For two days John McCain and Ted Cruz have been fighting on the Senate floor over the rules for negotiating a budget, but, like so many fights, it's also about so much more. Cruz is being annoying about the budget, but worse, he just doesn't get the Senate.
Mitch McConnell said he wouldn't block the bipartisan immigration overhaul on Tuesday, and Patrik Leahy said he will hold off — "with a heavy heart" — on a controversial amendment to green cards to spouses of gay couples. But the path to passage is surprisingly clear, even amidst the Obama administration's scandals.
While the Republican National Committee thinks it needs to support immigration reform to start winning presidential elections, Republicans in Congress have reason to think they need to oppose to keep winning elections.
The new conventional wisdom is that Sen. Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster laid bare this week the divisions within the Republican party between the hawkish old guard and the insurgent young guns. The new conventional wisdom is wrong.
The sequester has gone into effect, and no deal has materialized, so Obama is working behind the scenes to woo people on Capitol Hill. Or at least, the White House is waging a PR offensive to get op-ed writers to praise him for doing so. And there's good reason to be skeptical.
He was the immigration guy in the Republican Party. But now, there's a new immigration guy — Bush's protege, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — and suddenly Bush's position on immigration is very confused.
Republicans have been going through a civil war since they fared much worse than they expected in the 2012 elections. Actually, it's a lot of civil wars. So many that it's hard to keep them all straight. We've created a chart of GOP infighting to help you sort them out.
Since the sequester hasn't forced a deficit-cutting deal, some pundits, like The Washington Post's editorial page, David Brooks, and most spectacularly Bob Woodward, are putting their faith in mind control magic to get the centrist deal they want.
Which is worse: raising taxes or ceding your biggest and most important power to someone else? Some Senate Republicans would rather be irrelevant than raise taxes.
The tweets were obliquely racist — and even homophobic enough — to chime through the halls of the Capitol and even get potential candidate Ashley Judd to speak up.
Ted Cruz was so aggressive during Chuck Hagel's confirmation hearing that he was reprimanded by fellow Republicans. After it was revealed Cruz sees communists everywhere, the Texas Republican made a defense inspired by his recent foe.
The New Yorker reports that the freshman Senator claimed there were 12 communists actively plotting against the government at Harvard Law School when he was a student there. But Harvard (and Chuck Hagel) shouldn't feel singled out — Ted Cruz sees anti-American plotters all over the place.
Pundit and lobbyist Michelle Laxalt gave an impassioned defense of then-Sen. Pete Domenici on CNN in 2007, saying he was a man of "integrity" who was "supporting no fewer than eight children." That curiously inexact reference makes sense now that Domenici has admitted to fathering a son with her.
Things seemed to escalate quickly there. After a copy of the White House's back-up immigration reform bill leaked, Marco Rubio moved quickly to shoot down the bill's proposals to ensure his bipartisan effort remained the favored method to get this deal done.
Less than six weeks into his term, a remarkable number of both Republicans and Democrats have come forward to say that they think Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, is kind of a jerk.
Daniel Larison on Republicans holding up Hagel, Ruth Marcus on Ted Cruz, Geoffrey Till on Asia's "arms race," Paula Dwyer on merger mania, and William Finnegan on the GOP's immigration fix.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will give the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union speech tonight, and while it will give Rubio a chance to be seen by millions of Americans, recent history says it will be no help to his 2016 presidential candidacy.
The king of all geeks thinks the would-be king of all Super PACs is about to watch his house of campaign cards implode, which could actually lead to something of a Tea Party resurgence.
Both Republicans and Democrats cast themselves as deficit cutters during the presidential election, but the new reality from the anual CO report is further evidence that no one in Washington — not Obama or Boehner — will take credit for the sequester anymore.
Karl Rove's American Crossroads has started a new group to make sure the 2014 Senate races produce zero Todd Akins. But it turns out some conservatives like Rove less than Akin.
Chuck Hagel's confirmation hearing to become the next Secretary of Defense did not go well, but if he fails to get the job, it won't be because of some deeply held foreign-policy principle. And the best evidence rests with one man: John McCain.
One of the common criticisms of President Obama is that he's too aloof and too uninterested in making friends in D.C. to make to end partisan gridlock in Washington (see Michelle Obama's eye-rolling and John Boehner's speech about Obama trying to "annihilate" the GOP). But the recent deal in the Senate on filibuster reform shows that chumminess isn't working, either.
Remember how New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called for the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana in public view? That was kind of fun, wasn't it?
President Obama has stopped enforcing laws. The Senate has stopped passing laws. Who's the more insidious threat to the Constitution?
Cartoonist Tom Toles on Olympia Snowe's sudden departure.
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