Republican Party

“South Carolina has passed a bill that criminalizes the implementation of Obama’s health care law reform law,” said HuffPost Live host Jacob Soboroff last week. The claim, from the Huffington Post and others, is that South Carolina is attempting to “nullify” Obamacare.

Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina occupies a strange place on the spectrum of American politics. An 18-year House veteran from the conservative coast, Jones is a pro-life former Democrat, raised Baptist but a Catholic convert. The 70-year-old Republican’s biggest claim to fame may have come in 2003 when France decided not to participate in the American-led coalition invading Iraq. In a moment of patriotic pique, Jones, following the lead of a diner in his district, directed the House cafeterias to rename French fries as “freedom fries.”

At the Republican National Committee’s self-healing session Monday morning at the National Press Club, Chairman Reince Priebus ran through a five-point “action plan” for moving the party forward. It’s a plan, Priebus said, of “bold strokes” that shows the GOP is “done with business as usual.” Per the recommendations of an internal review of “what went wrong” in 2012, the RNC will be working to improve in five areas: “messaging, demographic partners, campaign mechanics, technology, and the primary process.”

Former Republican governor William Weld of Massachusetts says he isn't seeking Secretary of State John Kerry's Senate seat. NBC reports:

In March 1975, with the United States in post-Watergate disarray at home, stunned by repeated diplomatic defeats at the United Nations, and about to suffer the humiliation of seeing an ally at whose side we had fought for many years be overrun by the North Vietnamese Communist Army, Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked: “What then does the United States do?”

His answer, in an article in Commentary magazine:

At the Washington Post, Jen Rubin writes of a renewed interest in compassionate conservatism, citing Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, Republican Paul Ryan, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, writing in THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Here's Rubin:

The New York Times has greeted the appointment of South Carolina congressman Tim Scott to succeed fellow Republican Jim DeMint in the Senate with an op-ed decrying the selection--and Scott himself--as "token."

What happened with the Senate? That’s one question Republicans are likely asking themselves after a disappointing Election Day.

Viewers of the 2012 debates have witnessed an extraordinary turnaround. John Stuart Mill famously spoke of “a party of order and stability, and a party of progress or reform.” Once upon a time, Barack Obama and Joe Biden could claim the mantle of change and progress. But the televised exchanges between Mitt Romney and Obama and Paul Ryan and Biden have revealed that this is no longer the case.

The Massachusetts Republican party has a new ad criticizing Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren for her real estate speculation practices--purchasing homes, many of which were foreclosures, and selling them for a profit. The video claims Warren was "profitting off the misery of the middle class" while later railing against real estate speculation in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis. Watch the ad below:

I have been reading A Time for Choosing, the wonderful new e-book from RCP’s Carl Cannon and Tom Bevan about the 2012 campaign, and was really struck by this passage about the Democratic counter-punch to Team Romney. Cannon and Bevan note how Democrats decided to attack Romney as:

On his personal website, former congressman Artur Davis confirmed at least some of the recent rumors surrounding him—that the lifelong Democrat, the man who endorsed Barack Obama for president early in 2007 and seconded his nomination at the Democratic party convention in 2008, now considers himself a Republican. Here's Davis on his switch: