Chris Christie wants to gut the most popular thing our government does — Social Security. Marco Rubio is proposing a tax cut so big that even the Wall St. Journal doesn’t buy it. Ted Cruz wants to abolish the IRS and somehow keep the military. In 2013, the party reaffirmed its opposition to same-sex marriage, a stand only currently held […]

Scott Walker demonstrated why he’s suddenly trailing Hillary Clinton by 12 percent in his home state in New Hampshire on Saturday with what will likely be the thesis statement of his attacks against the likely Democratic nominee: This isn’t the third term of Bill Clinton, this is the third term of Barack Obama. No matter what universe you live in, […]

On Friday, Rand Paul blasted President Obama’s plan to make tuition to community college free. He offered an alternative, “Let’s make college tuition entirely deductible.” “So that the children of rich people can finally get some advantages in life?” Vox’s Marry Yglesias tweeted. Paul’s idea directly contradicts his flat tax plan — which would explode the deficit and likely cut […]

The Republican Party is now engaged in a great battle of the spirit, according to The Daily Beast‘s Matt Lewis. Lewis channels The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent to ask: Will the Republican Party run for the White House in 2016 with a genuine effort to expand the party’s appeal beyond its core constituencies and make inroads with the voter groups that have […]

Last week Ted Cruz showed us why we need another season of Cosmos. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, he was presented with a chance to explain why the world is on fire but it isn’t getting hotter — and he took it. It was as if the world’s greatest internet commenter had crawled into the news and started spraying […]

If there were actually a liberal Fox News, America would be messing itself over the GOP’s new budget proposal. Relying on savage cuts to those who have been most brutalized by the Bush Recession, the new blueprint from House Republicans claims to make a huge dent in our long-term debt. But the proposal is so much less believable than Harry […]

Republicans are so supportive these days! Matt Drudge is thrilled about the presidential candidacy of Martin O’Malley. William Kristol and Karl Rove want to see Elizabeth Warren get into the 2016 Democratic primary. Reihan Salam has five progressives he’d like to see oppose Hillary. Either our conservative friends want a candidate who would be tougher on corporate greed or they […]

Robert D. Putnam wants to have a debate without starting an argument. And he may succeed. His new book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis succeeds in displaying the kind of canniness that makes the Harvard professor a favorite of both President Obama and Jeb Bush. To maintain the kind of equanimity that keeps your work at the heart of […]

Recently economists and commentators have been debating how much richer the rich have gotten since the Great Recession. Republicans have decided shouldn’t be just sitting around yapping about it — we should get busy trying to make the richest richest-er. New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait took a look at the new proposal from Marco Rubio and Mike Lee and found […]

If Republicans are trying to show people how crucial Obamacare is, King v. Burwell could be the perfect way to do it. The lawsuit that could end subsidies to the millions of Americans in 34 states who purchased insurance through the federal health care exchange will be argued on March 4. But we already have hints of what the impact […]

Jeb Bush has gotten an early start on his path to being 2016’s Mitt Romney. And the first non-Jeb to pull ahead of him is Scott Walker (and possibly Ben Carson, too). It’s the perfect time for Walker to have his moment in the spotlight because no Republican politician better reveals the GOP’s true agenda better than the governor of […]