Browse Research and Commentary

Today, committees have lost much of their autonomy to party leaders. As a result, investigations are often used in periods of divided government as a partisan tool to club the administration and its supporters. More often than not, committee investigations become arenas for majority party “message politics” — contests designed to score political points rather than to identify problems or to generate solutions that can garner bipartisan support. The higher the partisanship in Congress, the lower its committees seem to fall.

May 9, 2013, Sarah A. Binder, New York Times

When budget cuts hit high-profile business travelers, you can get Congress to act.

April 30, 2013, Darrell M. West, Bloomberg

One of [Cass Sunstein's] proudest accomplishments, he says, was nudging the Department of Agriculture toward replacing its old 'food pyramid' with a simpler 'food plate' showing that half your diet should be fruits and vegetables. He presided over big-ticket items too, including a rule to standardize safety warning labels that could save employers as much as $2.5 billion, and a rule to simplify doctors' and nurses' paperwork that could save hospitals and medical practices as much as $5 billion.

April 29, 2013, Cass Sunstein, Los Angeles Times

[The Obama administration hasn't] advertised [its regulation-trimming efforts] very well. No one knows that they've even been trying, let alone that they've accomplished anything.

April 28, 2013, Elaine Kamarck, Los Angeles Times

It seems to me that when you want an ambassador, two very important assets are proximity to the president—which [Caroline Kennedy] clearly has—and visibility. There has been a pattern in the past of appointing high-profile people to this post and that [Ms. Kennedy's nomination] would fit into the pattern. This is a complicated region, but she has those two very important assets.

April 1, 2013, Mireya Solís, Wall Street Journal

The airspace [for the FAA's six drone test sites], under the current schedule, opens up [in] 2015...and so we will see one of the most fundamental shifts in who and how you can use the airspace above us.

February 26, 2013, Peter W. Singer, National Public Radio

There's a defense wing of defense hawks, and they've been pretty vocal about the impact on the Defense Department and national security, generally. And we know there's a hard-core group as well that's opposed to any and all revenue increases. And between the two of those, there's no agreed-upon path of what to do, and so it looks like they may prefer the sequester to any alternative — certainly the alternatives the Democrats are offering up.

February 21, 2013, Sarah A. Binder, National Public Radio

[Without U.S. approval] the whole effort to make the IMF a more accountable, more legitimate institution worldwide cannot really be fulfilled.

February 15, 2013, Domenico Lombardi, Bloomberg

I think that Obama's second inaugural address will go down in history as the last speech of his election campaign. I think the 2013 State of the Union address will be regarded as the framing speech for his second term. If President Obama wants to be a transformational president and be regarded in history in that way, he's going to have to build on this new vision of government that he's advancing.

February 11, 2013, William A. Galston, AFP

[Obama's tone of his ’08 campaign] hasn’t worked very well, but this is the moment to go back to it, because if he doesn’t, he dooms the rest of his term to squabbling with the Republicans.

February 11, 2013, Alice M. Rivlin, The Daily Beast

Don’t hold your breath [on Obama seriously tackling entitlement reform]. He has every reason to sit tight and play to his base. The American public is very much on his side.

February 11, 2013, Ron Haskins, The Daily Beast

The public views a downgrade of the U.S. debt rating as just one more sign that the government doesn’t know what it’s doing.

January 28, 2013, Douglas J. Elliott, Reuters

[Filibustering of a presidential nominee is] just sort of emblematic of senators pushing their powers here into an area where we traditionally said that senators are willing to defer to the president.

January 11, 2013, Sarah A. Binder, National Public Radio

[Jack Lew] is a political insider without a close relationship or linkage to outside business groups. He will not be a particularly effective emissary between the President and the business community or other outside groups. I don’t think he has any particular leverage with the Congress and will not find it easy to bring in outside business groups to pressure the Republicans.

January 10, 2013, Barry P. Bosworth, International Business Times

[The fiscal cliff negotiations are] very bad for the economy and for our image in the world. We don't look like a country in charge of its own destiny. That's hard to quantify but it's bad.

January 2, 2013, Alice M. Rivlin, Reuters

The reality is it is not tenable simply for Republicans to stay in opposition for the whole second term of President Obama. If they are seen as the obstacle to doing anything to solve our problems, they are writing their own death certificate.

December 25, 2012, Thomas E. Mann, Voice of America

[America] has moved so very quickly from the broad argument of the campaign to the great difficulty of governing under a deadline.

November 28, 2012, E.J. Dionne, Jr., New Haven Register

If you are going to do something big or important, do it fast. A presidential administration is like an hourglass with the sand running out. There is a blip up with your second inauguration. You know the odds are that you are going to lose seats at the midterm election, and pretty soon you are going to look pretty lame-duckish, as even your supporters start to choose up sides over your successor.

November 23, 2012, Stephen Hess, National Journal

I suspect that in a war of wills between the parties [in Congress], an intense minority might prevail. After all, the majority typically has a full agenda on its plate and is just as likely to want to move on to other issues [giving in to the filibuster] as it is to battle it out with the minority.

November 17, 2012, Sarah A. Binder, Washington Post

What I would guess is the tea party types and other activist conservatives will heckle him [Rep. Scott DesJarlais] into leaving (Congress). He can expect a (primary) challenge.

November 16, 2012, Thomas E. Mann, USA Today

In the U.S. today, polarization is structural. Members of Congress are worried about their own campaigns over national issues — no one gets punished for standing their ground, they get punished for compromise.

November 14, 2012, Jonathan Rauch, The Madison Times

Forces within the Democratic Party are clearly mobilizing to prevent President Obama from returning to anything resembling the 2011 negotiations. Where [Nancy Pelosi] will come down on that, I don't know.

November 14, 2012, William A. Galston, The Daily Beast

When it comes to getting economic growth or not, I'm pretty skeptical about how much power he [President Obama] has.

November 10, 2012, Philip A. Wallach, The Atlanta Journal Constitution

No consensus between the parties is in sight after the election, and polarization has been exacerbated, not diminished.

November 10, 2012, Thomas E. Mann, The Arab American News

[Nonproliferation is] going to be very high on [Obama’s] agenda. Preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons is a critical imperative for bolstering the nonproliferation regime.

November 7, 2012, Martin S. Indyk, Reuters