Patrick Brennan
Patrick Brennan is a writer and policy analyst based in Washington, D.C. He was Director of Digital Content for Marco Rubio's presidential campaign, writing op-eds, policy content, and leading the campaign's Web content strategy and email fundraising.
Before that, he was the opinion editor at National Review Online, where he led editorial decision-making and covered economics, domestic policy, and foreign affairs. As a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute from 2011 to 2013, he covered a special election in New York’s ninth congressional district, sparred with Senator Rand Paul over who should run the Federal Reserve, and became quite familiar with Mitt Romney’s tax returns. He has provided research for Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and helped run her social-media presence. He has also written for Politico, Forbes, andHe has been a Hillsdale Fellow at the Allan P. Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship, and, in 2013, he was a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute. He graduated with a degree in Classics from Harvard College, where he was managing editor of The Harvard Salient, competed on the sailing team, and served as chancellor of the Knights of Columbus council. He also studied government, economics, and international development, and has worked for two non-governmental organizations in sub-Saharan Africa and an Africa-focused consulting firm.
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I don’t want to distract from this Friday’s inaugural festivities, but one final thought has come to me about the Obama presidency, and if I don’t share it now, it will be, as they say, overtaken by ... -
How Not to Sell Your Policies to the Public
Cathy McMorris Rodgers is the chairman of the GOP House Conference, the arm of the House Republican caucus devoted to communicating and promoting its message. She’s the fourth-ranking House Republican, and she delivered the well-received Republican response to the ... -
Paul Krugman Has Painted Himself into an Odd Corner
Tyler Cowen points out the strange position Paul Krugman find himself in: Having advocated stimulus spending during all of the Obama years, he now has to confront the possibility that Donald Trump will actually provide it (via tax cuts, infrastructure ... -
Watch Hillary Pull a Brian Williams
Much of the attention to Hillary Clinton’s dishonesty the past couple years has focused on her mishandling of classified information in her emails. But it’s worth remembering that she can be breathtakingly dishonest about policy matters, too. The ... -
Re: The Map Follows the National Polls, Cont.
To follow up on Rich’s point that, as Trump’s numbers rise nationally, the picture of how he’d win the states he needs becomes clearer, too, I recommend Nate Silver’s piece from last year about how there’... -
Moderators Are Awful at Fact-Checking — Especially Things Like the Unemployment Rate
The head of the presidential debate commission caught flak yesterday for her comments on CNN about why she doesn’t think the debate moderators should call out Trump and Clinton over factual inaccuracies: The director of the #Debate commission is ... -
The Conservative Answer to Thomas Piketty That You’ve All Been Waiting For
The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class, by Edward Conard (Portfolio, 320 pp.) It’s been a rough few years for conservative economics. In some arenas, such as federal policymaking, this is understandable, given who holds the ... -
The Right Way to Make Families Great Again
The most newsworthy part of Donald Trump’s economic speech earlier this week, at least in the policy world, was his proposal to help American families by making the cost of child care tax deductible up to a certain amount. ... -
The Irony of the Economic Smart Set's Opposition to Brexit
One of the key elements of the debate over Britain’s referendum on EU membership has been the claim, from both the British government and widely respected independent authorities, that it would spell serious economic trouble for Britain. There are ... -
A Pretty Damning Nugget Buried in the AP's Clinton
E-mail StoryThe AP reported this morning the specifics of what classified information a sample of Hillary’s e-mails were found to contain. Perhaps just as bad, though, is the information at the bottom of the piece: Former intelligence officials say it’... -
Here's What Hillary Thought Was Okay to Send over Unclassified E-mail
John Schindler, a former NSA analyst, helpfully translates the details of just how classified the information we now know Hillary transmitted over her private e-mail server was. Answer: pretty darn classified. TS = TOPSECRET SI = Special Intelligence (SIGINT) TK = TALENT KEYHOLE (... -
Christie, Rand Paul Go At It over Domestic Spying — Again
New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Senator Rand Paul clashed tonight over how much power the National Security Agency should have to access phone records of Americans, reprising a spat they’ve been having for years now. Christie, a former ... -
Is This Seriously a Line from a Speech by the President of the United States?
