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President Obama announced that a bipartisan deal to trim the federal deficit and increase borrowing authority had been reached on Sunday night, telling reporters at the White House that congressional leaders in the House and Senate had signed onto a framework that would enact $1 trillion in spending cuts over ten years and form a [...]
Updated, 6:35 p.m. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ‘s office announced late Sunday that he had signed off on a deal to raise the debt ceiling and enact $2.4 trillion in budget cuts, pending agreement from his caucus. Earlier in the day, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that negotiators were “very close” [...]
House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell attempted to lay Washington’s debt-ceiling debacle squarely at President Obama’s feet in a press conference on Saturday, making public their effort to drag Obama back into the center of frenzied negotiations to cut spending and increase borrowing authority ahead of a Tuesday deadline. “He’s the [...]
With three days to go before the U.S. is forced to take drastic action to avoid default on its debt obligations, you’d think congressional negotiators would be frantically looking for a way to avoid disaster. Apparently not. Senate leaders at the center of the negotiations are not speaking. For much of past week, Senate Majority [...]
TIME’s photo editors bring you the best pictures of the past week, from the Beltway and beyond.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are not chatty men by nature. Notoriously monosyllabic, either man could probably compete for a world record in shortest average phone conversation. But that doesn’t mean they’re not talking now. Although not fast friends, Reid and McConnell have one of the most functional professional relationships [...]
House Republicans passed Speaker John Boehner’s debt bill 218-210 on Friday, eking out little more than a symbolic victory in the heated debt-ceiling debate by sending the measure to the Democratic Senate, where it was hastily tabled in a 59-41 vote. Friday night’s are a precursor to a frenzied weekend of negotiations in Washington as [...]
Politico flags another sign of the fissures within the House GOP: Republican Study Commission member Tom Rooney, a two-term congressman from Florida, has written a letter blasting Jim Jordan, the group’s chairman and a voluble critic of the Boehner debt bill, just days after an RSC staffer was nabbed sending emails that urged conservative advocacy [...]
When Republicans showed up to their pivotal powwow in the Capitol basement on Friday morning, it was no surprise to see the freshmen of the South Carolina delegation arrive together. Of the five GOP members from the Palmetto State, four — Jeff Duncan, Trey Gowdy, Mick Mulvaney and Tim Scott — are rookie representatives. Since [...]
President Obama is not the only one calling on Americans to reach out to their members of Congress by any means possible, phone call, email or tweet. A 501 (c)4, called GrassTopsUSA has been fundraising around a good-old “blast fax” campaign. As I have argued before, reading the fundraising solicitations on the right is a [...]
