Speaker Boner

Enlarge Mark Wilson/Getty Images President Obama walks onstage Dec. 22 to urge members of Congress to vote on a short-term compromise that extended the payroll tax cut. Mark Wilson/Getty Images President Obama walks onstage Dec. 22 to urge members of Congress to vote on a short-term compromise that extended the payroll tax cut. Even as [...]

Susan Walsh/AP House Speaker John Boehner, surrounded by Republican House members, speaks during a news conference in Washington in December. The House initially rejected a plan to extend a tax cut for two months to buy time for talks on a full-year renewal. It later compromised — a rare event in 2011. Congress got plenty [...]

While major media outlets from the major television networks to the Wall Street Journal viewed the showdown over the extension of the payroll tax holiday through a political lens in 2011 and judged House Speaker John Boehner the loser, the reality is that Boehner’s courageous stand – in the face of certain political pillorying – [...]

Master musical satirist Tom Lehrer once said that political satire became obsolete the day Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. And Lehrer surely had a point: The political arena increasingly is — and perhaps always has been — something of a theater of the absurd. Year-end news-in-review wrap-ups yield an annual refrain: You can’t [...]

Years that do not feature national elections generally get overlooked by political historians and the years before presidential elections are portrayed as the calm before the storm. There was little calm about 2011 in either national or state politics. Following the Republican victories in 2010, the tea party movement left its impact on Congress as [...]