This Bradley Lecture is based on Brooks’s new book, “The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise” (Basic Books, May 2012).

Export-related jobs are a huge and important driver of the U.S. economy, and the record of the Ex-Im Bank is clear: Using private funds and with minimal exposure to taxpayers, it has been a major driver of U.S. exports and a driver of jobs and corporate profits in the United States.

If ever we need evidence of ideology run rampant, the House vote to eliminate the annual American Community Survey and the Economic Census to provide basic information on the state of businesses and industries in the country and data used for generating quarterly gross domestic product estimates is exhibit A.

Imagine if Montgomery and Helderman's editor had demanded that they deliberately slant a story to benefit an advertiser, and they and the rest of the reporting staff responded by walking out and shutting down the paper in protest. Would it be accurate to say that Washington Post reporters picked a fight?

Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget is a big story in Congress, even though it barely made it through the House Budget Committee, will take a battle to pass on the House floor and has zero chance of being embraced as is, or in any facsimile, in the Senate. So why is it so big?

On the disaster relief front, Cantor's office released a study by the majority staff of the House Appropriations Committee saying that offsets on disaster relief are actually commonplace, if not routine. I dug into their examples a bit, albeit with my limited expertise on what really goes down on the process for supplemental appropriations, and found the examples they used shaky at best.

John Boehner and Eric Cantor want to see Congress approve or disapprove major agency resolutions. Democrats will offer a grab bag of excuses for why this should not be done.