Lamar Smith

Paul Ryan and his utterly dysfunctional House Republican conference is riven with so much in-fighting and back-stabbing and with so many ideological purity tests that they can't get anything done-- not even the most basic functions of government. The Florida delegation-- both Democrats and Republicans-- have been begging and are now demanding that Ryan call Congress back into session to deal with the Zika crisis.

One ominous development we've been watching with alarm this cycle is the DCCC's systematic discounting of the public's preferences in primaries. It seems that every time a progressive wins, the DCCC decides the district is "not winnable" and they immediately abandon the winner and the district.

A week or so ago, the editors of Scientific American did something I never saw them do before-- they took a partisan political stand. They didn't mention any names, but it's clear they had two rotten characters in mind, Donald J. Trump and one of his top enablers in Texas, House Science Committee chairman Lamar Smith. Smith's district is not some backward hellhole like Louie's Gohmert's district.

In his darkly dismal and negative-- albeit low energy-- foreign policy speech in Youngstown yesterday, Trump was hawking some kind of an ideological test for immigrants and even would-be visitors to the U.S.

Lamar Smith and Roger Williams-- this is not Austin, TexasIn 2003, Tom DeLay did Travis County in. It was part of a masterplan that brought Texas from a state with 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans in Congress to one with 21 Republicans and 11 Democrats.

For nearly a decade now, the Republican Party in the House thought it would be funny to appoint anti-Science neanderthals to the House Science Committee.

Indiana's somewhat senile retiring lobbyist-turned-senator, Dan Coates, called Ted Cruz "a wrecking ball" yesterday and added gratuitously that "he's the most self-centered, narcissistic, pathological liar I’ve ever seen." He went on to accuse Cruz of trying to hurt the Republican Party.

I readily admit that I don't know what transpired when then-Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy decided who to put on the House Science and Technology Committee.

President Obama started asking congressional Republicans for emergency Zika funding in March. BY May they hadn't done a damn thing. We wrote at the time that instead of cooperation, what the House Republican leaders had given Obama instead of cooperation was more deranged right-wing intransigence and more of their crazy, dangerous anomie.

Barbara Lee says no wars without congressional approval; Fred Upton disagreesLast week the House passed the 2017 Defense Appropriations bill. As part of the debate, Barbara Lee (D-CA) offered an amendment that would prohibit the use of funds for the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, a blanket excuse any president-- Clinton or Trump-- could use to attack anyone, anywhere without seeking constitutionally-mandated congressional approval.