Congress

Even before President Obama announced D.C. appeals court judge Merrick Garland would be his nominee for the Supreme Court on Wednesday, ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS This Morning both hailed Garland as a “moderate” leading contender for the nod.

Vox editor-in-chief Klein doesn’t often look back fondly at the good old days of the conservative movement, but he did so in a Sunday post inspired by the death of Nancy Reagan. Klein thinks conservatism was at its best in the 1980s, for which he gives considerable credit to the First Couple of the era. Klein wrote that the “political genius” of the Reagans “was to shape the pessimistic, angry…

A certain January 20, 2009 private dinner in Washington is famous because the Republican bigwigs in attendance resolved to stymie President Obama’s agenda. William Saletan implies that gathering also should be known for inadvertently getting the Donald Trump presidential ball rolling. “The Republican Party decided to be what Obama wasn’t,” opined Saletan in a Monday article. “And what Obama wasn…

The last two midterm elections have yielded big Republican congressional gains, yet most conservatives who cheered those developments now jeer at Donald Trump. That’s inconsistent thinking on their part, suggests Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall. “Trump is very little different from the average candidate Republicans elected in 2010 and 2014, in terms of radical views and extreme…

Not long after Midnight Eastern time on Wednesday after Super Tuesday, CNN senior political commentator David Axelrod and senior political analyst Gloria Borger repeatedly lectured fellow panelist and former Ted Cruz communications director Amanda Carpenter by telling her that Cruz would be unable to best unite the Republican Party in November since he’s called Senate Majority Leader Mitch…

Instead of going on a tirade against Donald Trump or the horrors of ISIS, TBS’s Full Frontal host Samantha Bee chose to resume her vile attacks on conservatives with her latest show on Monday night featuring video of an elephant pooping to describe Republicans elected in the 2010 midterms. Specifically, Bee dubbed Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy (S.C.) as the “Benghazi queen” and the House…

Two categories of news the press has studiously avoided during the Obama era came together this week, causing it to (in my view) proactively decide to ignore emotional congressional testimony which should have been front-page news almost everywhere. The first is their virtually complete disinterest in reporting on congressional hearings. The list is longer than can be recounted here, but…

Appearing as a guest on Sunday's CNN Newsroom with Fredricka Whitfield to discuss Donald Trump declining to condemn former KKK leader David Duke in a CNN appearance earlier in the day, Jason Johnson of TheRoot.com not only repeated a discredited claim that Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise spoke to a white supremacist group in Louisiana in 2002, but he even gave the impression that Scalise…

In August 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged, as paraphrased in a New York Times story, "not to use signing statements to undermine legislation passed by Congress," and "called Mr. Bush’s frequent use of such statements an abuse of his power." On Wednesday, Obama issued another signing statement — there have now been over 30 during his presidential tenure — to put a thumb in…

Conservative and center-right columnists often have to do far more digging than their liberal counterparts, simply because overwhelmingly left-leaning beat journalists, aka "Democrats with bylines," provide such unbalanced reporting on current events on a daily basis. Fortunately, the Washington Post's Marc Thiessen did the necessary work by rummaging through available information about federal…

On Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher, left-wing HBO comedian Bill Maher and his all-liberal panel went after deceased conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, as Maher not only joked about the possibility that he died while watching his show, but ended up imagining him "murdering" birds and looking like Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series the evening before his passing.

Scatology has typically been out of bounds in mainstream-media political commentary. (Not in all political commentary, of course. For example, actor John Cusack once called former actor Ronald Reagan “a criminal who used the Constitution as toilet paper.”) Nonetheless, Michael Tomasky went there in a Wednesday column trashing Senate Republicans for refusing to consider any Supreme Court…

On Thursday's New Day, CNN's Chris Cuomo invoked the Constitution to former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli over Senate Republicans' refusal to consider any potential Supreme Court nominee by President Obama: "The Constitution...[is] about nominating somebody and advise and consent. It's not about delay." Cuomo added, "It would be hard to argue that part of advise and consent is the…

The Associated Press clearly hopes that most Americans still pay little to no attention to New Media. That's the only credible argument one can employ as to why the wire service's Alan Fram, in his Tuesday evening dispatch, characterized the unanimous decision of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee not to hold hearings on a potential Supreme Court nominee this year as "extraordinary."…