned canceling tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry to pay for investments in renewable energy. With gas prices nearing record [...]

We all know about the Paul Ryan budget, which will get a vote on the House floor this week, only one week after it was introduced. Both sides feel they have a story to tell about that budget: Republicans because they’re passing a budget at all, Democrats because that budget is unnecessarily cruel, forces the [...]

If nothing is done in Congress by the end of June, interest rates on federally subsidized Stafford student loans will double, from 3.4% to 6.8%. The general public, in particular students, have only now become aware to this looming time bomb that would raise financial obligations by thousands of dollars over the life of the [...]

I had a little Twitter spat with Zandar today after he responded to a tweet I wrote about the STOCK Act with a rejoinder that I probably thought it was “Obama’s fault.” Zandar has adopted this Sixth Sense, “I see Obama critics, they’re everywhere” mentality of late, extending even to bashing Jon Chait, one of [...]

The Senate invoked cloture today on the JOBS Act, the financial deregulation bill that Reid pulled from the floor yesterday after the failure of some amendments that would strengthen the investor protections. The vote was 76-22, with all the no votes coming from Democrats, including (surprisingly) New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, who must be representing the [...]