From Obama’s pitch for his Iran deal today: Just because Iranian hardliners chant “Death to America” does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe. In fact, it’s those . . . (APPLAUSE) In fact, it’s those hardliners who ... -
Your Thursday Night Lineup
Trump, Bush, Walker, Huckabee, Carson, Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Christie and Kasich — as was expected this morning. (The deadline for a poll to be integrated into Fox’s average of five quality polls was 5 p.m. this evening.) Earlier Thursday evening, ... -
How Hard Is this 'What's the Difference between Democrats and Socialists' Question?
Chuck Todd asked Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz this morning what the difference is between a Democrat and a socialist — a question she refused to answer when Chris Matthews asked her it out of the blue on Thursday. ... -
Why America Shouldn't Bid for the Olympics
Jay laments below that the Boston bid — and possibly the U.S. bid, period — for the 2024 Olympics has been abandoned. A country as great as the U.S. should regularly host the Summer Olympics, which it now will go at ... -
Hillary Backs the Iran Deal, Tries to Make It Sound Better Than It Is
Below, I noted that Hillary Clinton’s staff is waffling on whether she backs the deal with Iran. Clinton has now officially endorsed it, in a long statement detailing how hard she’ll try to enforce the deal and other ... -
Shock: Hillary's Staff Is Dodging Questions on Whether She Backs the Iran Deal (Update: Now She Does)
Vox wrote this morning that Hillary Clinton had endorsed the deal the U.S. and other world powers just reached with Iran. The evidence: A source who was inside a meeting between House Democrats and Secretary Clinton said, “She applauds ... -
The DNC Isn't Making Hay Out of Trump, or Isn't Taking Him Seriously
The Hill has an analysis adding up all the times the Democratic National Committee has mentioned various Republican candidates for president since July 2014. Rand Paul, with 203 mentions, has the top spot. Interestingly, second from bottom is Donald Trump, with just ... -
Ex-Im Is Kaput (For Now)
At midnight, the Export-Import Bank’s authorization lapsed for the first time in 81 years. Congress is on recess, and later this month a Republican House and Senate would both have to act to resurrect the institution, which exists to extend ... -
Donald Trump's Explanation of Why He Blasts China but Makes His Ties There Is Halfway Decent
CNN’s Jake Tapper donned a Donald Trump–brand tie today for his interview with the businessman and potential 2016 presidential candidate, and pressed Trump, who talks tough about trying to bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas, about why he puts ... -
SCOTUS Rules 6--3 to Maintain Obamacare Subsidies
The decision, with the opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts (Quin has words for him below), is here. Scalia’s pointed rebuke from the dissent (emphasis mine): Having transformed two major parts of the law, the Court today has ... -
The Target in Charleston
It’s hard to overstate the symbolic significance of the Charleston church where a man killed nine people last night in a horrific massacre. The church, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, is the most historic black parish in Charleston, and ... -
Noted Tea-Party Crank Comes Out against Export-Import Bank
Ah, wait, no, it’s the chairman of the Harvard economics department, Greg Mankiw, who delivers a succinct case against the arguments typically made for the Export-Import Bank — that it creates jobs (at subsidized firms, sure; on net, probably not), ... -
Berniementum
Hillary leads Bernie Sanders by just ten points, 41 percent to 31, in the latest poll of New Hampshire, from Suffolk University. In national polls and surveys of other states, though, Clinton still tends to be way ahead of Sanders. Still, it ... -
A U.S. Air Strike Just Killed a Very Bad Man
The Pentagon says that a U.S. air strike in Libya seems to have killed Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who is not a former U.N. secretary general but instead a former top operative in al-Qaeda’s North Africa affiliate, a veteran ... -
The (Maybe Temporary) Trade Failure: Blame Democrats
The House overwhelmingly voted down reauthorizing a program called trade-adjustment authority today that is crucial to sending the major trade bill currently before them, trade-promotion authority, to President Obama’s desk. Democrats have long insisted that trade adjustment, a program ... -
