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The Gang of Eight that's working on passing an immigration reform law seems more like a gang of seven people who are managing one guy: Marco Rubio. The Florida senator and budding Republican star appears to be both critical to passing the bill and always within inches of blowing it up.
Well, it's pretty much confirmed at this point: South Dakota's Democratic Senator, Tim Johnson, will announce his retirement during a press conference on Tuesday. Now get ready for another Johnson to save the Democrats' narrow lead in the chamber.
During the long and arduous financial fights on Capitol Hill, one of the Republicans favorite attacks was how the Democratic Senate had not passed a budget in four years. Well, that changed last night. The Senate finally got around to approving a budget that will die on arrival in the House.
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."
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.
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.
Democratic Sen. Ed Markey mentioned Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case allowing unlimited political ad spending, in the same breath as the Dred Scott decision, the 1858 Supreme Court keeping slavery legal by saying it was OK for white people to keep black people as their private property. Cue unthinking outrage!
Both House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama agree that the sequester will be a disaster for the economy. But Republicans and Democrats aren't allowed to agree on anything, so, with eight days before $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts kick in, a chorus of conservatives have emerged to ask, what's so bad about sequestration?
"Nobody has bought me, No. 1. Nobody. Never," New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez told Univision last week. But if you survey the kind of things Menedez has done for opthamologist Salomon E. Melgen in the last 20 years, Menedez sure is a great friend.
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.
On Monday we saw two very different ideas for how President Obama might achieve his second-term policy goals — one in a campaign-style speech on gun control in Minneapolis and another in the recorded gripes of Democrats on Capitol Hill in Politico. Which one has the best chance of working?
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 National Rifle Association did not have a good election last fall — a mere 0.83 percent of the campaign cash it donated went to races with the outcomes it wanted — and yet the political clout of the gun lobby is accepted as veritable fact.
Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer was hyped as the biggest obstacle to Chuck Hagel becoming Secretary of Defense, but Schumer has officially backed Hagel, CNN's Dana Bash reports after Schumer recieved "reassurances" about Iran and Israel during a 90-minute meeting on Monday.
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?
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.
In a move that may offer Republicans an opportunity to pick up a Senate seat in the next midterm elections., Sen. Jay Rockefeller has decided not to run for reelection in West Virginia in 2014.
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