Justices Caution Not So Fast It’s not often that a revolution winds up on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, but it seemed to happen this past week.  The nine justices heard two potentially significant cases on same sex marriage and while decorum was maintained inside the chamber, a lot of the action seemed […]

Bracing for a Summer Showdown Members of Congress are away for the next two weeks, but before they left town they approved a law that will keep the federal government funded through the end of September.  Passage of the funding measure avoided a government shutdown and includes the $85 billion worth of across-the-board spending cuts […]

Party May Need Heart Transplant Like all smart political parties, Republicans have been spending some time looking in the mirror after last November’s dispiriting election results.  In a report called the Growth and Opportunity Project, Republican leaders studied what went wrong last year and offer up some general ideas about improving the party’s electoral prospects […]

  Looking for the Next Reagan Thousands of election-weary conservatives gathered at a resort hotel outside Washington this week, trying to figure out what went wrong in last November’s election and how to fix it for the future. The Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC, is a kind of melting pot for the conservative […]

Will Changes in Tone Lead to Action? Like the warming breezes of an unexpected early spring, there was a subtle shift in Washington’s political landscape this week.  President Barack Obama took the unusual step of having dinner with a dozen Senate Republicans to open an informal dialogue on the budget issues that have crippled this […]