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The House of Representatives is right now taking up H.R. 358, the Protect Life Act — a bill proposed by anti-abortion stalwart Representative Joe Pitts, a Republican from Pennsylvania, that would allow hospitals to refuse to perform an abortion, even when the life of the mother is at stake. Currently, hospitals that generally do not […]

Had you asked Mitt Romney a year ago how he would have liked the pre-primary period of the 2012 presidential election to play out, he probably would have said something like this: First, I’d like to be widely assumed to be the inevitable nominee. Then, I’d like to have a series of candidates emerge, capture […]

As I watched last night’s debate, it struck me, not for the first time, that Mitt Romney is really, really articulate. He’s not particularly eloquent — his words aren’t going to move you to tears — but he speaks in full sentences, at times even in full paragraphs. He rarely stumbles, or gets halfway into […]

As I wrote yesterday, 2010 has been a rough year for voting-rights advocates. Under the guise of fighting voter fraud, Republicans have exploited their new legislative majorities in the states to pass a slew of bills that will restrict access to the ballot. But with all the doom and gloom, there are bright spots. Late […]

On its face, David Brooks’ most recent column for the The New York Times is a policy-focused critique of Occupy Wall Street and the “We are the 99 Percent” movement. “If there is a core theme to the Occupy Wall Street movement,” he writes, “it is that the virtuous 99 percent of society is being […]

At last night’s Republican debate, Newt Gingrich got asked about the fact that Medicare spends a huge amount of its funds on procedures in the last two years of patients’ lives, much of which are pointless or even harmful. His answer was, essentially, that the government should pay for any medical procedure anyone wants, no […]

Jon Chait has a contrarian take on last night’s debate: The big question of tonight’s Republican presidential debate was whether Rick Perry, cratering in the polls and facing a party Establishment starting to accept the inevitability of Mitt Romney, would survive. I think he did. He is a bad debater, but given the history of […]