That all-male hearing on birth control access over at the House Oversight Committee provoked Democratic women on the committee to walk out of the hearing room. And Nancy Pelosi responded to the hearing this way: “Five men are testifying on women’s health,” Pelosi said, adding, “Where are the women? Imagine having a panel on women’s [...]

President Obama has asked Congress to provide him with the authority to consolidate multiple federal agencies, the next step on a plan announced earlier in the year to reconstitute the Commerce Department and several other agencies as a trade and economic competitiveness department. In a letter to John Boehner, Jeffrey Zients, the acting director of [...]

The details on this emerging deal on various expiring measures are getting worse by the minute. Here’s what we know: The $150 billion bill, extending the payroll tax cut, some extended unemployment insurance benefits and the “doc fix” on Medicare reimbursement rates, will only require $50 billion in offsets. The payroll tax cut won’t get [...]

Late yesterday afternoon, news broke of a tentative deal to extend the payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance and the “doc fix” on Medicare reimbursement rates. Only we shouldn’t say that the deal would extend unemployment benefits, because it wouldn’t extend all of them. There will be cuts to the maximum number of weeks of benefits [...]

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi released a statement that probably secures passage for a standalone, unfunded payroll tax cut: “The House Republican leadership plans to bring to the floor a stand-alone payroll tax cut extension bill tomorrow. We have long proposed bringing this tax cut to the floor without payfors and House Democrats will support [...]

Senate Democrats have a plan for the payroll tax cut legislation that House Republicans basically gave up on yesterday. When we last left our story, Republicans said that they would offer a bill in the House extending the payroll tax cut to the end of the year without an offset. This would mean that the [...]

We know that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has rejected the new compromise policy on birth control access, and that the Republican leadership agrees with them. But does that mean they have a chance to shift policy legislatively? The chances of that took a severe blow today, when Maine Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and [...]

The conference committee for the payroll tax cut is on a road to nowhere, and it’s clear that the House and Senate leadership will have to step in if the payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance and the doctor’s fix will get extended beyond the end of the month. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave [...]

What we’ve learned so far in the short primary season is that political advertising still has a major impact. Newt Gingrich was obliterated in Iowa and Florida by a negative ad attack, and that also played a role in Mitt Romney losing his grip on South Carolina. While polling indicates that the President has benefited [...]

The Senate will vote as early as today on whether to punish transportation unions in a bid to get Federal Aviation Administration authorization through 2015. The House already passed its version of what negotiators called a bipartisan compromise. But unions object to the deal and have gotten more vocal about it in recent days. The [...]

The STOCK Act was a media-driven bill that politicians felt they could not resist after 60 Minutes ran a (somewhat flawed) exposé on the insider trading activities of members of Congress. Once a must-pass bill like that gets into circulation, it’s going to become an attractive target for messaging amendments where members try to hitch [...]