"Scott Brown is expected to launch an exploratory committee to run for Senate in New Hampshire as soon as Friday, sources confirmed to POLITICO, another boost for Republicans pushing to expand the map of competitive races into purple states. 

"The former Massachusetts senator, who moved to the neighboring Granite State this winter, has told multiple people that he plans to challenge Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. 

"Brown, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, is scheduled to speak at 4:30 p.m. on Friday in Nashua at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference."

"President Obama’s lawyers told the Supreme Court that the individual mandate is vital to making the whole law work, and they surely meant it. So the suspension of the mandate means the administration has quietly given up on making the thing work, at least for now. 

"All they’re looking to do is keep the shell in place while they make up as talking points about how it really is succeeding, and/or ways to change the subject. They won’t even ask Congress to fix it, because they’d have to admit they had no idea what they were doing in the first place. 

"Presumably, the plan (to the extent they have one beyond getting past the next election) is to keep the law on the books and let Hillary fix it, hopefully with the help of a Democratic Congress. ... 

"Bottom line: This mess is only going to grow worse for the next two years. Try not to get sick before 2017."

"Tuesday night's special election in Florida should be a serious scare for Democrats who worry that Obamacare will be a major burden for their party in 2014. Despite recruiting favored candidate Alex Sink, outspending Republicans, and utilizing turnout tools to help motivate reliable voters, Democrats still lost to Republican lobbyist David Jolly — and it wasn't particularly close. 

"The Republican tool: lots of advertisements hitting Sink over Obamacare, even though she wasn't even in Congress to vote for it. Sink's response was from the Democratic playbook: Call for fixes, but hit her opponent for supporting repeal. Sink won 46 percent of the vote, 2 points behind Jolly and 4 points below President Obama's 2012 total in the district. 

"Special elections don't necessarily predict the November elections, but this race in a bellwether Florida district that both parties aggressively contested comes as close as possible to a November test run for both parties."

"Some Democrats hope to minimize the importance of Obamacare as a political issue by focusing on other topics in this November's midterm elections. Some hope to win by promising to fix the flawed national health care plan they passed in 2010. And others hope to turn the issue on Republicans by appealing to voters who have been helped by the law. 

"The problem is, none of that will work. The importance of Obamacare as an issue in November 2014 cannot be controlled by either political party. It will be determined by just one thing, and that is the performance of Obamacare as a law in the months preceding the election. 

"The Obama administration obviously understands that. There is no other explanation than political expediency for its announcement last week that it is extending the 'keep your plan' fix until 2016 for Americans who have coverage that doesn't meet Obamacare's minimum standards."

"The idea that politicians should write laws restricting people critical of them is as perverse as the idea that the sprawling, opaque IRS bureaucracy should be assigned to construe and apply such laws. It is bad enough that there is the misbegotten Federal Election Commission to do what the First Amendment forbids — government regulation of the quantity, content and timing of political speech.  

"This column has previously noted that in 1996 a Republican Senate candidate called the FEC to dispute campaign finance charges made by Democrats. The head of the FEC’s enforcement division told the Republican: 'Promise me you will never run for office again, and we will drop this case.' So spoke Lois Lerner.  

"There almost certainly are people, above her and beyond the IRS, who initiated or approved the IRS’s punitive targeting of conservative groups and who hope Lerner’s history of aggressive partisanship will cause investigators to conclude that she is as high as responsibility for the targeting rises. Those people should hire criminal defense attorneys."

"What a small and politically vicious man New York's new mayor is. Bill de Blasio doesn't like charter schools. ... 

"Some 70,000 of the city's one million students, most black or Hispanic, attend charter schools, mostly in poorer neighborhoods. Charter schools are privately run but largely publicly financed. Their teachers are not unionized. Their students usually outscore their counterparts at conventional public schools on state tests. Success Academy does particularly well. Last year 82% of its students passed citywide math exams. Citywide the figure was 30%.

"These are schools that work. They are something to be proud of and encourage. 

"The very existence of charter schools is an implicit rebuke to the public schools. It means they are not succeeding, and something new must be tried. That something new won't be perfect — no charter school is, and some are more imperfect than others — but people still line up to get into them. And there's something to the wisdom of crowds. When a school exists for the students, you can tell. When it exists for the unions, you can tell that too."

"A new poll by the Washington Post shows that amnesty is a vote-loser for GOP legislators. 

"The poll of 1,002 adults shows that pluralities of independents and moderates oppose candidates who support amnesty, which was euphemistically dubbed 'a path to citizenship' by the poll designers. 

"The poll showed that 41 percent of independents and 37 percent of moderates were less likely to vote for an amnesty-backer. 

"Only 28 percent of independents and moderates said they were more likely to vote for a candidate who backs amnesty.  ...

"The poll also showed that the GOP’s opposition to amnesty doesn’t lower their one-in-four support among Latinos."

"After dozens of delays of various aspects of ObamaCare, Democrats are still facing a tsunami of voter anger this fall in midterm elections that are looking more and more like a disaster for the president’s party. The administration’s answer to their plight is simple: delay more implementation of the president’s unpopular and misnamed Affordable Care Act. ... 

"The political motivations for this move are obvious. Prior to the rollout of ObamaCare last fall, Democrats drew a line in the sand on any delay of the president’s signature health care law. Rather than push back the implementation of the legislation a single day, they allowed the government to be shut down for weeks causing untold suffering to the American people. That was a political masterstroke. The mainstream media blamed the GOP for the fiasco since their demands for delaying or defunding the law seen as unreasonable and unrealistic. What a difference a few months makes."

"Americans still awaiting the full truth about the Obama administration's IRS targeting tea party groups for excessive scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle should applaud House Republicans' efforts to compel testimony from a woman at the center of that scandal. ... 

"With the Obama administration still defending the indefensible, recalling Lerner to testify shows that Mr. Issa and his committee aren't backing down in their efforts to document the full extent of politically motivated IRS abuses — which the American people have every right to know."

"The United States already has a rather good regulation regarding government oversight of political speech, which is that there isn’t to be any. The First Amendment ought to be the last word on the subject. ... Congress has the authority to rewrite the rules about who qualifies as a tax-exempt nonprofit, should it choose to do so, but the IRS plainly does not have the power to regulate away political speech where it is explicitly authorized. 

"The IRS has willfully and intentionally misled Congress and the American people about the scope and nature of its actions targeting political opponents of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. ... 

"The IRS does not inspire confidence as a practitioner of self-regulation, much less as a regulator of political speech."