The 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, which the president signed into law late Wednesday night, has been assailed by liberals and libertarians for authorizing the indefinite detention of American citizens. But the annual spending bill this year made a different sort of history as well by repealing the generation-long ban on insurance coverage for abortions for members of the armed services who are victims of rape and incest—finally giving those women the guaranteed affordable coverage in those circumstances that federal prisoners, civilian employees and Medicaid recipients have long received.

New Hampshire’s senior senator Jeanne Shaheen, who introduced the amendment repealing the ban that had been in effect since 1981 (PDF) called the bills passage an “important step” toward ending a policy that was “blatantly unfair to women putting their lives on the line.” Currently, military insurance only covers abortions performed to save the life of the mother, and military health care facilities will only perform them to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape and incest. Shaheen’s amendment will let insurance pick up the cost of the procedure in such cases, rather than forcing the woman to pay out of pocket.

Before the bill’s passage, “military women have been in a situation that has not applied to anybody else covered by federal health care,” Shaheen told the Daily Beast earlier this month. “Even if you’re in federal prison and you are raped you can get abortion coverage. That has not been true for military women since the early eighties.”

The fiscal-cliff deal settled nothing in terms of the desperate, ongoing struggle to bring Washington’s devastating deficits under control, but it should put an end, once and for all, to a bitter debate that’s damaged the conservative movement for the last four years.

With the president participating in successful last-minute efforts to prevent crushing, automatic, across-the-board tax hikes that would have done disastrous damage to the U.S. economy, it’s time for Barack Obama’s angriest critics to finally give up the paranoid fantasy that he’s some sort of alien agent with a secret agenda to wreck capitalism and weaken the United States.

If the president really did nurse a deep-seated desire to ruin the free enterprise system (and the Republican Party along with it), he just missed his golden opportunity.

The fiscal cliff deal finally passed by the House Tuesday night isn’t likely to lift the public’s rock-bottom esteem for the nation’s elected leaders. It took too long and delivered too little, and the spectacle of a Congress that can’t conduct the nation’s business except under extreme duress from self-imposed deadlines and penalties is infuriating. 

Still the outcome wasn’t terrible—and it shows that a grand fiscal bargain is still in reach, as our deeply polarized political class seems to be relearning the art of compromise. 

The deal is best understood as ratifying the 2012 election result. President Obama campaigned and won on explicit promises to raise tax rates on the rich. That mandate, plus the automatic expiration of the Bush tax cuts, left Republicans with no choice but to negotiate with the White House over narrowing the scope of the coming tax hike.

Until last night, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that the Tea Party was on the wane. Congressional leaders of the nascent movement, like Allen West and Joe Walsh had lost reelection, or, like Jim DeMint, had decided to leave politics altogether.  House Speaker John Boehner had stripped some of the more outspoken members of the Tea Party caucus of their congressional leadership posts, a sign that the GOP establishment was no longer going to be led by its ultra-conservative tail.  The big money groups backing the Tea Party were falling apart in a spate of post-election season squabbling.

But after 85 House Republicans joined Boehner in raising taxes without spending reductions during the end game of Monday night’s fiscal-cliff negotiations, Tea Party leaders and conservative activists from around the country are dusting off their tri-corner hats and “Don’t Tread On Me” signs, and now say that their members are as energized as they have ever been since the first Tax Day protests in 2009. And the Republican Party, they add, had better beware.

“We now have 85 members of the House who have shunned their noses at us,” said Dustin Stockton, a Texas- and Nevada-based operative and the chief strategist of The Tea Party.net. “Our job now is to recruit and inspire and motivate people to run against those Republicans who did it.”

Has there ever been a worse Congress than the 112th?

Probably not, and we should all get used to it.

The era of a national legislature boldly tackling major problems is over.

Here’s my New Year’s resolution: I’m going to read less liberal grousing about Barack Obama. At the moment, we have a number of critics of the deal Obama just cut with the Republicans to avert the fiscal cliff. They make some fair points, about the deal and about Obama. But if there’s a style of criticism that really bugs me, it’s that which reproves him for failing to be Captain Liberal while refusing to recognize that the guy has to be Mister President. Here’s what I mean.

The standard liberal position in the run-up to the cliff deal, or at least a position taken by a number of prominent liberals, was that Obama should have let the country go over the cliff, because he’d immediately have more leverage after Jan. 1. Taxes would go up, the argument went, most of the country would blame the Republicans, and boomity-boomity-boom, they’d come crawling to Obama ready to sign a deal on his terms.

