In a big win for the Obama Administration, a second Clinton-appointed federal judge ruled today that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional, asserting that the individual mandate falls under federal authority granted by the Commerce Clause. The lawsuit, brought by Liberty University, also argued that the ACA violates the First Amendment because of its abortion [...]
The bipartisan fiscal commission created by President Obama in February was due to vote on its final report by December 1. But at a press conference on Capitol Hill a little over an hour ago its chairmen, Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson, said there’s been a change of plan. Bowles and Simpson have [...]
TIME Managing Editor Rick Stengel interviewed WikiLeaks’s founder today via Skype and, among other things, Assange said he thought Secretary of State Clinton should step down “if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations.” You can read the story here and [...]
Of all the controversial pieces of the Affordable Care Act, the one that seems ripest for rollback is a new requirement that businesses file tax forms on every purchase over $600. Yet, despite calls for its demise from both sides of the aisle and seemingly every business group in America, this provision lives on, which [...]
This morning, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn’s proposal to ban earmarks for the next three fiscal years failed in the senate, by a vote of 39 to 56. Eight Republicans broke with their party to vote in favor of continued earmarks, and seven Democrats voted against earmarks. For those fiscal conservatives outraged at Republican spending on [...]
Sarah Palin raised $469,000 between Oct. 13 and Nov. 22 bringing her total for the year to over $3 million, Tim Crawford, SarahPAC’s treasurer, told TIME exclusively. Crawford attributed the surge of funds to energy surrounding the midterm elections, Palin’s endorsements and her TLC reality show “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” Her second book, America By Heart, [...]
Late last week, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informed the White House of the likely fall-out from the WikiLeaks cable dump, the White House came back with a question: “What’s our corrective action?” Clinton’s undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, had a simple suggestion: pull the plug on SIPRNet, the classified DoD network that PFC [...]
Pew has a new poll out today showing that the nation has shifted on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, since the 1990s. Only 27 percent of Americans oppose gays and lesbians serving openly in the military, down from 45 percent in 1994. Fifty-eight percent of Americans support ending DADT. Even among Republicans, there is a narrow [...]
