As Scandal Week comes to a close, it's worth reviewing the policy proposals that have followed in the revelations' wake. There aren't many.
ABC News' Jonathan Karl's revelation of the White House's role in 12 revisions to the Benghazi talking points propelled the story, long percolating in conservative media, into a bona fide scandal. But then CNN's Jake Tapper's revelation of what the emails actually said revealed that to be a fake scandal. So who lied to Karl?
After admitting that his 2012 Republican "fever" theory was wrong, President Obama told donors like Jessica Biel, Justin Timberlake (who was wearing hipster glasses), and Tommy Hilfiger that Washington gridlock is pretty much Rush Limbaugh's fault on Monday evening at a fundraiser at Harvey Weinstein's house in New York's Greenwich Village.
A Pew poll released Wednesday offers some interesting insights: Democrats are bored with Democrats, independents blame Republicans, and Republicans hate everyone — but a closer look at the data may reveal why Congressional Republicans are tracking higher than Democrats on some of the key issues of the day.
Why hasn't the American public risen up in fury at Republicans over the sequester's annoyances and inconveniences, as President Obama had clearly hoped? Because the annoying things about the sequester perfectly play into the Republican talking point that government is dumb and wasteful and run by people with no common sense.
Pundits are skeptical about whether President Obama will be able to charm Republicans into agreeing to a "grand bargain," but Republicans have plenty of tips for the president for getting a deal done.
Republican senators inserted several gun rights measures into a bill to fund the government through September, including one that says the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives must attach a disclaimer to any gun data saying it "cannot be used to draw broad conclusions about fire-arms-related crimes."
Now that the sequester has settled in, we've learned that Republicans do not feel much urgency to protect defense spending. After President Obama's dinner diplomacy failed to produce a grand bargain, it doesn't look like they were after party invitations. And, now, we're learning that Republicans aren't all that enthusiastic about entitlement reform, either.
Paul Ryan is Washington's top chart man, and, as expected, was flanked by a chart when he presented the House Republican budget Tuesday. But terrifying charts of impending fiscal fears — and in bright blocks of color — are not a new thing.
President Obama's biggest problem used to be that he wasn't schmoozing with Congress. His biggest problem now is that he's schmoozing with Congress. Who gave him such terrible advice? The very same reporters who were demanding he get snacks with senators in the first place, obviously.
Ryan's 91-page budget is not a budget document; it is a political baseline. From that standpoint, it's already a success. But here's what it actually looks like.
Repealing Obamacare is impossible in the near term, so why does Paul Ryan's budget assume it's repealed? To keep a little more than a dozen guys happy.
President Obama is finally having the dinner parties that Washington is so obsessed with in an attempt to get some Republicans to support a deal to replace the sequester that includes more tax revenue.
The sequester has gone into effect, and no deal has materialized, so Obama is working behind the scenes to woo people on Capitol Hill. Or at least, the White House is waging a PR offensive to get op-ed writers to praise him for doing so. And there's good reason to be skeptical.
As Ryan finishes up the House Republican budget before he presents it on Wednesday, he's confronting a last-minute problem on Medicare.
Republicans have been going through a civil war since they fared much worse than they expected in the 2012 elections. Actually, it's a lot of civil wars. So many that it's hard to keep them all straight. We've created a chart of GOP infighting to help you sort them out.
The 112th Congress was widely regarded as the worst Congress ever. The 113th -- which is just 58 days old, but will go into recess on Friday as the sequester hits -- is taking do-nothingness to the next level, because it has done nothing to stop the deliberately stupid cuts of the sequester from happening.
Many people have noticed the GOP is increasingly becoming a southern party. So has New York Republican Peter King. The congressman is getting tired of his colleagues insulting his state and then begging it for money.
Since the sequester hasn't forced a deficit-cutting deal, some pundits, like The Washington Post's editorial page, David Brooks, and most spectacularly Bob Woodward, are putting their faith in mind control magic to get the centrist deal they want.
What looked like another obstructionist tangle between the ever-competing chambers is now looking more like an unnecessary House debate and another win for Harry Reid over Boehner and Cantor and Co.
The person who deserves the most blame for the sequester -- the automatic spending cuts that kick in March 1 and will slow GDP growth by 0.5 percent -- is not President Obama or John Boehner, but House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
We're one week away from the sequester, and Republicans and Democrats are panicking about it actually hitting and over their side having to cave. But fear is a good sign, right? The fiscal cliff proved it can force a deal. Here's the current state of panic.
It is starting to look less likely that Congress will reach a deal that prevents automatic spending cuts from taking effect March 1, so politicians are finding the strength to accept the things they cannot change, and change the things they cannot accept. That means accepting the sequester but changing who gets blamed for it.
In a speech to promote his State of the Union education plan, President Obama framed it in a way to appeal to Republicans: It saves money. But the question is not whether it's a good idea so much as whether it can pass the Republican-controlled House.
