Later this week, President Obama will sign a bill that simultaneously averts a government shutdown and locks sequestration into law for the next six months.
During those six months, Obama will try to build a coalition of Democrats and Republicans who can agree to a mix of new taxes and entitlement cuts to replace sequestration. At the same time Republican leaders will grapple with the need to increase the debt limit, and there’s a small chance that these two imperatives will become entwined in a sort of 2011 redux. But ever since GOP leaders relinquished their dangerous and heavy-handed debt ceiling strategy earlier this year, and then resigned themselves to enduring sequestration rather than raise taxes again, it makes more sense that Republicans will increase the debt limit without demanding any real concessions, and sequestration will continue in perpetuity. Maybe its spending caps will simply become the new discretionary spending baseline, and just like that an era of perpetual crisis will come to an end.
That’s a disorienting forecast. Read More
Last we heard from members of the White Student Union at Towson University they were speaking up for disenfranchised white voters at CPAC. Well, now they’re back, starting up nighttime campus patrols. Read More
A series of gorgeous pics of the rapidly changing polar regions, via NASA’s IceBridge aerial survey mission.
Over the last few months we’ve seen a steady and by any historical standard rapid Republican withdrawal from the politics of immigrant-bashing. First, the elites in the party, then the would-be presidentials and then last week basically all the hold outs among the Tea Partiers in the House. In military terms, it’s not so much a rout as the army just fading away.
I think that’s great for the country. But it does make you wonder, what happened to this being a core issue to GOP base voters last year? Read More
Some pretty amazing numbers from Pew on how Republicans view the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court.
Compare that to this chart based on an academic study of the right-ward shift of the court.
Looks like Ted Cruz may be the final holdout on immigration reform.
Here’s why Anthony Kennedy may be the key Justice in the upcoming marriage equality cases before the Supreme Court.
A new Gallup poll shows that 66% of respondents do not believe drone strikes should be used against suspected terrorists within the United States. And an even larger number, 79% of respondents, don’t believe strikes should be permitted in the United States against suspected terrorists who are US citizens. Read More