I will readily confess that the logic is, if not impeccable, only mildly peccable. The Republicans would have been over a barrel. Of course predicting what those people will do and how they’ll respond to any given situation is risky business, but presumably they would not have wanted to be blamed for middle-class tax rates going up, so they’d have done something vaguely rational.

Today, the new 113^th Congress officially enters Capitol Hill. Their swearing-in represents a fresh start and the hope that maybe, just maybe, the ideological excesses and obstructionism of the Tea Party class of 2012 are over.

Ironically, the first major act of the new Congress will be to deal with some of the priorities the Tea Party established for itself—dealing with the deficit and debt through a combination of entitlement reforms, spending cuts, and tax reform—which is expected to come due with the debt ceiling and sequester cuts in two months. The Congress’s challenge will be to deal with this opportunity more constructively and cooperatively than its Tea Party predecessors.

There is some rational reason for optimism rooted in the key differences between the 2010 and 2012 elections.

If you thought the Benghazi saga ended last month when a State Department review concluded that a handful of State Department middle managers failed to provide adequate security for the U.S. mission, think again: it may no longer be dominating headlines, but with multiple active congressional investigations and an ongoing attempt to hunt down the perpetrators, the story of Benghazi is far from over.

The biggest recent development—which was overshadowed by the fiscal cliff negotiations—came on New Year’s Eve, when the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a report that raised the question of whether Libyan officials assisted the Benghazi terrorists. The report found that a team of CIA contractors dispatched from Tripoli to Benghazi on the night of the attacks waited at least three hours after arriving at the Benghazi airport before departing to the scene because of negotiations with Libyan government officials. According to the report, members of Congress still don’t know the exact reason for the delay. “Was it simply the result of a difficult Libyan bureaucracy and a chaotic environment or was it part of a plot to keep American help from reaching the Americans under siege in Benghazi?” the report asks.

To be sure, the night of the attack was indeed chaotic. “It’s important to remember that the team from Tripoli faced a chaotic and difficult situation on the ground when it arrived in middle of the night,” one U.S. official tells The Daily Beast. (Both the Libyan ambassador to the U.S. and the State Department declined to comment.) Moreover, Libya’s government was a mess at the time: while it had conducted successful elections earlier that summer, the national assembly in Tripoli had yet to appoint a prime minister or the chiefs of government ministries. Nevertheless, a Senate committee asking this troubling question about the Libyan government is, at the very least, noteworthy.

It was the sort of acrimonious exchange between co-workers that, had it happened in the private sector, would have landed the aggressors in the Human Resources office.

But John Boehner and Harry Reid are constitutional officers of the United States—the Republican speaker of the House and the Democratic Senate majority leader, respectively—so their sulphurous, X-rated squabble last Friday, in the midst of fiscal-cliff negotiations at the White House, had no consequence beyond the further coarsening of political dialogue and a decreased likelihood of bipartisan cooperation in the nation’s capital.

“Go fuck yourself,” Boehner advised Reid as they crossed paths just outside the Oval Office.

I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to equal the moral disgrace of now-deceased Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno and former top administrators in their handling of the horror reign of predatory animal Jerry Sandusky. I didn’t think it was possible to perhaps even exceed the moral disgrace of these men who obfuscated and ignored in the name of inaction while one of the university’s very own fed his habits with impunity and prowled and then pounced into the hearts and minds and bodies of young children with dozens upon dozens of sex acts before he was finally arrested in November of 2011.

But wherever 63-year-old Republican Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett ranks in the Penn State tragedy, he is a disgrace, an elected official who throughout the Sandusky investigation was far too interested in his own self-interest of winning the governorship. Now, as he is hoping to stay there for a second term, he has pulled his most shameless act yet.

On Wednesday, Corbett held a press conference to announce that the state was filing suit in federal court against the National Collegiate Athletic Association on the grounds that its sanctions against Penn State and its football team were arbitrary, capricious, laced in the venom of making the Nittany Lions an unfair example for its own public relations purposes, and lacking in authority. In a rare move, Corbett himself was named as the plaintiff.

It was a congressional slap in the face to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

More than two months after hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the tristate area were destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Sandy, Republicans in the House of Representatives intentionally killed the $60 billion bill passed by the Senate by refusing to bring it to a vote on New Year’s Day. 

Right-wing activist groups like Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, and Heritage Action have all pressured congressional Republicans to vote against the bill.