The crazy-quilt tax legislation and the jerry-rigged prescription drug plans show what happens when Congress sacrifices deliberation for partisan efficiency.

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?

For the first time in 20 years, Saudi Arabia has named an ambassador to Iraq. For years the Saudis resisted U.S. entreaties to take this step, and the current relationship between these two most important Arab countries in the Gulf has not been warm, so the timing is curious and...

Many commentators have noted that if the Super Committee fails, the sky will not fall, at least not immediately. The sequesters that would be triggered do not take effect until 2013, after all. Here is the starker reality.

House Republicans have broken the hugely successful spectrum auction authorization first effected in 1993 and also delayed for many years any possibility that digital broadcast spectrum that is almost entirely unused can be repurposed to serve the growing demands for wireless broadband.

The new rules package, combined with other procedural changes, is an interesting mix of commendable components and positive motives with more pernicious elements that go in a very different direction.

Cass R. Sunstein argues that the key to preventing the spread of extremist views is ensuring that like-minded groups encounter a diversity of opinions within civil society.

In conjunction with the Reform Institute, Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution have co-written a report entitled “Restoring Order: Practical Solutions to Congressional Dysfunction.” In the report, the authors offer concrete suggestions that the leaders of the next Congress should...