Ramesh Ponnuru

Journalism

Since 1999, Ponnuru has been a senior editor at National Review, where he writes on politics, 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.

He appears frequently on television programs about public affairs, including Meet the Press and Face the Nation. Ponnuru is a regular guest speaker on policy, politics, and constitutionalism at college campuses and law schools across the country, and in 2013 he was a fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics.

In 2006, Ponnuru wrote The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, which 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." He is also the author of a monograph on Japanese industrial policy.

Ponnuru is a past contributor to Time and WashingtonPost.com and has written for 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.

Policy

Ponnuru is a sought-after thinker on conservative policy and its political implications, and has regularly been a guest at retreats for congressional Republicans. In 2015, Politico Magazine featured him and his wife, April Ponnuru, as two of the "Politico 50" influential leaders in American politics.

He has been identified as a leader of the "reform conservative" movement, and was featured in a 2014 New York Times Magazine cover story about the conservative intellectuals who comprise it.

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. (Ponnuru also contributed the book’s concluding chapter, on constitutionalism.) The book was widely praised, with New York Times columnist David Brooks calling it "the most coherent and compelling policy agenda the American right has produced this century."

Personal life

Ponnuru was raised in Prairie Village, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, MO. He attended Briarwood Elementary School and Mission Valley Middle School. He skipped the 8th grade and directly entered high school. After graduating from Shawnee Mission East High School at the age of 16, he went to Princeton University, where he earned a B.A. in history and graduated summa cum laude. Raised by a Hindu father and a Lutheran mother, Ponnuru is of Asian Indian descent and has converted to Roman Catholicism from agnosticism. He is married to April Ponnuru.