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For the first time since losing the White House to President Obama, Mitt Romney sat down for a TV interview that airs on Sunday. "We were on a roller coaster, exciting and thrilling, ups and downs," Romney told Fox News, in an excerpt released Thursday night. "And then you get off. And it's not like, oh, can't we be on a roller coaster the rest of our life? It's like, no, the ride's over."

California's elected Republicans have long had a simple approach to illegal immigration: Those who broke the law coming here should leave. But the confluence of politics and personal threat have now put many Republican legislators in Washington and Sacramento in a very different place: eager to embrace an overhaul of immigration laws and willing to consider legal status for some of the country's nearly 12 million illegal immigrants, 3 million of whom live in California.

...Mr. Christie’s failure to be invited is not a mere oversight; virtually every other prominent Republican who might be a plausible nominee in 2016 has been asked to participate.

The most popular Republican governor in the United States has not been invited to the country's most important gathering for conservative activists, a source familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.

Twice burned, Republicans are treading carefully around tea party groups as they pursue a Senate majority that slipped through their fingers in 2010 and 2012....

Mich. governor Rick Snyder, opposing his own party, welcomes an "Obamacare" option... A day before he delivers his budget message to the state Legislature, Gov. Rick Snyder said Wednesday he will support an expansion of Medicaid in Michigan.

Top Republican lawmaker John Boehner said on Wednesday that he would oppose any delay in the automatic budget cuts that are set to kick in March 1, without other spending cuts and reforms.

George W. Bush was president of the United States less than five years ago. You'd never know it by listening to Republican politicians or talking with GOP party strategists -- all of whom seem perfectly willing to simply erase Bush from their collective memory. (It's a sort of political version of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.")

When Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) announced Saturday that he wouldn’t seek a sixth term, Republicans rejoiced at the possibility of picking up the seat in 2014. But, that joy soon gave way to political reality — the likelihood of a primary between conservative, tea-party-aligned Rep. Steve King and a more establishment GOP figure such as Rep. Tom Latham or Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds. And, just in case Republicans thought they might avoid that sort of primary fight, King released this statement Saturday night: “Iowans now have a real opportunity to elect a true Constitutional conservative.” (In case you were wondering, he is referring to himself.)

The budget battles rocking the capital have exposed a deepening fault line within an already fractured Republican Party: the divide between the GOP's solid Southern base and the rest of the country.