Free Republic

Former House Speaker Tip O'Neill famously said that all politics is local. And it mostly was, in his time: He was first elected to the Massachusetts legislature's lower house in 1936 and became its speaker in 1949, and was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1952 and became its speaker in 1977. Those were years when there was constant churning and turmoil in partisan politics. Yankee Republicans yielded majority status to Catholic Democrats in O'Neill's Massachusetts. The South was still solidly Democratic, providing a majority of the Democratic Caucus when O'Neill came to Washington, but it started...

Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi is a loyal Republican, a decent guy, and generally a good senator. He also needs to retire from the Senate because he is not good enough, and I don’t care if that makes him sad. The New York Times probably thought it was helping him recently when it ran an article about how Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz is planning to challenge him in the 2014 Republican primary. The Times hailed him as “a studious, low-key legislator who worked well with Senator Edward M. Kennedy,” and Enzi probably thinks that’s a compliment. For that reason alone he...