Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) last week took the extraordinary step—in response to Democrats’ obstruction of President Trump’s nominees—of using the “nuclear option” to shorten debate time for judicial and executive nominees. I’ve written at length about why this is a bad idea, most recently here and here. Prior to this action,
Ed Whelan of National Review on Monday published a two-part rebuttal to my argument against the Senate’s effort to nuke their post-cloture 30-hour rule. The Senate is scheduled to start that very process Tuesday afternoon. Part one of Whelan’s argument focuses exclusively on whether or not the Senate has the right to change
After much public hand-wringing, the Senate reportedly is planning to go “nuclear” on its debate rules for floor nominations this week.I can count on one hand the number of people outside Washington, D.C. (or inside, D.C., for that matter) who are likely to care about this. But if my more than a decade in
When Democrats return to town this week, at the top of their to-do list is to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. The bill is intended to address the so-called wage gap, or the Census Bureau data showing that women working full time earn 80 percent of what men earn. Democrats have been trying
The Republican-controlled Senate on Thursday followed the lead of the Democratic House and voted to disapprove President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border. The success of the disapproval vote was expected in the House, where Democrats keep waving their arms and saying “It’s fine!” while women and children are
Customs and Border Patrol released statistics last week showing the highest number of apprehensions at the border in 11 years. But along with the numbers of illegal crossers an equally serious crisis is growing—that of sexual and other types of violence perpetrated against migrant women and children as they make their way to
Democrats have always been the party of abortion. For a while, the mantra was “safe, legal and rare.” But in the era of the progressive Left, they have turned that slogan on its head. As of last Monday, Senate Democrats have confirmed that their party is now for unrestricted, unregulated, and unlimited abortion.
A bipartisan howling is coming from Congress about President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build the border wall. And while hypocrisy in Washington is always in the water, on the question of immigration, there is enough of it to make your hair curl. Both Republicans and Democrats alike have rushed to
After spending the last 10 years debating border security—the last two of which were under unified GOP control—and then engaging in a 35-day shutdown the best Congress could muster this week was a 1,169 page bill that does nothing more than sustain the problem. The fix was in from the start. Democrats entered
After months of talk, we finally saw the outlines of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” this week. Hoo boy, is it a doozy. The New York Democrat’s 14-page resolution aspires to achieve “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” in just 10 years. It leaves no part of the economy untouched in pursuit of this