Chris Christie Won a Pension Battle, but He's Got a Long War Ahead
The New Jersey supreme court yesterday ruled that Chris Christie didn’t break the law by skipping a big pension payment he’d been scheduled to make. This is being read as a victory for a guy who might be ... -
Rick Perry Takes It to Wall Street: 'Regulate Them'
Former Texas governor Rick Perry was on Face the Nation this morning to make the case for his recently launched presidential campaign, and h emphasized not just the work he’s done since his failed 2012 campaign, but also a populist ... -
Bill de Blasio's Latest Ingenious Plan to Stick It to the 1 Percent
Last night I got the following e-mail from the Hampton Jitney company, which runs buses from Manhattan to the Hamptons — the main way to get there if you don’t like the mess that is the Long Island Rail Road ... -
Congratulations to Claremont's New Publius Fellows
The Claremont Institute, a staunch outpost of conservative ideas out in California, home to the legendary, recently deceased Harry Jaffa, announced a new class of Publius Fellows this week — young conservative thinkers and writers who will spend a couple weeks ... -
Americans Aren't Moving Left on the Most Important Social Issue
Matt Yglesias of Vox is excited by a new Gallup poll that produced this headline: Charlie noted that this is a little odd because it’s not really clear why the Left would want to claim moral approval of extramarital ... -
It's Fine that Hillary Won't Say What She Thinks about Obama's Trade Deal — This Is the Question She Needs to Answer Instead
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign continues to be almost devoid of substance, and her interactions with the media entirely so — but this is partly because she isn’t being pressed on the right questions. When the dam finally broke this ... -
Re: The Presidential Debate Limit
I look forward to reading Quin’s take on why CNN and Fox have decided to limit the number of candidates in the Republican primary debates they’re hosting later this year. It strikes me as a reasonable point prima ... -
What the Pope Really Said to Abbas Doesn't Matter Except to Prop Up the Media's Narrative
American and British media breathlessly reported this weekend that Pope Francis had hailed Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian government such as it is, as an “angel of peace.” But a number of other news outlets, such as Italy’s ... -
Boston Bomber Gets the Death Penalty
After considering various mitigating circumstances put forth by Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s defense, a twelve-person jury in Boston sentenced him to death today. From the Boston Globe’s Kevin Cullen, who’s covered the trial for months now: “We vote that ... -
In Defense of the Pope on Palestine
Mike jokes that, with the media reporting that Pope Francis has recognized a Palestinian state, his defenders might as usual say the media got it wrong — and yet, as he notes, they did. John Allen Jr., a very well respected ... -
Sub-Saharan Sorosoids
Jay, who’s been publishing a journal about his recent trip to Macedonia, writes the following about what conservatives there think of George Soros, a towering figure there: In the early years after the collapse of Communism, Soros did many ... -
'A [Really] Royal Snub'
Saudi Arabia’s decision to send its crown prince rather than its king to a summit of Gulf leaders at Camp David this week is no small snub, Bruce Riedel of Brookings argues: It was timed and orchestrated to demonstrate ... -
Oops: Assad Kept Some Chemical Weapons
President Obama and President Putin’s first great nonproliferation triumph, Bashar Assad’s surrendering of hundreds of tons of chemical weapons, has not aged all that well: It offered Assad a boost in international legitimacy (temporarily, actually, making the international ... -
That Time Putin's New Super Tank Broke Down During Rehearsals for His Stalinfest
This May 9 is a big day for Russia, and for President Vladimir Putin: Russia will be celebrating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, which surrendered to the Red Army 70 years ago this Saturday, and Putin will be doing ... -
John McCain Raises a Good Point: Why Is Obama Inviting a Lawless China to Play in the Pacific?
