Weekly Columns

Tax day and the stress that comes along with it has come and gone at last. The annual drill of gathering all those necessary income documents, navigating complicated instructions, completing numerous tax forms and finally filing our taxes is over—at least for now.

Two months late and $8.2 trillion short, President Obama’s fiscal year 2014 budget blueprint finally arrived on Capitol Hill. While the unveiling of the White House budget is usually the first event of the yearly budget season, its arrival well after passage of the House Republican budget makes the contrast between the two plans even more dramatic.

If only President Obama would take his approach to energy production and apply it to the national debt, we’d be down to 2007 levels in no time. According to a new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), his administration’s policies have caused production on federal lands to plummet.

One of the first questions reporters asked House Republicans when we unveiled our “Path to Prosperity” budget plan is “Why does the plan repeal Obamacare?” The answer is simple: Obamacare is an economic disaster.

It may be March Madness in the NCAA, but a rare burst of sanity played out this month on Capitol Hill. House Republicans passed an important funding measure well in advance of the deadline. This is not an unusual occurrence since we have done the same with previous government funding legislation, as well as multiple bills to address the fiscal cliff, sequester and a number of other contentious issues. The twist this time is that the Democratic Senate actually took up the bill in a timely manner, made amendments and sent it back to the House for final passage.

House Republicans presented our annual budget blueprint last week, followed the next day by Senate Democrats. The contrast between the two plans could not be more stark.

Much like the Mayan Apocalypse, the dreaded beginning of sequestration came and went without much fanfare. After the $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts went into effect on March 1, President Obama’s doomsday prophecies were exposed as politically motivated exaggerations and, in some cases, outright fallacies. Claims from the Obama administration that teachers are beginning to receive “pink slips” and Capitol Hill janitors are facing pay cuts were both awarded “Four Pinocchios” -- the highest score on the Washington Post fact checkers’ dishonesty scale.

The rate of domestic violence and sexual assault for Native American women has reached epidemic proportions due in large part to a stunning legal loophole that severely limits tribal ability to prosecute these crimes. Until recently, non-Indians accused of misdemeanor domestic violence crimes against tribal members could only be prosecuted by the federal government and some states – not by the local tribal courts.