TIME’s photo editors bring you the best pictures of the past week from the Beltway and beyond.
It’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Wisconsin, according to the local forecast. The cold days are almost done and so, too, is the Republican primary. In the week leading up to Tuesday’s nominating contest in Wisconsin, one of the few standing between Mitt Romney and iron-clad inevitability, GOP leaders rallied to the former governor’s banners. Romney finally has the party at his back. But that support also puts a new kind of burden on his shoulders.
Republicans’ cherubic budget crusader, Paul Ryan, unveiled the latest House GOP budget on Tuesday morning. It won’t become law anytime soon, but it can still tell us a few things about the state of fiscal politics in 2012.
Clearly, health care reform was a losing political issue for lots of congressional Democrats, especially those who were up for reelection in 2010. The issue helped mobilize Republican voters who managed to unseat enough Democrats to shift the balance of power on Capitol Hill. Democrats lost their Senate super majority and Republicans now hold a [...]
The ubiquitous fact-checking outfit PolitiFact has chosen Democrats’ charge that Paul Ryan’s budget would “end Medicare” as its Lie of the Year. This dubious honor, which follows 2009 and 2010 rulings that both went against the GOP for its health care claims, is a coup for House Republicans, who will no doubt face an onslaught [...]
In the wake of the debt-ceiling debate, young voters might find it hard to believe that just ten years ago, “compassionate conservative” was a mantle worn with a straight face by many GOP leaders. In fact, you could argue that George W. Bush split the independent vote with Al Gore in 2000 because of his [...]
Here is a Washington truism for 2011: It’s all about jobs, except when it is not, which is most of the time. House Republicans are about to put their deficit cutting plan on the table, a snappy sounding piece of legislation called Cut, Cap, and Balance. It has three main parts: First, cut $111 billion [...]
On Tuesday, as congressional leaders and President Obama fought a public battle over cutting spending and increasing revenue, Rep. Paul Ryan was elsewhere, leading a discussion over an issue that just happens to be at the center of the current debate over national debt: Medicare spending. Ryan, GOP chairman of the House Budget Committee, recently [...]
(This post was update at 6:35 p.m.) Yes, we’re back here again already, with at least one Republican claiming this week that Democratic health reform will kill seniors. Sigh. The target of the GOP attack is the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a controversial group to be appointed by the president and charged with slowing the [...]
On the campaign trial – especially the presidential campaign trail – nuance rarely breaks through the fog of generalization. Mitt Romney is the frontrunner and a flip-flopper on the issues. Michele Bachmann is the Tea Party favorite and an evangelical Christian. Jon Huntsman worked for Obama, but might have a good shot in a general [...]
