"There are a lot of people who want to conveniently lay the blame for this stunning failure on recalcitrant members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. If only these conservative hardliners were willing to give way, we'd be on the road to repeal, defenders of leadership would like to have us believe. This is convenient, both because there are always people in Washington eager to take aim at conservative purists, and also because it has the makings of a great ironic hot take for journalists: 'How conservatives saved Obamacare.' ...

"In this case, the hardliners were playing a productive role by pointing out the real policy consequences of the piecemeal approach being pursued by the House leadership. Though we'll never know for sure how the numbers might have looked if a vote had taken place, it's clear that many centrist members of the Republican caucus were also prepared to vote this bill down. House conservatives, if they could be blamed for anything, it's for having the audacity to urge leadership to actually honor seven years of pledges to voters to repeal Obamacare. If anybody was moving the goal posts, it wasn't Freedom Caucusers, it was those who were trying to sell a bill that kept much of Obamacare's regulatory architecture in place as a free market repeal and replace plan."

"Republican congressional investigators expect a potential 'smoking gun' establishing that the Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team, and possibly the president-elect himself, will be produced to the House Intelligence Committee this week, a source told Fox News. ...

"The intelligence is said to leave no doubt the Obama administration, in its closing days, was using the cover of legitimate surveillance on foreign targets to spy on President-elect Trump, according to sources. ...

"The FBI hasn't been responsive to the House Intelligence Committee's request for documents, but the National Security Agency is expected to produce documents to the committee by Friday. The NSA document production is expected to produce more intelligence than Nunes has so far seen or described -- including what one source described as a potential 'smoking gun' establishing the spying.

"Some time will be needed to properly assess the materials, with the likely result being that congressional investigators and attorneys won't have a solid handle on the contents of the documents -- and their implications -- until next week."

"Intelligence agencies cannot share details about American citizens with no foreign intelligence value. If [House Intelligence Committee Chairman David] Nunes is right, how were these procedures not broken? If a Bush-era intelligence agency had engaged in 'incidental collection' of Barack Obama's phone calls in 2008, and then disseminated that information, the Earth would have stopped in its orbit. (Sen. Rand Paul claims Obama's phone calls were intercepted 1,227 times and then masked. Being caught up in surveillance doesn't necessarily mean you're guilty of anything.) Now, because the person involved is named Donald Trump, journalists sprinted to the nearest media platform to push back against the story. ...

"Journalists, many of whom take every conspiracy about Russia and Trump seriously, have no reason to dismiss the potential abuses of the NSA. Even if intel agencies failed to minimize frivolous information, it is still an abuse. Nunes, as far as I know, has not made any bizarre allegations in the past. It's not implausible that information legally obtained about Trump was subsequently abused by a government agency. In fact, Democrats have been warning us for years that something like this would happen."

"So here we are with gallons of ink, forests of trees and gigabytes of pixels being spent on one single tweet where Mr. Trump regurgitated press accounts reporting that the Obama administration used electronic surveillance to investigate Mr. Trump's campaign.

"That claim is incontrovertibly accurate. The hardest and clearest evidence of this is that Mr. Trump's national security adviser and former campaign operative Mike Flynn was fired over lying about leaked transcripts of 'wiretapped' phone calls between him and the Russian ambassador.

"No one can dispute that intelligence officials inside the Obama administration used electronic surveillance to spy on the Trump campaign. All anybody can quibble about -- and quibble they have -- is the exact wording Mr. Trump used in his 140-characters-or-less message."

Read entire article here

"Judge Gorsuch's opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee was a model of gratitude and grace. ...

"It was the end of his testimony, however, that was most powerful. Reflecting on a tombstone of a colonial-era lawyer and judge, a man named Increase Sumner, Judge Gorsuch quoted his epitaph:

'As a lawyer, he was faithful and able. As a judge, patient, impartial, and decisive. In private life he was affectionate and mild. In public life he was dignified and firm. Party feuds were allayed by the correctness of his conduct. Calumny was silenced by the weight of his virtues, and rancor softened by the amenity of his manners.'

"Gorsuch says those words guide him, serving for him as a 'daily reminder of the law's integrity, that a useful life can be led in its service, of the hard work it takes, and an encouragement to good habits when I fail and when I falter.' The evidence that he lives those values is found in the bipartisan acclaim for his courtesy and integrity. At today's hearing, Americans saw a humble public servant, and in these troubled times, a little humility is exactly what America needs to see."

"Already, Democrats in the Senate have declared that they have no interest in taking Judge Gorsuch or his confirmation hearings seriously.

"'The high burden of proof that Judge Gorsuch has to meet is largely a result of the president who nominated him,' said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat who was elected to the Senate from the ridiculous state of Connecticut despite repeatedly lying about fighting in the Vietnam War.

"In other words, according to Mr. Blumenthal, it's all about politics. Nothing to do with the Constitution. He doesn't like the president, so he will never vote for Judge Gorsuch's confirmation.

"Break out the smelling salts. It's gonna be a long, putrid week along the Potomac River."

"For much of the Washington news media, cutting federal funding for something is the same as opposing that thing. Trump's budget, however, makes a distinction that these critics miss. Federal funding should be for things that are best done by the federal government. Many things are better done at a level of government closer to the individual, or even outside government altogether. ...

"Total funding levels matter. Efficiency and demonstration of results are important. But the most important thing in this budget is the White House's efforts to get the federal government back in the business of doing what it should be doing and can do better than anyone else, and leaving the other things, however crucial they are, to the people who can do them better."

"House Speaker Paul Ryan says the nation has just two options. It can accept his repeal and replace bill or it can keep the mess it already has. 'It really comes down to a binary choice,' he said, trying to whip recalcitrant conservatives into line behind the American Health Care Act. 'This is the closest we will ever get to repealing and replacing Obamacare.' ...

"There's another option. Republicans could pass a better Obamacare replacement, one that doesn't preserve costly regulations or create a brand new entitlement. ...

"There's also no reason to believe the current bill has a better chance of passing than a genuinely conservative alternative. Centrist Republicans are abandoning Ryan's bill after the Congressional Budget Office predicted that it would leave millions more people without insurance. ...

"The 'binary choice' is a false premise and thus a bad argument. It's also bad politics that will yield bad policy. Republicans and conservatives who want real healthcare reform (not merely tax cuts) should withhold support at least until their leaders agree to consider other possible roads out of Obamacare."

"MSNBC's unapologetic liberal 'journalist' Rachel Maddow lit the internet on fire Tuesday night when she teased via Twitter that she'd gotten her hands on President Donald Trump's tax returns -- a scoop that would have been pretty juicy, considering Trump never released his tax returns during the presidential campaign as all other modern-era presidents have done.

"If only it'd been true.

"What Maddow and the fine folks over at MSNBC actually managed to do was get part of a copy of Trump's 2005 tax return. Which was already 12 years old. And which the White House had already released.

"And which the Wall Street Journal had already reported on -- a year ago."

"Why is IRS Commissioner John Koskinen still in office? A growing number of Capitol Hill Republicans want to know -- and they have good reason to be troubled.

"When he took over in 2013, Koskinen was supposed to 'fix' the IRS -- and in particular get to the bottom of the scandal in which the agency deliberately held up approvals for 75 conservative and Tea Party groups that had applied for legitimate tax exemptions.

"Instead, what Congress and the public got from him was obstruction, open defiance and a refusal to discipline anyone at the agency. Indeed, he seemed most concerned with running interference to shield the Obama administration from any embarrassment. ...

"It's clear there'll be no IRS reforms while Koskinen is in office. He's the No. 1 candidate in Washington for President Trump's signature line: 'You're fired.'"