Blowing right past the Republican concession on the payroll tax cut, the President demanded passage of all three expiring measures without delay in remarks at the White House today. He only referred to the new GOP concession in passing: Now, the good news is over the last couple of days, we’ve seen some hopeful signs [...]

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 [...]

As a kind of counterpoint to House Speaker John Boehner’s vow to legislate away the Administration’s regulations on universal access to birth control, including for certain religiously affiliated institutions, five Senate Democrats will “reaffirm their commitment to ensuring that women have access to the full range of preventative health services covered under the Affordable Care [...]

A new poll shows that the lack of forceful opposition to Administration counter-terrorism policies, especially from Congressional Democrats, has led to them becoming broadly popular. This is true even for controversial policies like the continued presence of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, or drone strikes abroad. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that Obama, [...]

Despite fierce opposition from major transit unions, the Senate yesterday gave final approval to the FAA Authorization bill, a five-year extension that removes uncertainty from the FAA, approves a next-generation air traffic monitoring system and, in Harry Reid’s telling, creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. But unions were unhappy about changes to labor law insisted [...]

A collection of 18 transportation unions have demanded that Congress reject a compromise measure on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Authorization bill which they say will hurt unions. Unions like the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, Teamsters, the International Association of Machinists, the Association of Flight Attendants (CWA) and more object to several hidden provisions [...]

I don’t know if anything’s going to get done in Congress in 2012, but one thing is becoming clear – Senate Democrats will try to put Republicans up against the wall on taxes. They already have on the record multiple instances of Republicans voting almost in unison against millionaire’s surtaxes. Now we’ll see votes on [...]

Well, we won’t have the resolution of disapproval on the debt limit to kick around anymore. The Senate held their vote on the resolution, part of last August’s debt limit deal, and just like with the first tranche of funds, the Senate blocked the resolution by a vote of 52-44. Republicans did not even get [...]

I was very skeptical that the Indiana House Democrats could hold up on a boycott to deny quorum to Republicans, and indeed, they couldn’t. They returned to work late today and allowed the right-to-work legislation to pass. Indiana’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives cleared the way Wednesday to become the first right-to-work state in a traditionally [...]

Indiana Democrats in the State House walked out again to deny a quorum, as Republicans attempted to pass their right-to-work bill and clear the last hurdle before moving the bill to Mitch Daniels for his signature. The House tried and failed to come in at both 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., as not enough representatives [...]

The ongoing boycott by House Democrats in Indiana over anti-union right-to-work legislation was theoretically made easier by this ruling from a state judge, blocking the seizing of legislator paychecks to cover the $1,000-a-day fines Republicans have recently imposed. This won’t stop the fines, but it tangles the issue of the fines up in court for [...]