Bedtime Prayer

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
But if this be the night I go,
Inscribe my tomb “Vote Rubio.” 

…and other Republican prayers: http://nyr.kr/ZIi7bZ

(Source: newyorker.com)

The Obama-Boehner Grand Bargain proposal was not necessarily an ideal compromise (plenty of people on both the right and the left disliked it), but at least it would have given us a single, comprehensive solution to our fiscal issues rather than the serial brinksmanship and dysfunction that we have now. 

Listen to the full recording of Ryan Lizza interviewing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor about his leading role in the death of the 2011 Grand Bargain deal: http://nyr.kr/Y2ONKB 

The news, on the front page of the Times this morning, that dozens of leading Republicans had signed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the case of Proposition 8, the California gay-marriage ban, merited the A1 treatment that it received. Despite their party and their own past positions, Jon Huntsman, Meg Whitman, Ken Duberstein, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and others said that they supported a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage. This comes two days before the Obama Administration must decide whether it is ready to file a similar brief. In the most high-profile Supreme Court case of the year, with the future of how we view civil rights and treat our fellow-citizens at stake, someone had quietly engineered enough prominent conservatives from the opposition party to sign onto a legal brief supporting full equality for gay and lesbian Americans. That someone was Ken Mehlman, the openly gay former political director of the George W. Bush White House, the campaign manager for Bush’s 2004 reëlection campaign, and the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. 

Richard Socarides on Ken Mehlman’s gay-marriage mission: http://nyr.kr/Weh7Q1

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty.

In this week’s issue, Ryan Lizza asks if Eric Cantor, the Republican Majority Leader, can redeem his party and himself: http://nyr.kr/159MMST What do you think? Can the leadership of the House of Representatives transform the GOP?

Photograph by Christopher Morris.

(Source: newyorker.com)

What do you remember most from the night of the State of the Union? Are you mentally replaying President Obama’s passionate appeal for gun control? Or maybe you can’t get Marco Rubio’s lunge for water out of your head? Either way, both speeches revealed a lot about the policy and political battles on the horizon. On this week’s Political Scene podcast, John Cassidy, Ryan Lizza, and Hendrik Hertzberg join the host Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the Democratic and Republican agendas for the next couple years:  http://nyr.kr/11JsKkc

(Source: newyorker.com)

In today’s Daily Comment, Jeffrey Toobin writes about how the disappearance of Republican presidential candidates from political life in the past couple of decades, aside from John McCain, “reflects a fundamental problem with the contemporary Republican Party.”

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/11Dbtcu

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty.

John Cassidy on Congressional Republicans, “about to endorse another damaging economic idea that should be consigned to the history books: a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/WFsZZF

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Just hours after being sworn in at the U.S. Capitol, the freshman class of House Republicans said that they were disappointed that they failed to shut down the government on their first day in office. Read more: http://nyr.kr/13bszvU