On Tuesday morning, former Vice President Dan Quayle endorsed Mitt Romney, as did California Congressmen Jerry Lewis, Ken Calvert and Brian Bilbray. On Monday morning, Tennessee Congressmen Jimmy Duncan, Diane Black and Phil Roe announced their support. In the past month Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte and John Thune of South Dakota have endorsed the former Massachusetts governor, as have 28 officials from Missouri, 15 from New Hampshire, 19 from Indiana, eight Nevada state senators, former Senator John Danforth, former Iowa Gov. Robert Ray and Representatives Charlie Bass of New Hampshire, Illinois’s Robert Dold and Pennsylvania’s Jim Gerlach. If there is a GOP establishment left after 2010′s Tea Party revolution, it is backing Mitt Romney.
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 [...]
Sen. Joe Lieberman has found an ally for the middle-of-the-road Medicare reform proposal he laid out a few weeks ago. On Tuesday, the independent Senator from Connecticut and conservative Republican Tom Coburn unveiled a tweaked version of Lieberman’s plan. They hope to build a coalition of support for the proposal, which they say could save [...]
As I type this, Vice President Joe Biden is one floor below me, cloistered in a room with congressional negotiators trying to work out a deal to slash deficits and raise the debt ceiling before the Aug. 2 deadline, when the Treasury would start to default on U.S. obligations. The group will meet again Wednesday, [...]
The Senate voted down a bill Monday afternoon that would’ve strip $6 billion in annual ethanol subsidies and get rid of an import tariff on ethanol, particularly from Brazil, coming into the United States. The measure, co-sponsored by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, garnered a surprising amount of support, failing 40-59, [...]
Senator Tom Coburn on Tuesday said that he’s “taking a break” from the Gang of Six, the Senate group that has been trying for months to reach a bipartisan deal on deficit reduction. The Oklahoma Republican’s withdrawal likely dashes any hopes that the three Democrats — North Dakota’s Kent Conrad, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Virginia’s [...]
The lurid revelations from the Senate Ethics Committee’s report on John Ensign’s alleged cover-up of an extramarital affair have raised a battery of questions, including why the Department of Justice and Federal Election Commission investigations stalled. Here are a few lingering issues:
Per Ben Smith, Sharron Angle is now running an ad saying that Harry Reid “actually voted to use taxpayer dollars to pay for Viagra for convicted child molesters and sex offenders. What else could you ever need to know about Harry Reid?” Presto, another example of members of Congress conducting politics under the guise of [...]
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services certainly knows its audience. As Adam noted earlier, the agency signed up Andy Griffith to appear in television ads now airing and touting changes to Medicare brought about by the new health reform law. This has caused a bit of a stir, with five Republican senators sending a [...]
