Frank Luntz, Washington Post
This coming week, House Republicans will gather in Williamsburg, Va., to discuss what went wrong in 2012. I’ve attended more than a dozen such congressional retreats since 1993, and I can already imagine how the conversations will go. Someone will undoubtedly come to the microphone to declare that what the GOP needs is a better brand, missing the essential point that candidates and political parties are about reputation, trust and ideas. You can’t sell them like soap or detergent. But what you say in defense of those ideas matters, and what people hear matters even more.

Jamelle Bouie, American Prospect
If you're looking for evidence that Republicans will""despite their rhetoric""eventually cave on the debt ceiling, it's worth noting a recent statement from Rand Paul, to Business Insider, on how he thinks the GOP should approach the ceiling. Rather than force a shutdown, Paul thinks Republicans should pass a bill that would prioritize payments to bondholders if the limit is reached. This would, he says, "force us immediately to have a balanced budget."

Republicans are signaling a willingness to go to great lengths to bend coming battles in their favor, especially versus a White House whom they view as just as unflinching in its views, if not more so.

Norman Ornstein, New Republic
One of the most stunning outcomes of the 2012 elections was the Democrats’ two-seat gain in the Senate. With 23 seats at risk to only ten for Republicans, Democrats were hoping simply to hold their own or keep their losses to a minimum. A gain of a single seat was almost wildly optimistic; picking up two seemingly unrealistic.But just as important as the overall gain was the nature of the new class of Democrats sworn in to the Senate last week. With the addition of Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, Tim Kaine and Chris Murphy, and the possibility of Barney Frank joining them for a few...

Ramesh Ponnuru, Bloomberg
Watch what he did, not what he says. President Barack Obama says he won't agree to spending cuts in return for Republicans' raising the debt ceiling. Yet he did exactly that in 2011. And he should do it again. The debt ceiling ought to be raised because nobody has a plan to eliminate the deficit immediately, and there is no popular support for doing what that would take. A congressman who isn't presenting and supporting a zero-deficit-now plan has an obligation to give the federal government the additional borrowing authority that continued deficits make necessary. For...

Sen. Mitch McConnell, This Week
STEPHANOPOULOS: And the question is, how will you follow through on your strategy? And, you know, there are -- a lot of your allies are worried about the -- about that prospect. The Wall Street Journal editorial page said the political result will be far worse if Republicans start this fight only to cave in the end. You can't take a hostage you aren't prepared to shoot. Do the two GOP leaders have a better strategy today than they did in 2011? 

Jonathan Alter, Bloomberg
You can already hear the rumbling in the distance -- a train of noisy liberal Democrats barreling straight for the White House. They should arrive just in time for President Barack Obama's second inauguration.The president already has his hands full dealing with angry and unrealistic Republicans. Now he's getting reacquainted with their counterparts on the left -- a less ideologically inflexible bunch but not necessarily any more susceptible to reason.

The House of Representatives passed $9.7 billion in aid for Hurricane Sandy victims by a 354-67 vote on Friday. All no votes came from Republicans. The Senate is expected to pass the measure later Friday and send it to President Barack Obama.

Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
We're all talking about Republicans on the Hill and their manifold failures. So here are some things President Obama didn't do during the fiscal cliff impasse and some conjecture as to why.He won but he did not triumph. His victory didn't resolve or ease anything and heralds nothing but more congressional war to come. 

Montgomery & Helderman, Washington Post
Congress approved a plan to end Washington’s long drama over the “fiscal cliff” late Tuesday after House Republicans surrendered to President Obama’s demand to let taxes rise on the nation’s richest households.The House voted 257 to 167 to send the measure to Obama for his signature; the vote came less than 24 hours after the Senate overwhelmingly approved the legislation.

Steven Greenhut, OC Register
California's Democratic leaders are giddy about the future now that they have gained everything they wanted in the recent election – voter-approved tax increases and two-thirds supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature, thus rendering Republicans little more than an annoying irrelevancy who can no longer block tax hikes. Will Democrats just ramp up the taxing-and-spending spree or will some semblance of a "moderate" Democratic caucus emerge to offer a limited check on those tendencies? Either way, it's hard to find good news for taxpayers or business...