Senator John McCain has suggested that China shouldn’t be reinvited to a major international military exercise next year, as they were in 2014 — RIMPAC, the world’s largest naval wargame and now a gathering of most Pacific security forces, hosted ... -
Candidate Ben Carson Takes a First Whack at Policy, Mostly Misses
The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal has a brief interview with neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who announced Monday that he’s running for president, in which they got him to say a few interesting things about his policy positions. The most ... -
How Common Are Police 'Rough Rides'?
Last week, the Baltimore Sun ran a piece on a number of tragic incidents where alleged “rough rides” from Baltimore Police drivers, in which they swerve and speed to throw handcuffed, unbuckled suspects around the back of police vans, have ... -
Our Nuclear Negotiating Partners Seized a Cargo Ship in the Strait of Hormuz This Morning
Five Iranian patrol boats — likely those of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard — intercepted, fired toward, and then boarded a cargo ship, the Danish-owned MV Maersk Tigris, early this morning, the Pentagon has confirmed. Although the Pentagon notes the ship has no ... -
Obama Isn't Trying to Strong Arm Just One Red State into Expanding Obamacare — He's Got His Eye on Four
Florida governor Rick Scott filed suit against the Obama administration last week on the grounds that the feds are trying to coerce his state into expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The bludgeon of choice: threatening not to renew ... -
Hillary's Infamous Women in the World Talk Isn't Quite as Awful as You've Heard (Though It's Still Awful)
During what was supposedly a rousing speech yesterday at the Women in the World Summit (held in David H. Koch Theater, as it happens), Hillary Clinton touched on a number of issues where women’s welfare has improved but hasn’... -
The 'Spa-like' Abortion Clinic Has an Unsurprisingly Ridiculous Ad
Carafem is a new Maryland-based abortion clinic that aims to destigmatize abortion. By making the clinic’s premises cheery and “spa-like” and talking about the issue more frankly, they want to “de-medicalize” what is, in the most favorable telling, a ... -
We Built a Massive Replica of Iran's Nuclear Facilities in Tennessee to Get an Edge in Negotiations
A fascinating story from the Times — we even used some of Qaddafi’s old centrifuges. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have helped much, does it? -
Not Recognizing the Armenian Genocide Might Be One of Obama's More Defensible Policies
President Obama won’t recognize the mass killing of Armenian civilians during World War I as a genocide when he remarks upon the 100th anniversary of that event, according to Politico. President Obama’s three immediate predecessors have not referred ...
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Hillary Drew the Lowest Turnout Boston's Black Neighborhoods Have Seen in Twenty Years
I’m not sure where we stand in the just-how-awful-a-candidate-was-Hillary debate, but I thought this was a striking finding from two keen observers of Boston politics, Larry DiCara and James Sutherland (from Commonwealth magazine): The most severe declines in [2016] voter ... -
Something's Missing from This Month's Jobs Report
Last month, the news from the October jobs report was not that the economy added 142,000 jobs that month, but that wages grew rapidly, too: by 11 cents per hour, following 8 cents in September. That may not sound like an incredible amount, ... -
Not a Perfect Jobs Report, But a Good One
The U.S. economy added a net 161,000 jobs in October and the unemployment rate ticked back down to 4.9 percent, but, as has been the case for a number of months now, that wasn’t the most important news from the ... -
Trump's Right: Hillary Is Proposing One of the Biggest Tax Increases in History
In one of Trump’s riffs Monday night about Hillary Clinton’s policy plans, he said she’s “going to approve one of the biggest tax increases in history.” This is a case where Trump’s penchant for superlatives actually ... -
Yes, Moderators Really Aren't Good at Fact-Checking
Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum takes issue with my argument that moderators shouldn’t try correcting candidates about even things like the unemployment rate. He says Trump does not do with unemployment what I’m saying lots of people do – ... -
The ‘Don’t Try to Out-Democrat the Democrats’ Argument Isn’t an Argument
Heather Wilhelm’s most recent NRO column has an entertaining send-up of the interview Ivanka Trump gave to Cosmo last week, in which Ivanka seemed surprised at the reporter’s skeptical view of her father’s recently announced family policy ... -
America Sure Does Have a Department of Sports — We Just Call It ‘Education’ and 'Charity'
Paul Crookston made the quite valid point last week that it’s impressive that the U.S. dominates the Summer Olympics (winter, not so much) without the massive sports bureaucracy other countries have. He certainly has a point, but there’... -
Are Brexit Opponents Just Going to Ignore Recent Economic History Now?
