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Late last Sunday morning, House Speaker John Boehner and his No. 2, majority leader Eric Cantor, found themselves in White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley’s West Wing office talking with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner about how tax reform, if done right, could produce $800 billion in new revenues over the next 10 years through [...]
For the past seven months, House Democrats have had a rough gig. Relegated to the minority by the Tea Party wave, they were forced to watch helplessly as the new House Majority passed reams of go-nowhere conservative legislation in party line votes and have been excluded from key private talks between President Obama and their [...]
Moments after the Senate voted to kill House Republicans’ Cut, Cap & Balance plan by a vote of 51-46, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took the floor and made a surprise announcement: He will not move to pass legislation to increase the debt ceiling in the Senate. Reid and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had [...]
The case of Syed Fai has turned over the rock under which foreign influence peddlers and members of Congress usually shelter together, protected by the darkness of our loophole-riddled lobbying rules. Fai was arrested on Tuesday and charged with acting as a foreign agent for the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, Pakistan’s spy service, without registering under [...]
President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner are close to a deal to cut the deficit and raise the federal borrowing limit, congressional sources say. Though both sides deny a deal is imminent, congressional Democrats who have been briefed on the proposal are voicing concerns that Obama would be conceding too much to Republicans in [...]
There’s another Aug. 2 deadline looming in Washington that also features a stand-off between a Tea Party favorite and the Obama administration. Senator Rand Paul, the freshman from Kentucky, has placed a hold on the otherwise broadly supported bipartisan bill that would allow FBI Director Robert Mueller to extend his 10-year stint by two more [...]
Less than two weeks before Congress hits its deadline to raise the debt ceiling, the path toward an agreement on deficit reduction remains murky. White House negotiations have slowed. House Republicans have coalesced behind a plan that can’t pass. And while the Gang of Six has resurfaced, earning kudos from the President and sparking glimmers [...]
At a White House meeting on July 7 when President Obama told congressional leaders he wanted a grand bargain on deficit reduction, Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat and a member of the bipartisan so-called Gang of Six, began to suggest that the gathered leaders look at the Gang’s work as a starting point [...]
Updated, 2:18 p.m. An ambitious deficit reduction framework crafted by the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Six earned two key endorsements on Tuesday as President Obama called it “broadly consistent” with what he wants from negotiations to raise the debt ceiling and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican in the upper chamber, fully embraced [...]
Washington’s debt-ceiling talks have entered a new and desperate phase. With two weeks to go until the U.S. begins to cut government services to avoid defaulting on its credit obligations, negotiators are further apart on a plan to stem the nation’s deficits than they have ever been. Spring talks led by Vice President Joe Biden [...]
