Politics

By Alexandra Petri I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low.”— Excerpt from George W. Bush’s…

According to Rhe Washington Post, President Barack Obama signaled a willingness to compromise with Republicans on tax cuts and energy policy Wednesday, one day after his party lost control of the House and suffered deep Senate losses in the midterm elections. Obama called the Republican victories “a shellacking.” At a White House news conference, the…

The headlines tell us of big Republican gains in these midterm elections, including the retaking of control of the U.S. House of Representatives. They also point to a number of victories for candidates from the far-right Tea Party movement. True enough. And this is news. But I am not depressed or alarmed by these election…

Excerpt: Three times in the past century, a sitting president’s party has lost its majority in at least one house of Congress. And all three times, the president went on to win re-election — Harry Truman in 1948, Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 and Bill Clinton in 1996. So if, as expected, the GOP takes the…

No matter their political affiliation, the experts on the panel at D.C.-based emerging-leaders organization IMPACT‘s Election Night Party, which The Root co-sponsored with the CBC Institute, BET and Politic365, agreed that increased political engagement is paramount in the black community. The panel, moderated by BET White House correspondent Andre Showell, opened the evening at Washington,…

Despite efforts by President Barack Obama and the Democrats to rally their base at the eleventh hour, voter anger about the shabby state of the economy swept through Congress on Tuesday, leaving in its wake a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. As of 11 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, CNN was predicting that the GOP…

On their way to wresting control of the House of Representatives and consolidating their ranks in the U.S. Senate in Tuesday’s midterm elections, conservative Republicans managed to turn a self-described former witch into a “constitutional conservative” while calling Barack Obama — a former constitutional lawyer — an enemy of the Constitution. They got indignant when…

Barack Obama and black America wake up today to a new political reality: a House of Representatives under control of the Republican Party and a U.S. Senate with a slim Democratic majority. The White House started putting its spin on the shift of power in the week before the election. There were hints that Obama…

If the United States is a car broken down on the edge of a highway somewhere, the Senate is its dry, ill-maintained, crapped-out engine. Since the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, our nation’s 100-member upper house has been, thanks to a monolithic block of obstructionist Republicans, a largely useless body of angry white men, many…