I noted last week how economic intellectuals are studiously ignoring the lesson of the euro project — one they actually seem to have learned, that’s not just limited to the right, that unaccountable international policymaking has big problems — when it ... -
The Unbelievable Incoherence and Incompetence of Harvard’s New Ban on Single-Sex Groups
Harvard University may be the greatest permanent gathering of intellect in the history of the world. It has the finances and managerial expertise to match — in fact, it just concluded a $6.5 billion capital campaign, the largest in the history of ... -
Chuck Schumer: The Best Opponent the Iran Deal Could Have
Senator Chuck Schumer is “working the phones on Iran,” according to a headline in Politico today. Except . . . he seems to be working the phones to tell fellow legislators they don’t have to agree with him: After news of his ... -
This Is Really the Clinton Spin on the E-mail Scandal Now? Really?
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is now resorting to the defense that her using a personal, private e-mail server in contravention of government rules was a good idea because . . . sometimes government servers get hacked, too. Ahem, @JebBush. Three Months Later, State ... -
Tom Friedman Thinks This is a Tough Question for the Republican Candidates. It's Not.
Tom Friedman has an idea for what Republican candidates should be asked Thursday night that will apparently reveal them for the lunatics they are. His idea: If I got to ask one question of the presidential aspirants at Thursday’s ... -
Is Donald Trump Starting to Sound a Little Serious?
//--> Business Insider’s Henry Blodget tweeted that Donald Trump sounded quite presidential and serious during an interview tonight on Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect. With all due respect, I was a little skeptical but . . . lo and behold, Blodget ... -
Planned Parenthood Defund Falls Five Votes Short (Basically)
Republicans failed to get to 60 votes for a procedural vote on a measure to cut off federal funding of Planned Parenthood today, with the vote tally 53 to 46. Republicans are, however, more likely only five votes short of the 60 needed, because ... -
Did Hillary Clinton Just Say the Whole Abortion Industry Should Be Investigated? (Great!)
Hillary has spent most of the last couple of years not responding to questions from the media about actual controversies of the day, and the media never ask Democrats embarrassing abortion questions. So, she may not have been very prepared ... -
Athens of America Rejects the Olympics, Because Democracy Won
The U.S. Olympic Committee announced today that it’s killing Boston’s bid for the 2024 Olympics, after a few days in which the two key local political players — liberal mayor Marty Walsh and moderate Republican governor Charlie Baker — were ... -
Maybe They Just . . . Forgot To?
In April: Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz on Iran nuke inspections: “We expect to have anywhere, anytime access.” April 20 ‘15 http://t.co/3ESiZkZdi5 — Mark Dubowitz (@mdubowitz) June 28, 2015 Ben @rhodes44 told the Israeli people today on TV that framework agreement w/ ... -
Ben Sasse Raises a Problem with the Iran Deal You May Not Have Known About
If Iran is suspected of not complying with the agreement that the Obama administration is trying to finalize this week in Vienna, should it have to demonstrate in a timely fashion that it is, in fact, following the deal, or ... -
Greece, Inching Toward Sanity?
From the Financial Times’ story on the European Central Bank’s and Germany’s announcement that they expect Greece to show up with a plan in Brussels tomorrow: Athens did its best to put its political and financial house in ... -
What If the Iran Deal Broke Down Because Everyone Finally Realized How Naive Obama's Strategy Is?
