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Three months closer to an election year, Congress is proving every bit as dysfunctional as it was during the debt ceiling deal that created the supercommittee in August, and looming primaries – both presidential and congressional – have put bipartisan compromise even farther out of reach. Really, there should be no shock that the committee has failed – there were too many people who stood to benefit from its demise.
TIME’s photo editors bring you the best pictures of the past week from the Beltway and beyond.
This June 2005 quote from the former House Speaker, spoken at a joint appearance with none other than Hillary Clinton (Newt was in a moderate-friend-of-Democrats phase at the time) proved less than prescient: “We may be at the end of a 40-year cycle of bitterness,” Gingrich said. “I’ve spent enough of my life fighting. It [...]
The vicissitudes of the GOP presidential primary have been dizzying; candidates have surged and plummeted so sharply and with such frequency that predicting the next sea change in sentiment can seem like a fool’s errand. But if you’re looking for a reliable bellwether of how candidates are faring with the motivated GOP base, check out [...]
The White House is threatening to veto a long-awaited defense funding bill over a perennial policy dispute: whether the President can prosecute terrorists in civilian courts, or must transfer them to military custody. The battle has raged since the very first day of Barack Obama’s presidency, but this time Obama’s opponent is not the GOP. [...]
Occupy Wall Street began with a simple idea: occupy Wall Street. By sitting, camping, sleeping at what many Americans still see as the symbolic scene of the crimes–both moral and legal–that led to the 2008 financial collapse, the message was clear. It was an act of civil disobedience that pointed the finger at the rich [...]
Disturbed White House shooter charged with attempting to assassinate the President. Herman Cain will get Secret Service protection after security dust-ups with reporters. Gingrich’s swell of support comes from conservative Republicans.
As the window of opportunity for Congress’s deficit-reduction supercommittee to do something big has passed – the Congressional Budget Office really needed to see language for a big bill by Thursday evening in order to score it by the Monday deadline – lawmakers spent more time figuring out how to blame each other than what to do next. It’s now worth asking: If they can’t find $1.2 trillion in savings, what happens next?
While the nation’s Catholic bishops were gathered in Baltimore for their annual meeting this week, Washington Post columnist and former Bush adviser Michael Gerson wrote an op-ed declaring that part of the Obama Administration “is at war with Catholic leaders and Catholic belief.” Echoing the words of New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who is president [...]
For months, a group of 12 Tea Partyers, with help from the libertarian advocacy group FreedomWorks, has convened hearings around the U.S. to map out a way to fix the nation’s fiscal woes. Modeled on the structure of Congress’s deficit-reduction supercommittee, they took up the task Tea Party-style, in a parallel universe where patriots are unconstrained by the presence of Democrats or pesky concerns like vote counts.
