There was a time when partisanship was kept in check and Congress could legislate. Former House Speaker Tom Foley loved to talk about those days and the institution that he loved. He had big Democratic majorities during the five...
Reports that House Speaker John Boehner is searching for a face-saving exit from the stalemate on Capitol Hill suggests a Democratic dream come true, that the shutdown is cratering the Republican Party. A sampling of five major polls last...
The key to crisis leadership is “break the rules, the rules were written for peacetime,” says Lt. General Russel L. Honoré, who brought calm to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city in 2005. He remembered pilots telling...
With the shutdown in its second week, President Obama chose the White House briefing room to lay out, once again, his strategy of no negotiations until the government is opened and the threat of defaulting on the debt removed....
There’s been a lot said in recent days about the so-called Hastert Rule. It is cited as the main reason why House Speaker John Boehner won’t allow a vote to fund the government with no Obamacare strings attached—under the...
At midnight, for the first time in 17 years, the federal government shut down. A game of legislative ping-pong continued into Tuesday morning as House Republicans sought to delay Obamacare and the Senate declined to follow suit. The ball...
“Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end”—as the song from the 1960s goes. I can still remember the thrill of walking into the lobby at 444 Madison Avenue and seeing that week’s cover enlarged and...
The contrast could not have been greater between a pair of diplomatic breakthroughs and the intransigence of Congress. Appearing in the White House briefing room Friday afternoon, President Obama said he had just spoken with Iranian President Rouhani, everything...
Could the dialogue about the new health-care law get any more surreal? On one television network, Texas Republican Ted Cruz drones on and on about the evils of Obamacare, and on another, Democratic Presidents Obama and Clinton do their...
One after another, a parade of Democrats went before the microphone, held up a flier with a picture on it: a grandmother in Arkansas, an unemployed mother in Ohio, a veteran, a cancer survivor, on and on, all faces...