Mitch McConnell said he wouldn't block the bipartisan immigration overhaul on Tuesday, and Patrik Leahy said he will hold off — "with a heavy heart" — on a controversial amendment to green cards to spouses of gay couples. But the path to passage is surprisingly clear, even amidst the Obama administration's scandals.
So far the facts of the three scandals facing the Obama administration do not tie President Obama himself to the scandalous acts. Since Republicans can't yet indict President Obama, they're shifting to indicting all of liberalism.
The President's senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer did a tour of the sunday shows to try and calm everyone down about this whole IRS targeting Tea Party groups scandal.
In a desperate attempt at virality, or perhaps simply to make their boss look cool by comparison, Sen. Mitch McConnell's campaign team has created a Tumblr in which McConnell fans send in their own photos of themselves drinking alone.
At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, President Obama joked: "Some folks still don't think I spend enough time with Congress. 'Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?' they ask… Really? Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?" It got a laugh. Today, McConnell has a snappy comeback.
After senators filibustered a gun background checks bill, President Obama gave an angry speech, promising that "we can still bring about meaningful changes that reduce gun violence so long as the American people don't give up on it." But according to a new Washington Post/ Pew Research Center poll, the American people are kind of over it.
There was mass fury at the Senate for filibustering a weakened gun background checks bill that had been driven by the outrage that one man with an AR-15 could kill 20 schoolchildren. What's more interesting is whether all that rage will end up changing anything on its own.
A lot of gun control advocates are upset about what happened in the Senate on Wednesday as a (mostly) Republican minority filibustered gun regulations that the majority of Americans support.
The man who reportedly taped a private meeting between campaign aides for Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell — and then passed the recording off to Mother Jones — is looking for your help.
There's something about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that inspires hyperbole. Today, his policies are being compared with the terrorists behind 9/11, officially completing the trifecta of overwrought analogies.
Mitch McConnell appears to have been right about the source of the leaked tape of his staff disparaging Ashley Judd. According to a Kentucky Democratic official, staff of the liberal PAC Progress Kentucky recorded the meeting from a hallway.
Let it never be said that American national politics lacks a flair for exaggeration. Mitch McConnell finds himself at the center of a storm of hyperbole, almost as though he and others were hoping to score political points off of relative non-events.
McConnell is blaming liberals for "bugging" his campaign office and leaking the embarrassing Ashley Judd critiques. According to an expert we spoke with that's possible — but it's almost certainly not the case.
With all due respect to Mother Jones's conversation-leaker-in-chief David Corn, the recordings published today of a conversation between Sen. Mitch McConnell and some consultants disparaging Ashley Judd is not that big a deal. It's the sausage being made.
Ashley Judd won't be challenging Mitch McConnell for his Senate seat next year, but a leaked audiotape shows how the McConnell campaign considered all kinds of potential attacks—including bringing up Judd's mental health issues.
President Obama, tired and clearly emotional, made another pitch for Congress to act on new gun restrictions Monday evening in Connecticut. His task: to translate the fury and urgency of the boisterous crowd in front of him into action in DC.
A heated op-ed from a Judd advisor on Monday suggests a report by Howard Fineman — on Judd's apparent comparison between challenging Sen. Mitch McConnell and enduring sexual assault at a private dinner — is fabricated. Here's what Fineman has to say about a kind of would-be Todd Akin-style moment that never was, and what it says about the state of 2014.
Buried in the news of a major Supreme Court case and effectively burying the hatchet on a contentious Senate bid before it even began, the actress-turned-philanthropist announced on Twitter that she has decided not to challenge Mitch McConnell in 2014.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has some news for Paul Ryan and House Republicans: Obamacare was a losing battle.
It looks like the dirt-digging campaign might not have scared her off after all: According to an "insider" interviewed by Fox News, the actress is seriously considering running against Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell in 2014.
The new conventional wisdom is that Sen. Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster laid bare this week the divisions within the Republican party between the hawkish old guard and the insurgent young guns. The new conventional wisdom is wrong.
The whole political world is baffled Ashley Judd might run for Senate in Kentucky against Mitch McConnell in 2014.
Failed Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney's first official interview since losing aired on Sunday. Guess what? He totally thought he was going to win, until, y'know, he lost.
The tweets were obliquely racist — and even homophobic enough — to chime through the halls of the Capitol and even get potential candidate Ashley Judd to speak up.
