Alice Rivlin, a member of Obama’s deficit commission (technically, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform), tells Damian Paletta at The Wall Street Journal that Congress should compromise on tax cuts by pushing the floor higher.
The White House and most Democrats want to extend the Bush tax More…
Though the last U.S. troops left Vietnam in 1973, many veterans still live with the war. And at a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing Thursday at the U.S. Capitol, senators expressed concerns for everything from oversight to deficit spending in the discussion over whether to allow three new conditions to More…
The Senate Armed Services Committee goes into room 222 of the Russell building today at 2:30 p.m. to mark up the fiscal 2011 defense authorization bill. Until members emerge at 9 p.m., it’s a black box of information for determining the contours of the half-trillion-dollar-plus piece of legislation, including More…
There were calls to close it in the wake of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, and there were more calls to close it in 2007, following the shooting massacre at Virginia Tech. But so far, Congress has done nothing to address the gun show loophole, More…
Following the horrific explosion at a West Virginia coal mine Monday, a strange thing has happened on Capitol Hill: Everyone seems to be treating the disaster as an issue peculiar to West Virginia.
Indeed, while we’ve seen plenty of statements and public interviews from West Virginia’s congressional delegation in recent More…
On Tuesday, a group of moderate Senate Democrats — wary that a proposal to scrap billions of dollars of subsidies to private student lenders would cost jobs in their states – urged party leaders to consider alternatives to the student lending reforms moving their way through Congress.
Yesterday, Democratic More…
Via an approving James Joyner and Nathan Hodge, the Virginia senator, ex-Marine and ex-Navy secretary thinks it’s time to let troops drink in war zones “for stress relief.” There would obviously need to be alcohol restrictions aplenty, especially when deployed to Muslim countries, but Webb notes that More…
President Obama rarely registers much more than 50 percent approval, he’s having trouble selling his message, and Americans continue to suffer under the weight of the nation’s economic problems. So what can the president do to help improve his standing among Democratic voters? Well, for one thing, he could More…
The only one on the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning who says the defense budget should be on the table for President Obama’s spending freeze is a former Navy secretary — Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). Saying that there’s no reason military spending should be “sacrosanct,” Webb urged Defense More…
We’d already set aside the January 2010 deadline for closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay that President Obama set on his first day in office. But now the administration is acknowledging that it probably won’t close the prison down until 2011 — at the earliest.
While funding is the More…
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