The Week: Most Recent Republican Party

Why are conservatives defending a billionaire who abandoned America?

The Week — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:22:00 -0400

Eduardo Saverin, a Facebook co-founder, renounced his U.S. citizenship just before the company's $16 billion IPO, in what is widely seen as an attempt to avoid paying taxes. The Brazilian-born Saverin, who became an American citizen in 1992, is being lambasted for ingratitude, with many saying he could not have made his billions without the opportunities afforded him in America. Democratic senators have introduced legislation, dubbed the Ex-Patriot Act, that would force similar tax dodgers to pay a 30 percent tax rate on their U.S. assets and bar them from re-entering the country. Some Republicans...

John Boehner's new debt-ceiling threat: Will it blow up in his face?

The Week — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:00:00 -0400

It's been a few months since we've had a budget standoff between House Republicans and President Obama, thanks to a deal ironed out during the last epic fight in August, when a last-minute agreement was made to raise the national debt ceiling. That compromise raised the ceiling high enough to get the nation through the 2012 elections, though probably not much further. With last summer's damaging brinkmanship in mind, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday that he expects Congress to act "without drama, pain, and damage" in December. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) says...

Will Republicans 'evolve' on gay marriage too?

The Week — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:45:00 -0400

Just days after President Obama announced his support for gay marriage, a respected Republican pollster urged members of his party to evolve on the issue, too. Jan R. van Lohuizen, who advised George W. Bush during his 2004 campaign, wrote in a memo leaked over the weekend that public opinion is quickly shifting in favor of same-sex marriage — by 5 percent a year since 2010 — and that the GOP needs to change with the times. He suggests that Republicans rationalize their support for gay marriage because "freedom means freedom for everyone," including same-sex couples who want to live...

The GOP lost the European elections

The Week — Mon, 07 May 2012 12:15:00 -0400

Maybe Republicans are right in the wrong way: Europe is a political model — an unhappy one for them.

The easy consolation they can take from the past week's elections there is that Nicolas Sarkozy has just become the latest incumbent leader in the advanced nations, the eleventh in Europe, to lose office since the onset of the financial crisis. Doesn't Obama have to follow Sarkozy and the rest as night follows day?

The lessons actually point in the opposite direction.

Sarkozy is only the second president of the Fifth Republic to be denied a second term — because voters...

Is Paul Ryan the most powerful figure in the GOP?

The Week — Tue, 01 May 2012 06:58:00 -0400

The message from two new profiles of House budget chief Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), in New York and The New York Times, is pretty unmistakable: This is Ryan's GOP, and Mitt Romney is only along for the ride. Ditto for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Romney has pledged to enact the controversial budget plan authored by Ryan, and powerful anti-tax activist Grover Norquist says the only qualification the next (Republican) president needs is "enough working digits to handle a pen" to sign Ryan's fiscal prescriptions — which would slash both...

Is the GOP waging a war on... sex?

The Week — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:08:00 -0400

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is putting a new spin on the election-year battles over contraception and abortion. For weeks, Democrats have accused Republicans of fighting a "war on women." But now, in an editorial in the May issue of Playboy, Hefner argues that what "repressed conservatives" are really trying to do is turn back the clock on our "hard-won sexual liberation" — waging an all-out "war against sex," from Rick Santorum's attacks on contraception to Mitt Romney's call for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Fair assessment or over-the-top caricature?

Hef found...

Are Republicans better informed than Democrats?

The Week — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:30:00 -0400

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press recently posted the results of a survey on political knowledge, broken out by age, education level, gender, and perhaps most intriguingly, political affiliation. Not only did "Republicans fare substantially better than Democrats on several questions in the survey," Pew says, but that's "typically the case in surveys about political knowledge." (Take a short version of the quiz yourself.) Republicans answered 12.6 of 17 questions correctly, versus 11.4 for Democrats, and Democrats only outperformed the GOP respondents on one policy question. Looks...

Paul Ryan's budget: An albatross for the GOP?

The Week — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:11:00 -0400

House Republicans passed Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget on Thursday — without a single Democratic vote. The spending plan has no chance of getting approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate and signed into law by President Obama, but it puts Republicans on record as a party in favor of slashing spending by $5 trillion over a decade (relative to President Obama's budget), while cutting taxes and slowly replacing the popular entitlement program Medicare with a voucher system. Will such contentious positions drag down GOP candidates in November?

This is a disaster for...

The GOP's plummeting Latino support: Blame Mitt Romney?

