Recessitation—Members of the House of Representatives quickly got out of town on December 19. And they aren’t coming back until January 31. Why the month and a half paid vacation? Two words: Tom DeLay. After “The Hammer” stepped down as House majority leader last September upon his indictment in Texas, House leaders named only a […]

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The United States Senate is often called “the most exclusive club in Washington,” or exalted by its members as the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” But a new appellation may be in order: the world’s best investment club. According to a study conducted by four business professors, in any given year between 1993 and 1998 roughly […]

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One of the older conventional wisdoms in our nation’s capital is that any president who tries to plug leaks in the ship of state is engaged in a futile, self-defeating exercise. The leaker(s) can never be definitively identified, and any attempt to do so involves tactics more familiar to a police state and likely to […]

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No one could blame President Bush for wanting to get out of town after the end of October. He’d just experienced what non-partisan political observer Charles Cook dubbed “the worst week of the worst month of the worst year of the Bush presidency.” The president’s approval ratings sagged to an all-time low of less than […]

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Trick or Treat?—It’s fitting that it was Halloween when Senate Democrats held a secret meeting and hatched their plan to temporarily shut down the Senate so that the decision to go to war in Iraq could be fully examined, as promised. The invocation of the arcane “Rule 21” on November 1 surprised virtually everyone, not […]

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