Minnesota Lawyer

If three Republican Senate candidates lost — because of better-than-expected Democratic turnout, last-minute shifts in the race, or dumb luck — Republicans would come up just short of a majority.

Raising the minimum wage is as popular an idea as ever. It’s also a worse idea than ever.

House Republicans who want to advance what they call “comprehensive immigration reform” say they’ve found a workable compromise, one that allays the concerns of opponents, improves current policy and allows the party to make gains among Hispanics.

His press coverage has been brutal. His poll numbers are dropping. His enemies inside and outside his party are crowing that his presidential ambitions are over, and some journalists agree.

President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul looks extremely unlikely to hit the goal set for it in October: enrolling “at least” 7 million people in exchanges by April. So the administration is redefining success as mere survival for the program.

Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, wants to cut corporate tax rates. But he’s finding that corporations are lining up to criticize his proposal.

Last week, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, picked just the right words to make an increasingly hot controversy even hotter. Like many education officials in both parties, Duncan is a defender of the Common Core initiative to create uniform academic standards for K-12 education in all states.

The fifth and sixth years of a presidency often end up being high noon for judicial politics. This time the first confrontation concerns the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the venue for many important regulatory issues and a training ground for future Supreme Court justices.

For many supporters of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, continued resistance to the law isn’t just mistaken. It’s downright pathological. They view it this way: Republicans were within their rights to oppose the law while Congress was debating it, but fighting it three years after it was enacted, and more than a year after the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional, is extreme and dangerous.

Watching cable coverage of the possible military strike on Syria, my wife noticed a repeated verbal slip: People kept saying “Saddam” when they meant “Assad.”