It’s been about two weeks since House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he would retire, and a narrative has already emerged about Ryan’s legacy and why he wanted out. In short: Ryan had no place in President Trump’s Republican Party. Ryan is a standard establishment Republican, the narrative goes, uninterested in President Trump’s populist bromides […]
House Speaker Paul Ryan announced Wednesday that he won’t seek re-election in 2018, marking the retirement of one of the two most powerful Republicans in Congress. In an emergency edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Julia Azari and Perry Bacon Jr. react to the news. While it’s a big retirement, it’s not exactly unexpected. You […]
Al Capone was busted for tax evasion. Leona Helmsley was, too. But gangsters and entitled millionaires aren’t the only ones who hold something back from the tax man. Each year, Americans of all stripes underpay the IRS by hundreds of billions, aided by the fact that the agency lacks the resources to catch all the […]
We think of today’s Washington as being rigidly divided along party lines on nearly every issue. But a bloc of Democrats in the Senate just joined with Republicans and the Trump administration on a bill that would lighten some restrictions on banks imposed by the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, one of President Obama’s signature policy […]
The announcement on Thursday night that President Trump planned to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, likely in May, was weird. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson seemed blindsided by the move, it breaks with U.S. precedent (no sitting commander in chief has ever met with a North Korean leader), and it was announced at […]