The organization never had any.

I think it’s interesting that DeMint has pushed Heritage into an even more blatant political role; but the subtext of such stories often seems to be that until DeMint arrived Heritage was a center of honest, serious, if conservative-leaning research.

In their dreams — or maybe in the dreams of self-proclaimed centrists, who wanted to believe that such an organization existed.

The truth is that the pre-DeMint Heritage was Hack Central, producing garbage posing as research. It promoted the death tax scam; it proclaimed that the Ryan plan would push the unemployment rate down to 2.8 percent, then tried to send that “result” down the memory hole. Heritage economists have promoted the fallacy that government spending can’t increase demand. And so on.

So Heritage never was a “think tank” in the sense that actual thought or research took place there. It just played one on TV.