Greg Sargent, Washington Post
President Obama, during a brief statement to the press just now, said Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are in the process of working out a deal to avert the “fiscal cliff” tax hikes, and pronounced himself optimistic about the talks. The key to Obama’s statement, though, is that he spelled out the political reality Republican leaders will be left facing if a deal is not reached:

Debra Saunders, SF Chronicle
Abandon all hope, ye who watch the "fiscal cliff" drama. There has been serious pressure on House Republicans to buckle and pass the extension of the Bush tax cuts for 98 percent of income tax filers demanded by President Barack Obama.I would have cried, "Uncle." Polls show that voters are predisposed to blame Republicans if Washington falls off the fiscal cliff. I don't see how House Repubs can withstand the onslaught likely to follow Jan. 1, when, thanks to past budget deals, income taxes rise on all workers. Voters might well perceive -- as per a Democratic talking...

Charles Blow, New York Times
Republicans are apparently in a funk this holiday season.According to recent polls, they are depressed and despondent.A Gallup survey of our well-being released last week reported that “Republicans’ ratings of their lives worsened significantly in November, with their collective Life Evaluation Index score dropping to 40.3, from 47.0 in October.” Democrats’ life ratings, by contrast, have improved.

Michael Barone, Washington Examiner
Last week, Republicans proved they are not a governing party. Next week we will see whether Democrats are. A governing party would have, reluctantly, passed Speaker John Boehner's Plan B, which would have preserved the current tax rates on everyone with incomes under $1 million.Passage would have put Senate Democrats on the spot, since they voted for a similar measure in 2010. They might have engaged in negotiations with Boehner that could have been more productive than his negotiations with Barack Obama this month and in the summer of 2011.

Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
Let's get something straight from the start. Plan B wasn't going to lead to any deal anyway. Suppose it had gotten 218 votes last night, instead of being the epic failure that it was. Okay. That would have left Republicans at $1,000,000 on tax rates, with Obama at $400,000. That's still an extremely wide gulf, and if the GOP had to fight that hard to get to 218 on $1 million, what on earth would make anyone think there'd be votes in the GOP caucus for a compromise-on-the-compromise figure like $500,000 or $600,000? No chance.And that's just tax rates. Plan...

Steve Benen, MSNBC

Republicans alarmed at the apparent challenges they face in winning the White House are preparing an all-out assault on the Electoral College system in critical states, an initiative that would significantly ease the party's path to the Oval Office.

House Speaker John A. Boehner has offered to push any fight over the federal debt limit off for a year, a major concession that would deprive Republicans of leverage in the budget battle but is breathing new life into stalled talks over the year-end “fiscal cliff.”

Robert Pear, NYT
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday that more than half the states had rejected its pleas to set up their own health insurance exchanges, dealing a setback to President Obama’s hopes that Republicans would join a White House campaign to provide health insurance to all Americans.Friday was the deadline for states to notify the federal government of their plans, and administration officials had been hoping that Mr. Obama’s re-election would overcome resistance to the new health care law. 

Peggy Noonan, WSJ
Viewed a certain way, the 2012 election can be seen as a gift to Republicans wrapped in ugly paper. The wrapping looked like a hostage note with a message scrawled in crayon: "We hate you." But inside was a gift, and the gift was time. The party was given the opportunity, when it is still strong, to hold the kind of fresh, open-the-windows debate it would have been forced to have in 2016 anyway, and in less favorable conditions. If Mitt Romney had won this year he would have had a very tough presidency, with the left revived and the coffers empty and the president having to move...

Jonathan Chait, NY Mag
“Where are the president’s spending cuts?” asks John Boehner. With Republicans coming to grips with their inability to stop taxes on the rich from rising, the center of the debate has turned to the expenditure side. In the short run, the two parties have run into an absurd standoff, where Republicans demand that President Obama produce an offer of higher spending cuts, and Obama replies that Republicans should say what spending cuts they want, and Republicans insist that Obama should try to guess what kind of spending cuts they would like.Reporters are presenting...

E.J. Dionne, Washington Post