After the French Revolution, when the Bourbon regime was restored to power, the French statesman Charles Talleyrand remarked, “They learned nothing and they forgot nothing.” That may also be true of the Republican Party after Donald Trump.
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives is hell-bent on revenge. Revenge for what? For eight years of Barack Obama and his hated Obamacare program. For Republican insiders who foisted establishment figures like George W. ...
Opinion
Déjà vu all over again: Tea Party tactics and realpolitik
After the French Revolution, when the Bourbon regime was restored to power, the French statesman Charles Talleyrand remarked, “They learned nothing and they forgot nothing.” That may also be true of the Republican Party after Donald Trump.
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives is hell-bent on revenge. Revenge for what? For eight years of Barack Obama and his hated Obamacare program. For Republican insiders who foisted establishment figures like George W. ...
Is ‘defund the IRS’ the new ObamaCare repeal?
House Republicans kicked off the 118th session of Congress by fulfilling a campaign pledge to defund the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), seemingly in order to undermine the agency’s ability to audit the complex tax filings of millionaires and billionaires. The move that may well empower tax cheats is an opening gambit to what will likely be a years-long Republican effort to claw back the $80 billion appropriated in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act to modernize the IRS and empower it to...
Juan Williams: Will House Republicans push granny off a cliff or cut Pentagon waste?
Granny is going over the cliff, again, apparently.
During the 2012 campaign, Democrats’ allies ran political advertisements showing a grandmother-like figure in a wheelchair heading for the big fall — along with everyone else on Social Security and Medicare — under Republican proposals to cut government spending.
The advertisement worked. President Obama won a second term, and Democrats added two Senate seats and eight seats in the House.
Then, in...
Nurses deserve better, but strikes aren’t the answer
More than 7,000 nurses at New York’s Montefiore Medical Center and Mt. Sinai Hospital walked off the job this week, arguing that staff shortages have led to burnout and the inability to properly care for patients.
Ironically, with only more than 75,000 licensed nurses in New York City, the nurses on strike will put a terrible burden on not just these hospitals but others too where the spillover of patients seeking care occurs.
<...
We have a Republican Speaker, but no Republican plan to speak of
Republicans have vehemently complained that President Biden and Democrats are taking the country and the economy in the wrong direction. But now that Republicans control the House of Representatives, what specifically do they intend to do instead? Your guess is as good as mine, because Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) never laid out a detailed plan.
It’s not a new problem for Republicans.
Remember when Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, in March...
We have a Republican Speaker, but no Republican plan to speak of
Republicans have vehemently complained that President Biden and Democrats are taking the country and the economy in the wrong direction. But now that Republicans control the House of Representatives, what specifically do they intend to do instead? Your guess is as good as mine, because Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) never laid out a detailed plan.
It’s not a new problem for Republicans.
Remember when Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, in March...
Messy new Congress and coming gridlock: Founders intended governing to be difficult
With Democrats holding the narrowest possible majority in the Senate (one seat) and Republicans holding a slim majority in the House of Representatives (nine seats out of 435), you would expect to see the two parties working together. More likely, we will see even greater polarization in Congress, with conservatives wielding greater influence among Republicans and a more assertive progressive left in the Democratic Party.
That’s because more and more states and districts are d...
Joe Biden, welfare king
The derogatory term “welfare queen” was so 1980s and ‘90s, when Republicans and even some Democrats were looking to reform welfare programs. President Biden, by contrast, is doing all he can to expand the number of people receiving means-tested welfare. That makes him the welfare king.
The irony is that historically politicians liked to boast that their leadership had created jobs and grown the economy, thereby reducing the number of people on welfare. Biden also says he’s gro...
For Joe Biden, results matter most
In December 1962, John F. Kennedy sat for an interview with the three television networks. The nationally broadcast program, titled “After Two Years: A Conversation with the President,” saw Kennedy reflecting on the presidency two years after being hired.
The conversation took place shortly after Kennedy diffused a potential World War III over the Soviet Union’s placement of nuclear weapons in Cuba. A year earlier, he disastrously erred when Cuban insurgents were slaughtered a...