"The Republicans have decided to have a little bit of authentic democracy within their party, and polite Washington is flipping out. ...

"The House is about to find out whether the more energetic conservatives long dissatisfied with the leadership of John Boehner can effectively put forward one of their own for the top House job -- and, if they do, Congress and the country are about to find out what that means. As a way of settling a genuine political dispute, this could hardly be improved upon.

"Washington retreats to its fainting couch. A passionate fight over ideas, over how we govern and to what ends? Angels and ministers of grace defend us!"

"Kevin McCarthy unexpectedly withdrew from the House speaker's race on Thursday, a casualty of a fractured Republican conference. The Californian didn't do much to inspire confidence last week when he suggested that the House Benghazi committee had been designed to attack Hillary Clinton.

"One pity of the McCarthy comments is that they tainted the committee's work with politics. The bigger pity is that they are dead wrong. South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy is 18 months into the committee that the House purpose-built to investigate the 2012 terrorist assault in Libya that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. His Benghazi investigation has been a model of seriousness, professionalism and discreetness. ...

"Keeping the Benghazi committee on the straight and narrow hasn't been fun. Democrats work with Mr. Gowdy in private but then berate his committee in public. Conservative activists and talk-radio hosts blast him for depriving them of the drama they crave -- for not running a get-Hillary committee. The State Department blocks him. And now his own side has made his job that much harder.

"Don't expect Mr. Gowdy to give up. He has run his committee with one goal in mind: finding answers for the families of four dead Americans. Mrs. Clinton flatters herself if she thinks it's all about her."

"The Constitution's Framers, knowing that executive officers might not monitor themselves, provided the impeachment recourse to bolster the separation of powers. Federal officials can be impeached for dereliction of duty (as in [IRS Commissioner] Koskinen's failure to disclose the disappearance of e-mails germane to a congressional investigation); for failure to comply (as in Koskinen's noncompliance with a preservation order pertaining to an investigation); and for breach of trust (as in Koskinen's refusal to testify accurately and keep promises made to Congress). ...

"Even if, as Koskinen says, he did not intentionally mislead Congress, he did not subsequently do his legal duty to correct the record in a timely manner. Even if he has not committed a crime such as perjury, he has a duty higher than merely avoiding criminality.

"If the House votes to impeach, the Senate trial won't produce a two-thirds majority needed for conviction: Democrats aren't ingrates. It would, however, test the mainstream media's ability to continue ignoring this five-year-old scandal, and would demonstrate to dissatisfied Republican voters that control of Congress can have gratifying consequences."

"[Obama is] not about to try building consensus on gun policy among people of good faith. He'll take the same approach he's taken throughout his presidency: He'll delegitimize opponents of his sweeping agenda as irrational, self-interested enemies of decency and progress.

"As the Washington Examiner's Byron York recently noted, Obama has a long history of trying to shut down disagreement by accusing his critics of politicization. He accused Republicans of trying to politicize abortion, the U.S. relationship with Israel, the Iran deal, Benghazi, and the scandals at the IRS and the VA. Just last week he insinuated that Hillary Rodham Clinton's disagreements with his Syria policy (or lack thereof) are influenced by the fact that she's running for office.

"The common denominator in all of these cases is Obama's unimpeachable certainty that he has a monopoly on all the good arguments and all the best motives. Now he even claims the exclusive right to politicize issues when it suits him."

"Each time there's a shooting like the one that took place in Oregon on Thursday, a choir of politicians and pundits rises up to pretend they have known all along how to stop such incidents from happening. If only people had listened to them in advance!

"What they wanted to tell everyone all along was that one or another gun control proposal would have solved the problem.

"They are not only wrong, but they are also fueling the dumbest kind of policy discussion possible, the demand that lawmakers do something, anything, even if all of the solutions under discussion are proven failures."

"Pollsters surveyed by POLITICO have a unanimous warning for the Republican National Committee and the TV networks who are using public-opinion surveys to exclude presidential candidates from debates: Don't trust polls to detect often-tiny grades of opinion in a giant field.

"Indeed, the unprecedented reliance on polls to winnow the Republican field is coming at a time when many pollsters feel they're blinder than ever to trends in public thinking -- and that using polls to keep out candidates who are otherwise well qualified could seriously alter the race.

"'Polls are being used to do a job that they're really not intended for -- and they're not as qualified for as they used to be,' said Cliff Zukin, a professor at Rutgers University and past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research."

"Why is Putin moving so quickly and so brazenly? Because he's got only 16 more months to push on the open door that is Obama. He knows he'll never again see an American president such as this -- one who once told the General Assembly that 'no one nation can or should try to dominate another nation' and told it again Monday of 'believing in my core that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion.'

"They cannot? Has he looked at the world around him -- from Homs to Kunduz, from Sanaa to Donetsk -- ablaze with conflict and coercion?

"Wouldn't you take advantage of these last 16 months if you were Putin, facing a man living in a faculty-lounge fantasy world? Where was Obama when Putin began bombing Syria? Leading a U.N. meeting on countering violent extremism.

"Seminar to follow."

"The first thing to understand about Vladimir Putin is that he's not content just to win. He has to destroy his opponents, foreign or domestic.

"His deeds may be despicable and his manners far too crude for the Upper West Side, but the guy is a force of nature, a man who -- by sheer strength of will -- has used a broken country and its rusting military to change the world. Meanwhile, our astonished president sulks like a high-school girl stood up by her boyfriend ('But Vladimir ... you promised!'). ...

"Never before has a US presidential administration combined such naked cowardice, intellectual arrogance and willful blindness. We don't have a president -- we have a scared child covering his eyes at a horror movie.

"And Putin knows it."

"The so-called 'progressives' love to talk about how their policies will create a worker's paradise, but then why is it that day after day, month after month, year after year, people are fleeing liberal blue states for conservative red states? ...

"The latest Rich States, Poor States document (which I co-author) published by ALEC, the state legislative organization, finds that nearly 1,000 people each day on net are leaving blue states and entering red states. This migration is changing the economic center of gravity in America -- moving it relentlessly to the South and West. ...

"Data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) show a similar trend. Each year the IRS issues a migration data report which examines how many tax filers (and dependents) in the year changed their residency and how much income was transported from one state to another. The numbers for the most recent year (tax filing year 2013) are gigantic and put the lie to the claim that interstate migration is too small to matter in terms of the wealth and economic opportunity in one state versus another."

"As the curtain falls on Fiscal Year 2015, Congress should send Obama a new spending bill that gives him all the funding he wants, with one exception: no $150 billion bailout to Iran's al-Qaeda-coddling ayatollahs.

"After such a measure has passed the House and Senate, departing Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Kentucky) should not rely on anonymous aides to transmit this measure to Obama. Instead, the entire GOP congressional leadership physically should travel to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with scores of journalists in tow, and hand deliver the enrolled bill to the West Gate of the White House. American news viewers will see this dramatic proof that Congress did its job and provided the funds to keep the government running. This evidence will remain on videotape for constant TV replay in the weeks ahead."