Now that the old white guy at the Pentagon is set to be confirmed, the online conservative media seems ready to target a female movie star, no matter how thin the evidence.
Judd hasn't decided yet if she'll challenge Republican Leader Mitch McConnell in 2014, but she's certainly laying the ground work for a potential campaign.
How worried is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about protecting his Senate seat in 2014? According to a new attack ad published today by McConnell's campaign staff, very worried.
Marijuana could be the next gay marriage -- a contentious social issue that suddenly picks up broad, bipartisan support for change.
Washington might blame Mitch McConnell for this even having a chance to become a thing, but Karl Rove is blaming Hollywood — and he isn't backing off his Ashley Judd for Senate smear campaign.
Senate Republican leader says hemp production would create jobs, not encourage illegal drug use.
Actress Ashley Judd and Indy Car driver Dario Franchitti are ending their marriage after 11 years, and, yes, the news impacts Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Harry Reid's dream of filibuster reform is over, thanks to a bipartisan agreement with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It's time, then, to take stock of who won and lost from today's deal.
One of the common criticisms of President Obama is that he's too aloof and too uninterested in making friends in D.C. to make to end partisan gridlock in Washington (see Michelle Obama's eye-rolling and John Boehner's speech about Obama trying to "annihilate" the GOP). But the recent deal in the Senate on filibuster reform shows that chumminess isn't working, either.
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.
There has been a lot of political coverage this morning about the gathering opposition to President Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. But what there hasn't been a lot of is people saying on the record that they oppose his nomination.
Mitch McConnell isn't sure if he's ready to "shoot the hostage" and let the country default if Republicans don't get what they want in the upcoming fight over the fiscal cliff; Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin are fans of tax reform generating new revenue; Lindsay Graham wants spending cuts.
While we may be just weeks away from a series of mini-cliffs to come, the House of Representatives approved the much debated Senate version of a bill late Sunday night, 257-167, averting a fiscal crisis. President Obama said at an evening appearance that he would sign it.
While you were out enjoying your New Year's Eve, members of the Senate and some of our top lawmakers rang in the new year working on, and eventually passing, a deal to avert the fiscal cliff.
We've been batting around this fiscal cliff debate for months, and now with just hours left until the deadline, Senators say they remain "apart on some pretty big issues." What are they? And what will we learn on Monday morning?
The fiscal cliff talks that were going so well yesterday have fallen apart, and now Mitch McConnell is reaching out to Vice President Joe Biden to help him see if they can get this deal done.
You would think the Senate and Congressional leaders would be making all kinds of progress towards a fiscal cliff deal considering it quite literally is zero hour and the country is mere days away from actually, really going over the proverbial cliff. But nope! You would be mistaken.
In a week of posturing and positioning on Capitol Hill, people on both sides of the aisle acknowledged that McConnell's failed maneuver cost the GOP some precious negotiating ground. The question was how much.
The president's latest attempt to portray congressional Republicans as unreasonable now boils down to something like this: What? What did I say? It was y'all's idea all along.
For now, all the "negotiating" amounts to little more than House Republicans and President Obama giving press conferences full of catchy phrases. Here are some of the best from Friday's back-and-forth, and a look into the subtext therein.
The president asked for a whole lot in his opening offer to Republicans Thursday, and they rejected it.
The meeting between President Obama and congressional leaders on the fiscsal cliff went well, and you can tell not by the nice statements released afterward, but by House Speaker John Boehner's face.
Democrats came out swinging on Sunday, taking coordinated shots across the Sunday shows at Romney's questionable offshore finances, while poor Bobby Jindal was left to defend Romney.
Republicans and Democrats are not about to make nice over health care reform anytime soon. Obviously. But in case you wanted more evidence, we present: Members of Congress and Other Political Figures on Sunday talk shows.
When it comes to our view of Congress, we are the boy who cried "worthless."
Washington's never-ending gender wars will not extend to the country's Nuclear Regulatory Commission thanks to the nomination of George Mason University professor Allison Macfarlane as chairman today.
Karl Rove thinks the proposed Jeremiah Wright attack ad was a "stupid" idea on Fox News Sunday; Paul Ryan defends his budget and dodges a question over whether or not he's being considered as Mitt's running mate on Meet the Press.
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