after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war ... of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happened - war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

We are willing to follow leaders only to the extent we believe they call on our best, not our worst.

Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.

John McCain from the very beginning has been unflinchingly loyal to Sarah Palin. He has never thrown her under the bus. He has never conceded it was a bad decision to pick her. He has never ever said a bad word against her.

[Bob Ferguson] won that huge ruling against the first version of the Muslim ban that resulted in it being stopped dead in the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Gay people exist. There's nothing we can do in public policy that makes more of us exist, or less of us exist. And you guys have been arguing for a generation that public policy ought to essentially demean gay people as a way of expressing disapproval of the fact that we exist, but you don't make any less of us exist. You just are arguing in favor of more discrimination, and more discrimination doesn't make straight people's lives any better.

Two committees in the house were up all night long trying to get a version of the repeal of the Affordable Care Act passed. House Republicans are just fighting tooth and nail to pass it in the House, to try to get it into the Senate, to try to make it then so that the Senate will get on board. But you know who one of the Republican senators is who`s not on board with this anymore? Senator Tom Cotton.