Jindal could have been the face of a modern Republican Party: racially diverse, factually based, mathematically literate, governmentally competent. Instead, he epitomizes a "stupid party" he claimed to reject.

In Tuesday's Republican presidential debate, both Senator Rand Paul and former Governor Jeb Bush tried to offer a new Republican approach to climate, and both got tied up in knots.

Democrats have won the presidential popular vote for five of the last six elections. So don't let anyone tell you than the midterms and off-year election results mean that the nation is fundamentally conservative and Republican.

Instead of spending the time to identify new ideas, craft polices and corral support for those policies among party members, Republicans spent the last few years going down the Benghazi and IRS rabbit holes.

Boehner and McCarthy ducking a fight with the Freedom Caucus on the basis of party unity is like refusing to get chemotherapy because you want your body to be united with your cancerous tumor.

Proposing a handgun ban certainly wouldn't make it become law anytime soon, but it would refocus the debate on the actual source of most of our senseless gun deaths.

Speaker John Boehner has to reckon with the fact that winning the midterms did nothing to make his party more responsible and did nothing to advance his own policy goals.

Jeb is planting his flag on constantly moving ground. GDP has steadily grown throughout the Obama presidency after the stimulus sparked the recovery. If the recent strong quarters hold up, Bush's pledge will be exposed as decidedly empty.

But Boehner set his resignation date for October 30th, not September 30th. He's giving himself an extra month. That means he can try to pass still more things with the help of Democrats.

Some anti-abortion conservatives are one week from shutting down the government over Planned Parenthood funding. Yet they got no encouragement from the leader of the world's biggest anti-abortion institution.

Those watching the juvenile tactics on the House floor may ask themselves who they would rather handle our delicate foreign policy matters: those who accept reality or those who don't.

Republicans are already stuck trying to keep the government open through a slapdash "continuing resolution" instead of a negotiated budget. They can't earn an "A." Can they avoid shutdown and get a "C"?

The Iran deal will not be scuttled by Congress now that President Obama has secured the support of enough Senate Democrats to sustain any veto of any attempt to strip Obama of his authority to waive sanctions. It's a historic win for peace.

The more the Left agitates the Right over Planned Parenthood, the greater the likelihood that next year's budget will include more government spending and more stimulus for the economy.

The die-hard Trump fans who think he has magical abilities to transform Washington need only look at the last couple of celebrity blowhards who swept into office on a promise of radical change: Governors Ventura and Schwarzenegger.

Trump is not only the obstacle in Jeb's way. His anti-immigrant bigotry is a cancer on the Republican Party. Jeb seems to grasp more than most that the cancer needs to be removed

Republicans used to brag about their "deep bench" of governors, diligently solving problems in contrast to the dysfunction happening in Washington. No more. They've been eclipsed by Trump, Carson and Fiorina.

No one will vote for a candidate with no governing experience on the basis on a single issue. And it's not true that nothing good can happen until we enact his package of election reforms.

After the debacle of George W. Bush’s conservative economic policy and foreign policy, Republicans still have something to prove. They didn’t prove anything last night.