The final vote on the war supplemental in the House is expected in the next hour or so, and while it may have the 289 votes needed under suspension of the rules to pass, because Republicans are likely to support it strongly, a growing number of Democrats are expressing second thoughts. For example, Appropriations Committee [...]

Just a little over an hour ago, I wrote that the likely scenario for the war supplemental is that it will be stripped of any social spending and passed, ostensibly with Republican support if they can make it as clean as possible. Progressives didn’t really have a choke point with this bill. If it couldn’t [...]

David Obey’s long recitations of the stimulus and education debates on Capitol Hill really are amazing reading. The story about Arne Duncan and the White House offering up food stamp cuts rather than his precious Race to the Top program is priceless, but Obey laying out the entire issue is instructive: The secretary of Education [...]

Let’s walk through just what happened last night in the House of Representatives on the war supplemental, and its multiple implications. The House wanted to pass war funding, and a substantial amount of members wanted to tack on some social spending. Antiwar progressives didn’t want to vote for both the social spending and the war [...]

There’s a cloture vote scheduled today on the tax extenders bill in the Senate. It doesn’t look like it’ll pass. Bernie Sanders couldn’t get a repeal of fossil fuel subsidies into it last night to help pay for it, so the usual suspects are choking on the cost. And Senators on the Democratic side are [...]

In case you were wondering why the President waited until a Saturday night to send the letter asking for $50 billion in new stimulus measures, David Rogers unravels that mystery for you today. For context, there’s been a growing frustration on the part of Democratic appropriators in the House on the lack of clear language [...]

Ideally, you would pay to keep 300,000 teachers employed as an additional stimulus, a well-targeted use of federal dollars that goes directly into saving jobs. But the self-defeating position of the Blue Dogs, to argue against additional job creation when their Congressional careers quite literally depend on it, has forced appropriators to look into a [...]

A couple weeks ago, Education Secretary Arne Duncan came out strongly for a proposal by Tom Harkin to add $23 billion dollars into an upcoming spending bill to give to the states so they could avoid laying off 300,000 teachers. With state budget cuts looming, teachers were at risk, class sizes were sure to rise, [...]

I think the Democrats figured they had closed the book on House retirements this year. Bart Stupak seemed to be the final departure. But Politico reports that David Obey, the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, will not seek re-election. In a major blow to Democrats, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey has told [...]

I forgot to file this yesterday, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did discuss at her press conference two ideas which have been generating discussion on Capitol Hill recently. On the war surtax favored by Rep. David Obey (D-WI), Pelosi basically torpedoed the idea. She said “that is his idea, he is speaking for himself,” and [...]

A war surtax would really give Republicans trouble, in addition to being the right policy, to show the real cost of war, instead of living in this fantasy world where our actions abroad have no effect on our actions at home. But Democratic threats have been proven to be so idle over the years that nobody accords them a smidgen of respect. And thus we have a failure to govern.