Minnesota Lawyer

Let’s get something straight: Sequestration doesn’t prove that the government is broken or that it can’t get anything done. If anything, it proves the opposite. This is the American government working. Compromising, even.

For years, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson pulled off a very unusual and very difficult trick: They managed to position themselves firmly in the political center even as their budget proposal was far beyond the boundaries of what either party was proposing.

In November 2011, Rep. Barney Frank, the mouthy Massachusetts Democrat, announced that he would retire from Congress in January 2013. A few short weeks after his retirement last month, he had second thoughts about leaving Washington.

Something very interesting is happening in the Republican Party. It’s just not entirely clear what it is, or how far it can go.

Washington tends to have a narrow view of what counts as “economic policy.” Anything we do to the tax code is in. So is any stimulus we pass, or any deficit reduction we try. Most of this mistakes the federal budget for the economy.

U.S. President Barack Obama begins his second term confronting a familiar and frustrating incongruity: the gap between how much change he has fostered and how little about the country seems different.

For all the bitterness in Washington these days, it’s easy to miss the broad consensus that undergirds our contentious politics. Republicans swear to protect Medicare and Social Security, and most recognize they can no longer hope to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Democrats voted to make the George W. Bush tax rates permanent for almost all Americans.

For a 70-year-old man, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden sure spends an awful lot of time winning the Internet. No other living politician has quite the same ratio of words spoken to memes inspired.

On Jan. 3, the 112th Congress of the United States of America finally ended. Thank God. To properly evaluate the 112th, consider the record of its predecessor, the 111th Congress, which ran from January 2009 to January 2011.

Is the deficit reduction deal being negotiated by President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner likely to be small-ball, medium-sized or a massive grand bargain that restructures the federal budget?