Many of the reporters and commentators writing about the looming, possible deal between the U.S. and Iran focus on the details of the deal itself — and more specifically, how the Obama administration has conceded almost every issue to the ... -
Supreme Court Forces States to Perform Gay Marriages, 5--4
The Court ruled today that the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Four justices — Alito, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas — all dissented separately. The opinion and dissents are here. The opinion, authored by Justice Kennedy, lays out ... -
Yes, Marco Rubio Read TPP — and That's Not Even What He Voted for Today
Senator Rubio cast a vote today in favor of giving President Obama trade-promotion authority (“TPA”) to negotiate trade deals, a measure that passed the Senate 60–37. According to a headline on Breitbart, this means “MARCO RUBIO CASTS DECIDING VOTE FOR OBAMATRADE ... -
Why the Treasury Is Bumping Alexander Hamilton from the $10 Rather than Replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20
With the news that a woman will be added to the $10 bill — not to the exclusion of founding father Alexander Hamilton, as originally feared, but in addition to him — plenty of people have wondered why the $20 bill wasn’t the ... -
Why the Latest Obama Administration Cave to Iran Matters
John Kerry announced a new concession in nuclear negotiations with Iran today: The Islamic Republic won’t have to make an accounting for its past military-related nuclear research. The Post: “We’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what ... -
45 Times Hillary Clinton Praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership
CNN has turned up a whopping 45 instances in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed a trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that she now says she opposes. Of course, she was doing the bidding of the president, not an independent ... -
Hillary Still Won't Say Anything about Her Position on Today's Most Important Policy Debate
We’re told Hillary Clinton offered her position about the ongoing trade debate yesterday. I’m not really so sure. Her comments are, at best, besides the point, and at worst, completely meaningless. At an event in Iowa: The president ... -
How Much Worse Can the China Data Hacking Get?
First, as John Schindler, a Naval War College professor and former NSA employee, explains, it’s gradually being revealed that the Chinese hackers who broke into the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management got more than just, say, the ... -
Embarassment for Erdogan: He Wanted a Supermajority, and He Got a Minority
The ruling party in Turkey, President Recep Tayip Erdogan’s AK Party, came up short of a majority in today’s Turkish elections, while a Kurdish party won official — and substantial — representation in parliament for the first time. It’s ... -
May Adds 280,000 Jobs, So Is the Economy Back on Track?
The U.S. economy added 280,000 jobs in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest report, an encouraging sign that the weaker jobs growth seen early this year was a passing problem, not a permanent downshift for the economy. ... -
Senate Passes Patriot Act Replacement
The Senate approved a House bill this afternoon that replaces one of the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, the Section 215 metadata-gathering program Edward Snowden revealed, with a more constrained program that aims to offer the intelligence community the ... -
Dennis Hastert Indicted
BuzzFeed reports that the Justice Department has indicted former Republican speaker of the House Dennis Hastert for some kind of misconduct related to payments he made to someone he’d mistreated in the past. If that sounds mystifying, that’s ... -
Court of Appeals Blocks Obama's Executive Amnesty
A three-judge panel for the federal Fifth Circuit Court blocked an appeal from the Obama administration today that sought to lift an injunction against the president’s plan to offer a form of legal status to millions of illegal immigrants. ... -
Obama Has Given Up Debating, Contd.
