Oh my.

Raul Labrador’s been saying this for months, that any bill with a “special” path to citizenship for illegals is DOA in the House, but I’m still surprised to hear Rubio say it. You don’t think the GOP leadership can find 30 or so panicky Republican reps to vote with a unified Democratic caucus in the [...]

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"A fine-toothed comb."

Straight talk. “I believe if we pass this legislation, it won’t gain us a single Hispanic vote, but what it will do is put us a playing field where we can compete. Right now we can’t compete,” he said at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. “The numbers in the last couple of [...]

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Uh oh.

This is exactly what you want to hear with bills on gun control and immigration in the pipeline. Dude, I’m nervous. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) signaled Thursday that he may continue to bypass a House Republican rule [i.e. the "Hastert Rule"] that has required any legislation being voted upon to have the support of [...]

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War powers.

Oh please. Obama violated the War Powers Act to attack Libya and then offered the flimsiest possible defense for doing so. How much table-pounding did you hear from Republicans over that? They passed a meaningless resolution scolding O for it and then quietly let the matter drop when he ignored them. Some Republican hawks even [...]

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Budgets.

This morning brings a grab bag: A little pope analysis, a bit of navel-gazing over CPAC and the future of the GOP, and a whole lot of yakking about the new Democratic and Republican congressional budgets with Paul Ryan, Chris Van Hollen, John Boehner, Dick Durbin, and the rest of the usual suspects. Expect a [...]

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Comeback.

Faced with a choice of rehashing the stale Bob Woodward drama and the very, very, very stale sequester doomsaying, the Sunday shows decide to kill two birds with one stone: Gene Sperling will appear on NBC and CNN to bash the GOP on sequestration and then field questions about what he meant by “regret” in [...]

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Doomsday.

To say that the meeting between congressional leaders and President Barack Obama was unproductive might be an understatement. And as the meeting wrapped up, a new reality began to take hold: The sequester may be here to stay… “There will be no last-minute, backroom deal and absolutely no agreement to increase taxes,” McConnell said in [...]

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"I am not a dictator."

Via BuzzFeed and NRO, a brief seminar in leadership Hopenchange-style. Anyone want to answer his question? He’s spent the past few weeks talking about the slow-motion trainwreck of indiscriminate across-the-board cuts (a claim from which he’s swiftly retreating now that the public’s about to see for themselves how he exaggerated). Was there anything on the [...]

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Coalitions.

286-138, with all 199 Democrats voting yes and all 138 no votes coming from the GOP. That makes three times, the first being the fiscal cliff and the second being the Sandy relief bill, that Boehner’s pushed something through the House with most of his own caucus opposed. How’d we get here? Most of the [...]

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Pressure.

Skip to 3:10 of the vid for the key bit. Not sure why Johnson’s trying to turn the spotlight on Boehner when the new Republican strategy is to keep it on Reid. Evidently Boehner’s not sure either: Senate Democrats have unveiled a package that would replace the sequester with a mix of spending cuts and [...]

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Natural.

Who else could it have been? Jindal and Paul Ryan have already done it, Rand Paul’s probably still too close to the rEVOLution for Republican leaders to be comfortable with him in a spot like this, and Chris Christie would just end up talking about how terrific Obama’s speech was. Half the reason party leaders [...]

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"[T]hese Republicans insisted the conference understands that the political winds are shifting..."

If you assume that some sort of terrible immigration reform bill is destined to pass, then maybe this is for the best. According to a House member involved in the talks, the bipartisan group is extremely close to not only an agreement, but to actually producing legislation. While a specific time table is not yet [...]

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"The President believes that a strong two-party system is the foundation of our democracy..."

Annihilation is something you’d pursue if you were a hyperpartisan liberal with grandiose aspirations of becoming the left-wing Reagan, not the sort of centrist “pragmatist” which the media long assured us that Obama was. Until this past Tuesday, when they stopped. Right around 12:30 p.m. ET. Anyway, if someone as trustworthy as Jay Carney is [...]

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"I do believe that is their goal. To just shove us in the dustbin of history.”

Via WaPo, skip to 9:50 or so for the key bit. I’m mighty curious to see if our fair and impartial media, who assured us for years that Obama was a soft-partisan “pragmatist,” will dismiss this as hysterical wingnuttery when commentators on the left, right, and center have all made similar points in the last [...]

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Mystery solved.

An understandable reaction in hindsight once you know what was said. Quote: “Another term for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, huh?” No, no, I kid. I’m sure the Obamas love Debbie. Which is why O just assigned Jim Messina to basically do her job from now on. The truth is more prosaic: So what was said? We asked [...]

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Fatigue.

Via Sooper Mexican, you can tell the left’s feeling good today by the fact that there are liberal publications trumpeting this too. I kind of like it just because it’s true to the real spirit of the moment. For all the forced chumminess between the two sides, that eyeroll is a perfect summation of the [...]

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Minority of the majority.

I’m kicking myself for not thinking to count them up last night after the vote on the big Sandy pork package. Boehner’s taking all the heat for violating the Hastert Rule by bringing two high-profile bills to the floor that were opposed by a majority of his majority, but he couldn’t pass them himself. There’s [...]

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Majorities.

I remember some consternation in the media a few weeks ago after Boehner split the original $60 billion relief package into two smaller bills that this meant the GOP was going to gut part of it. Absurd. Did anyone seriously believe Boehner et al. would risk more bad press by stripping out the pork after [...]

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“We have to ask ourselves, ‘What is winning in this scenario?’”

What do you do when the opposition’s working night and day to convince voters that you’re an obstructionist, almost nihilistic group that’ll never compromise on anything? Raise the stakes and catch them off guard by proposing a much bigger compromise than they were expecting. Just one problem with this offer: Would the public really view [...]

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Tactics.

They’re not saying Republicans should cave and raise the debt ceiling across the board, they’re saying the GOP should pass something that lets Treasury continue to borrow only for the purpose of paying interest owed to creditors. Missing those payments would mean true default and a potential meltdown for global markets, which is why Democrats [...]

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What could go wrong?

Part of a wider post-election splintering on the right, I think. There was a story last week about centrist establishment Republicans seeking to re-assert themselves in primaries to blunt the influence of tea partiers, followed shortly by a story about Bill Kristol maybe launching a new Republican version of the DLC to support “reformist” fiscal [...]

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"Catastrophic."

In the first closed-door meeting of the Republican majority in the new Congress, newly reelected House Speaker John A. Boehner on Friday promised a robust fight with President Obama to cut spending in exchange for raising the nation’s debt limit. The Ohio Republican doubled-down on his insistence that there must be at least a dollar-per-dollar [...]

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Unserious.

It’s the deficit-reduction package that doesn’t reduce the deficit. It’s the debt-ceiling deal that doesn’t touch the debt ceiling (and doesn’t cut debt). It’s the long-term entitlement negotiation that—after nearly three years of wheedling—does not delay, let alone stave off, a Baby Boomer retirement bomb currently on pace to swallow half of federal outlays by [...]

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Break up.

But … how else will we get our fill of facile political drama in the weeks leading up to the big debt-ceiling standoff? The one and only redeeming virtue of the fiscal cliff negotiations was that it produced a cheeky anecdote of one major player dropping the F-bomb on another. Someone will still drop the [...]

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Plus: American grandstand.

An anxious America waits and wonders: Can New York and New Jersey hang on for two more weeks? U.S. House Speaker John Boehner has assured lawmakers that the House will vote on $60 billion in aid related to Superstorm Sandy by January 15, a group of lawmakers from New York and New Jersey told reporters [...]

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