One thing members of Congress need to realize is how much their reliance on staffers is hurting the institution and helping make it unaccountable.

One Blue Dog Democratic House Member reminded me earlier this month of the saying that 'insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' He wondered if his fellow Members weren't more in need of advice from psychiatrists than from economists at this point.

As government grows, its increased power to grant favors or inflict pain attracts more people who would abuse the system.

Rhetoric is cheap, evidence comes more dearly.

I think the only way we retain credibility with the Arab world is to say, 'When push came to shove, despite the mistakes we made in the past, we are with you in democracy.'

There have been brilliant satires about the tax bureaucracy before, from the Beatles song ‘The Taxman’ to the film ‘Harry’s War,’ but in some ways Jim Greenfield’s The Taxman Cometh outdoes them all. His tale of a little guy who can’t take it anymore is both compelling and timely, given the tax scandals we read about in Washington almost every day.

I believe careers should be judged independently unless there's a clear conflict of interest in a specific case.

I think Democrats often hold the unconstrained vision, and Republicans focus more on the Rule of Law.

The Civil War was about a lot of things, but the core of it was slavery. That was the original sin.

Dozens of members of Congress will be retiring next month, and some should be missed. But there is only one Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma senator the Christian Science Monitor has dubbed 'a rabble-rousing statesman.'