The Week — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:50:00 -0400

Even though President Obama dominated the Latino vote in 2008, walloping John McCain 67 percent to 31 percent, this year's crop of Republicans aren't deterred, and have long hoped to make gains with Latinos, especially as Obama is plagued by his tough deportation policy and failure to deliver on a campaign promise of immigration reform. And yet, in a bid to win over the anti-immigration conservatives who vote heavily in GOP primaries, the party's presidential candidates have staked out hardline positions that could turn off Latino voters in November. Frontrunner Mitt Romney went so far...

The GOP's 'war on teleprompters': 4 theories

The Week — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:47:00 -0400

Bashing President Obama for using teleprompters, even for minor speeches, has long been a reliable way for Republican candidates to get laughs out of the GOP faithful. But on Monday, Rick Santorum fired a new salvo in the GOP's "war on teleprompters," arguing that it should be illegal for anyone running for president to read off a teleprompter, "because all you're doing is reading someone else's words to people." Why do Santorum and Co. keep attacking teleprompters? Here, four theories:

1. It undercuts Obama's image as a great speaker
President Obama's oratorical skill is one of his greatest political...

Who exactly is the 'Republican establishment'?

The Week — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:20:00 -0500

"Mitt Romney is the establishment candidate in the Republican presidential field," say Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake at The Washington Post. "Everyone knows it." What nobody seems to agree on, though, is who exactly the Republican establishment is. Here, six takes on who, if anyone, is calling the shots among today's GOP elite:

1. Top GOP lawmakers
The "major establishment figures in the party" are influential GOP governors and the Republican leaders in Congress, say Cillizza and Blake. House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who recently endorsed Romney, are among...

The 'corrosive' primary season: How badly has it damaged the GOP?

The Week — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 10:13:00 -0500

As the Republican presidential candidates head into the crucial Super Tuesday primaries, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that the long, nasty battle for the GOP nomination has had a "corrosive" effect on the party and its candidates. Forty percent of respondents said the primary season has left them with a less favorable impression of the GOP, while only 10 percent said the campaign has improved the party's image. Seventy percent of those surveyed — including a majority of Republicans — used negative terms such as "painful" and "uninspiring" to describe the nominating...

Andrew Breitbart's death: The 'astonishing' liberal gloating

The Week — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:10:00 -0500

Conservatives spent much of Thursday mourning the sudden death of flame-throwing internet pioneer Andrew Breitbart — and fuming over the "astonishing outpouring of hate toward Breitbart from the Left." Among the "mean-spirited" blog posts and tweets from (presumably liberal) critics of the journalist-provocateur was a highly scrutinized tweet from Slate's Matt Yglesias: "Conventions around dead people are ridiculous. The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBreitbart dead." Is cheering the death of a 43-year-old father of four a tasteless breach of decorum, or a justifiable...

Andrew Breitbart's death: A blow to conservatism

The Week — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:18:00 -0500

Conservative internet publisher and activist Andrew Breitbart, who inspired the Right and infuriated the Left, collapsed and died early Thursday, at age 43. Breitbart, who reportedly had heart problems, started out as a behind-the-scenes deputy to web pioneer Matt Drudge. After leaving The Drudge Report in 2005, he rapidly built an internet publishing empire that began with Breitbart.com, and now includes such sites as Big Journalism, Big Hollywood, Big Government, and others. In the process, Breitbart became a brash defender of conservative causes, and the muckraking nemesis of liberal politicians...

Does the GOP want $5 gas?

The Week — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:51:00 -0500

There are no "quick fixes" for rising gasoline prices, President Obama said Thursday, trying to get in front of an issue that threatens to compromise his re-election campaign. Republicans are blaming Obama for the uptick — which could reach $5 per gallon by summer's driving season, according to some analysts — saying he has denied oil companies the chance to drill for more domestic oil. In turn, Obama faulted Republicans for "licking their chops" over rising gas prices, "rooting for bad news" so they can exploit voters' fuel frustrations for political gain. Does Obama have a point?...

The unholy alliance between Catholic bishops and the GOP

The Week — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:05:00 -0500

The Episcopal Church used to be described as the Republican Party at prayer. Today's GOP has moved far right, and suddenly the Catholic bishops are now the Republican Party in the pulpit.

For many Catholics — and I intermittently try to be part of the church I was raised in — this is a betrayal of their beliefs about the place of faith in public life. For Republicans, the turn toward social issues, manifest in their misalliance with the bishops in a war on birth control, further radicalizes their presidential primary process and their congressional politics — and further...