The high costs of American sugar, coupled with quotas that make it near-impossible for the product to be imported, have led two congressmen to file a bill that would overhaul the way the industry does business. One of the bill’s sponsors, Danny Davis, D-Ill., tells the Independent
Though support for the U.S. sugar industry runs high among legislators, partly due to the fact that Big Sugar continuously More…
President Obama will meet with pro-immigration reform Democrats — Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Reps. Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.) and Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) — this afternoon to discuss immigration plans for the lame-duck session. The meeting will be a follow-up to a September meeting with the three Democrats, More…
The midterm hangover having finally worn off, the 111th Congress returns today to kick off the lame-duck session, its last hurrah before its successor takes over. And the 112th Congress will look radically different, with Republicans in control of the House and the Democratic majority in the Senate significantly reduced. More…
My article on the DISCLOSE Act today mentions that Democrats are hoping, yet hardly confident, that a stripped-down version of the bill might do the trick and attract at least two Republican votes in the lame-duck session of Congress set to resume next week. The Hill, it turns out, More…
The election post-mortems keep rolling in. Politico’s Byron Tau’s report on the remarkable shift in voting patterns among America’s oldest voters goes a long way to explain why last week’s contest became such a rout for Republicans. Voters over 65, he writes, favored Republicans by a 21-point margin after More…
Momentum is building for Democrats to try one last time to pass a version of the DISCLOSE Act once Congress resumes, this time without the extraneous (and some say, onerous) prohibitions on campaign spending by federal contractors or companies with partial foreign-ownership. The New York Times and Politico More…
Mark Kirk, the Republican senator-elect from Illinois, could be sworn in as early as Nov. 29 due to special circumstances regarding his seat, which used to belong to President Obama but was handed over to Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.) when Obama took office. Kirk will serve in the More…
The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen has released a crack report today called “Outside Job: Winning Candidate Enjoyed Advantage in Unregulated Third-Party Spending in 58 of 74 Party-Shifting Contests,” which attempts to make sense of what role, if any, new forms of outside money played in yesterday’s election. Measuring More…
Pundits may differ over which natural disaster analogy was most fitting — tidal wave or earthquake? — but Republicans made large gains in both chambers of Congress and various statehouses across the country on election day. And while, at the time of writing, races in several key Western states were More…
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