Congress

Michael Kinsley’s second-best-known contribution to political discourse, trailing only the “Kinsley gaffe,” is his observation that “the scandal isn't the illegal behavior -- the scandal is what's legal.” In a Thursday post, Steve Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the TRMS blog, sought to apply Kinsley’s wisdom to the congressional inquiry into the…

Appearing on Friday’s NBC Today, Bloomberg Politics managing editor John Heilemann saw a rapidly closing window for Joe Biden to enter the presidential race: “...if he's making a calculation on the political landscape, it's more forbidding now than it was a month ago. You've got Hillary Clinton performing well at this debate, the Benghazi Committee now kind of delegitimized. She's teed up to have…

New York Times reporter David "hard-line" Herszenhorn is making hostile labeling of conservatives a bad habit, especially in his post-Boehner reporting. The shock resignation of the Speaker of the House gave Times reporters an excuse to target the "far-right" conservatives who had supposedly hounded John Boehner out of office, and granting the speaker never a popular figure in Times-land, some…

During the 2012 election the New York Times treated Rep. Paul Ryan, currently a reluctant Speaker-elect, as fearsomely conservative. But now the paper is defending him from the "far-right" on the front page. Reporter Jennifer Steinhauer got to the labeling bias right off the bat: "Far-right media figures, relatively small in number but potent in their influence, have embarked on a furious…

We’ve time and again seen the media receive their messaging orders  - and then march off all mouthing the Leftist talking point(s) of the day.  Washington, D.C.-based talk radio host Chris Plante quotes a military friend of his describing the media not as a gaggle, but as a centipede.  Multitudinous legs in coordinated movement - all headed in the same direction.  Talk radio impresario Rush…

Is the Republican party actually two parties? In a sense, believes The Washington Monthly's Martin Longman, who contended in a Monday post that the forty or so congressmen who constitute the Freedom Caucus “are best understood in the parliamentary sense as being a party in their own right. In our system, they are still called Republicans, but in any other system they would be a minor party that…

This week, Hillary Clinton is treated to fawning tributes and softball quesions during her "town hall" forum on NBC's Today, while network reporters finger the "far right" as at fault in the surprise resignation of House Speaker John Boehner. Plus, CNN's Christiane Amanpour claims some in the GOP are part of a "war on Muslims," and ex-CBS newsman Dan Rather is sticking to his bogus story: "There…

Esquire’s Charles Pierce seemingly would like a time machine to take him back a quarter-century so he could advise the Tom Foley/George Mitchell-era Democratic party. Failing that, Pierce wishes today’s Dems would at last act on his idea to persuade the American people that the Republican party is “thoroughly, deeply, banana-sandwich loony,” thereby “beat[ing] the crazy out of [the GOP] so the…

The surprise withdrawal of Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the race for Speaker gave the New York Times an excuse to issue a series of front-page stories larded up with hostile "hard-line" and "hard-right" labels mocking the apparent chaos surrounding congressional Republicans, being held "hostage" by the party's conservative wing.

On Friday's PBS Newshour, host Judy Woodruff joined liberal columnist Mark Shields in declaring that the House GOP's conservative wing is holding the Congress "hostage," with allegedly right-leaning regular and New York Times columnist David Brooks then complaining that Tea Partiers are good at "destruction," but not "construction." Brooks further griped that, "to get elected, especially as a…

On Friday, all three broadcast networks read from the same liberal script as hosts and correspondents predicted doom for the Republican Party following Kevin McCarthy’s withdrawal from the race for Speaker of the House. Leading off NBC’s Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie breathlessly proclaimed: “Congress in chaos. House Republicans racing to find a new speaker this morning. Bitterly divided…

The morning after House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy shocked Congress by announcing he was dropping out of the race to become the next Speaker of the House, CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today sprinted over to their analysts to tear into the “really pathetic” conservatives for creating a “chaotic” situation for the House that shows they’re “impossible to run.”

As CNN's John King made appearances on the news network on Thursday to discuss the race to replace House Speaker John Boehner, the CNN correspondent suggested that conservative Tea Party members lack understanding of Civics 101 in trying to press their agenda in the House. In a later appearance, after the announcement that Rep. Kevin McCarthy was dropping out of the race, King used the words "…

To the surprise of no one, MSNBC ran to find the nearest token Republicans it could after shocking news that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) dropped out of Speaker of the House race and once such person was MSNBC political analyst and former 2008 McCain campaign adviser Steve Schmidt, who railed against the GOP for “hunting heretics” and not “converts.”