John Boehner can't stop making jokes that show how he earned his high school nickname, and his sexual innuendo campaign went there today — on sweet and innocent Valentine's Day, no less.
The Senate finally passed the latest draft of the Violence Against Women Act on Tuesday. Now the bill will be sent back to Congress, where it seems to have an uncertain future.
There is broad agreement that allowing the sequester -- automatic spending cuts set to go into effect March 1 -- to go into effect would be disastrous. And yet, like fresh growth after a forest fire, both parties see a way to benefit from all the economic destruction.
At a hearing on immigration Tuesday, Republican Rep. Robert Goodlatte tried to define a proposal to eventually grant illegal immigrants citizenship as extreme. If that's true, then some of his most conservative fellow Republicans are liberal extremists.
On the very same day House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is giving a major speech about the GOP's next steps at the American Enterprise Institute, Politico reports that former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is considering abandoning a 2016 presidential run in favor of consolidating power in the House in areas where Cantor has been influential.
There are several signs House Republicans will agree to raise the debt ceiling without demanding huge concessions in spending cuts.
After a few stumbles and a lot of arguing, the House of Representatives approved $50.7 billion in emergency aid to areas decimated by Hurricane Sandy on Monday night.
The president said at his press conference Monday that he wouldn't negotiate "ransom" with hostage-taking terrorists, which is how he is construing the House GOP threat. So what's left to do if we actually hit the debt limit?
Now that the magic coin is no longer on the table, Politico is kicking off the next stage of the debt ceiling fight with a report that House Republicans are "seriously entertaining dramatic steps," including letting the government default or shutting it down altogether.
The highest ranking Democratic Senators urged Obama to "take any lawful steps" to allow the Treasury to pay U.S. debt obligations if the debt limit isn't raised — including, but not limited to, invoking the 14th Amendment.
The easiest way for the United States to keep paying the debts it owes is for Congress to raise the debt ceiling like it usually does. However, House Republicans do not want to do it the easy way. Silly problems call for silly solutions of which there is no shortage.
The House Republican political committee tried to make fun of an idea that's been floating around a few weeks: minting a $1 trillion coin to avoid crashing into the debt ceiling. Unfortunately, the group revealed it doesn't know how money works.
Not only are House Republicans divided, but its protest wing is divided, too, with two groups working separately on a failed coup against Speaker John Boehner last week.
Pretty well everyone was shocked when John Boehner announced, immediately after dodging the fiscal cliff, that Congress would delay voting on the bill for Sandy. The reaction was swift and furious. So, why did he do it?
Delivering on the first of two parts in a controversial federal aid package, the House of Representatives passed a $9.7 billion Hurricane Sandy relief bill Friday by a large margin — 354 to 67. And yet, we can't help but ask: Who are those 67 jerks?
Hostage-takers, in most movies, are bad guys. So it's curious conservatives are fully embracing the liberal talking point that House Republicans took the U.S. economy hostage during the debt limit fight of 2011, and plan to make hostage-taking the cause célèbre before the U.S. defaults in March.
When the failed House Republican revolution came, it came by iPad. Now that House Speaker John Boehner has survived the rebellion, all of D.C. now knows which conservative House members were conspiring to mount a challenge.
Republican lawmakers unhappy with House Speaker John Boehner failed to oust him in Thursday's vote for the leaders of the 113th Congress, which re-elected Boehner by a tally of 220 to 192. And then he teared up.
New York Republican Rep. Peter King called for a campaign finance Lysistrata Wednesday after House Republicans killed a Hurricane Sandy relief package.
While the fiscal cliff deal was busy getting passed, bitter House Republicans allowed a $27 billion relief package for states affected by Hurricane Sandy to die.
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough yelled at Rep. Tim Huelskamp Friday morning after the Kansas Republican said people who called for gun control after the Newtown school shooting had "politicized" the tragedy.
Even as reports surface that he has asked his cabinet to look into an assault-weapons ban and that an old Justice Department report may be back on the table, the president could use executive orders to impose some gun restrictions — today.
In this time of great partisan fighting, there is one arena in which we are seeing a great breakthrough: Leaders inside and outside government, on both the right and the left, are publicly saying they refuse to work with "assholes."
Yesterday, the House of Representatives picked the leaders of 19 committees for the upcoming 113th Congress yesterday and every one of them is a white male.
A late-night, under-clothed, possibly drunken swim in the Sea of Galilee involving several Republican Congressmen raised so many questions that even the FBI looked into the incident, according to Politico.
Michele Bachmann was scolded by House Intelligence Committee chair Mile Rogers for her letter to the State Department suggesting the Muslim Brotherhood is stealthily influencing the department and implying that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin might be an agent for the group.
It's the first time in history the House of Representatives is voting to hold the highest-ranking American law official in contempt of Congress, and since Eric Holder's current predicament is so new and different, you're probably wondering what to expect.
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