Ramesh Ponnuru is an American conservativepolitical pundit and journalist. A longtime visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,, he is also a senior editor for National Review magazine, a columnist for Bloomberg View, and a contributing editor to the domestic policy journal National Affairs. Ponnuru has written on wide array of political and policy topics, appeared on numerous public affairs and news interview programs, and is a widely respected voice on conservative policy. In recent years, his profile has been widely praised for breaking with his party for being highly critical of President Donald Trump. In 2015, Politico Magazine listed both him and his wife, April Ponnuru, as two of the "Politico 50" influential leaders in American politics. It has been the first and only time ever that a husband and wife appeared on the list at the same time.
Career
Journalism
Since 1999, Ponnuru has been a senior editor at National Review, where he frequently writes on politics, public policy, and the law. In its pages, he has called for a revival of Republican policy thinking by applying conservative ideals to contemporary problems and emphasizing the concerns of the middle class. He has frequently made the case for increasing the child tax credit to properly compensate parents for the cost of raising children, and has been a regular co-author with economist David Beckworth on the topic of monetary policy and market monetarism. Ponnuru appears frequently on a diverse number of television programs about public affairs, among them Meet the Press, Face the Nation, the PBS NewsHour, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. He further is a regular guest speaker on policy, politics, and constitutionalism at college campuses and law schools across the country, In 2013, he was a fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. In 2006, Ponnuru wrote . Procatively titled on purpose, the work is an exposition on such right to life issues as abortion and euthanasia, concentrating on the United States Democratic Party's shift from anti-abortion to abortion rights. Peggy Noonan called "the most significant statement of the need to protect human life in America since Ronald Reagan’s Abortion and the Conscience of America. Jonah Goldberg, NROEditor at Large, wrote that "Ponnuru scrupulously sticks to nonreligious arguments, accessible to everyone. But that hasn’t stopped critics from charging that his motives are unacceptably 'religious,' while others have complained Ponnuru is too coldly rational. Again it seems Ponnuru’s real sin isn’t how he says things, but that he says them at all." John Derbyshire wrote of the book: "RTL is made as presentable as possible in Party of Death, with writing that is engaging and lucid.... are welcoming Party of Death very joyfully, though, and they are right to do so, as it is an exceptionally fine piece of polemical writing in support of their... cause.... Party of Death is obviously inspired by religious belief. The philosophical passages strictly follow the Golden Rule of religious apologetics, which is: The conclusion is known in advance, and the task of the intellectual is to erect supporting arguments." In a sharp response to accusations of Ponnuru having an overtly religious viewpoint in approaching the abortion issue, he addressed the issue himself head on: "I have made a show of reasoning, but my conclusions have all rather conveniently lined up with the teachings of my church.... For the record, my views on abortion have not changed since I was an agnostic.... It is true that I am a Catholic. It is also true that I believe that my church’s teaching on abortion is reasonable, sound, and correct. It is because I came to believe that Catholicism is true, after all, that I became a Catholic. If I didn’t believe Catholic teachings were true, I wouldn’t be a Catholic." Ponuru has also been the author of a highly influential monograph on Japanese industrial policy. Ponnuru is a past contributor to Time and WashingtonPost.com and has written for other such national publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Newsday, New York Post, The Weekly Standard, Policy Review, The New Republic, and First Things, an ecumenical and conservative religious journal.
Policy
Ponnuru is a frequent speaker on conservative policy and its political implications, and has regularly been a featured guest at retreats for congressional Republicans. He has been identified as a leader of the "reform conservative" movement, and was prominently featured in a 2014 New York Times Magazinecover story about the conservative intellectuals who comprise it. The Times' Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Ponnuro was one of a group of young conservative Republicans, who, each one, "was an intellectual prodigy in his 30s" who together had "become the leaders of a small band of reform conservatives, sometimes called reformicons, who believe the health of the G.O.P. hinges on jettisoning its age-old doctrine — orgiastic tax-cutting, the slashing of government programs, the championing of Wall Street — and using an altogether different vocabulary, backed by specific proposals, that will reconnect the party to middle-class and low-income voters." In 2014, Ponnuru co-edited, with Yuval Levin, Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class, a reform conservative manifesto and policy agenda. The book was widely praised, with New York Times columnist David Brooks describing it as a "policy-laden manifesto... which is the most coherent and compelling policy agenda the American right has produced this century."