A few weeks ago, Charlie noted that President Obama’s answer to why liberals could trust he would negotiate an Asian trade deal that’s good for the middle class basically amounted to, “Look, it’s me. I love the ... -
Hillary Answers a Question (By Saying She'll Consider Taking Questions)
After more than a month on the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has answered barely more than a dozen questions from the press, with most replies offering zero substance. Ed Henry of Fox News finally broke through today and got a ... -
This Iraq Charade Is Getting a Little Ridiculous
Marco Rubio and Chris Wallace had a vigorous back and forth this morning on Fox News Sunday, centered around whether Rubio would describe the invasion of Iraq as a “mistake.” Quizzing GOP candidates about their views on the Iraq War ... -
What the Fall of Ramadi Would Mean
As David noted below, the Islamic State has reportedly seized control of a key government complex in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province, raising a flag over the city. A brief summary of the attack from Long War ... -
You Will Not Believe This Abortion-Clinic Ad
Carafem, a D.C. abortion clinic that aims to destigmatize abortion, has already attracted some press for the way it casually treats the procedure it provides. This ad, apparently from the Washington, D.C., subway, though, takes things to a ... -
How Obama's Trade Agreement Could Make It Harder to Fight AIDS Abroad — and Why Americans Should Care
As Vox’s Tim Lee reports, an important AIDS research group is worried that the trade agreement that President Obama may get fast-track authority to negotiate, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, will make it harder for poor countries to fight HIV/AIDS. ... -
Senate Democrats Block Giving Obama Authority for Trade Deal
All but one Senate Democrat voted today to block the opening of debate on a bill that would give President Obama “trade promotion authority,” allowing him to negotiate and finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade and regulatory agreement with about ... -
Do Today's Good Jobs Numbers Mean the Economy Is Back on Track?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy added 223,000 jobs in April, a solid number that’s reassuring after the economy added a below-average number of jobs in March. In fact, we found out today that March ... -
'Why Assad Is Losing'
It’s . . . not quite for the reasons you’d hope. Brookings’s Charles Lister explains: The radical Islamist groups supported by Qatar and Turkey and the more moderate groups backed by the U.S. and Turkey are now getting along ... -
Three Mistakes Huckabee Makes on Social Security
Andrew Biggs of AEI, a former deputy Social Security commissioner, raises three problems with Mike Huckabee’s promise not to touch seniors’ Social Security. I would note that the point about how the FairTax Huckabee supports would hit seniors hard, ... -
Marco Rubio Has a Brilliant Amendment to the Iran Bill
The Senate is currently considering whether to add specific requirements for an Iran deal to the legislation it’s currently considering that will require Obama to submit a deal to Congress, where it could be rejected by a veto-proof majority. ... -
If You Look at the Numbers, One of Scott Walker's Advantages Is Even Bigger Than You'd Think
In the 2016 presidential race, Scott Walker has a couple advantages based on his electoral experiences alone: His back-to-back election victories after changing the state’s public-union rules drew attention and support from grassroots conservatives across the country, and to help ... -
Baltimore's Mayor Says She Didn't Intend to to Give Protesters 'Space' to 'Destroy.’ But What Happened Anyway?
Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake says that she didn’t mean, in some comments she delivered Sunday, that the protesters/rioters in Baltimore had been intentionally given “space” to “destroy” property. “The mayor is not saying that she asked police to ... -
Key Hawkish Lobbying Group Doesn't Want the Corker Bill Strengthened
AIPAC, by far the most powerful lobbying group in Washington when it comes to Israel issues, is opposed to amending a bill the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently passed that gives Congress limited power to review an Iran deal, according ... -
Senate Confirms Loretta Lynch with Ten GOP Votes
The Senate voted 56–43 today to confirm Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s nominee for attorney general. NR’s editors and a number of conservative groups had urged Republicans to vote against her confirmation, on the grounds that she’d promised to ... -
You Can’t — and Shouldn’t — Abolish the IRS
‘Completely unworkable,” “irresponsible,” “happy talk,” “a disservice to the political process.” That’s just a sampling of what tax experts, most of them right of center, told me they think of one of the most popular lines from Ted Cruz’... -
Hillary Clinton Hasn't Actually Said Anything about Trade (Or Any Other Policy Debate)
When people are trying to figure out how far to the left Hillary Clinton will run her campaign, the huge trade deal the Obama administration is negotiating with some Asian countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, has been a timely, important issue ... -
Democrats Stop Filibustering Human Trafficking Bill over Abortion Funding, Loretta Lynch Will Get a Vote
Senate Republicans and Democrats have agreed on a slightly modified version of an anti-human-trafficking bill, allowing the bill, had Democrats had been filibustering for months, to get a vote. Democrats had argued that the bill contained an unprecedented ban on ...