The one moderately effective charge that Republicans have been making at Democrats with respect to the budget process is that the Senate hasn’t passed a budget in over 1,000 days. That’s a fairly simplistic rendering. This really only refers to a budget resolution – if there wasn’t a budget there wouldn’t be a working federal [...]

Yesterday, Democrats began their media push on the Buffett rule, which Sheldon Whitehouse and Tammy Baldwin have turned into legislation called the Paying a Fair Share Act. The bill would set a minimum 30% effective tax rate for earners making over $1 million. The revenue increase from the bill is actually kind of small. CBO [...]

House Democrats have continued their efforts to keep the notion of oil speculation driving the run-up in gas prices at the head of the national conversation. Yesterday, the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee held a hearing on over-speculation and its impact on the market, attended by, among others, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. In remarks [...]

Leading Democrats and the White House have taken note of the threat of a doubling of the student loan interest rate by June 30 (from 3.4% to 6.8%), and are working on steps to prevent it. However, they have to contend with a stingy House GOP that isn’t interested in finding the $6 billion or [...]

President Obama just wrapped up his speech on the Ryan budget, and Jed Lewison has a couple live-blogs about it. He was quite pleased with the speech. But I want to point out something he wrote at the very end: Obama continues hammering Republicans for moving so far to the right. “Cap and trade was [...]

After two days of trying and failing to pass a short-term extension of the surface transportation bill, Republicans will now use the regular process to try to force their extension through, with just days to go before a shutdown of federal transportation funding. A 90-day extension of current law that provides funding for road and [...]

It’s message vote season in Congress, that time where political parties try to make the opposition uncomfortable by scheduling votes that are difficult to oppose. And the first one, yesterday from Senate Democrats, concerned canceling tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry to pay for investments in renewable energy. With gas prices nearing record [...]

We all know about the Paul Ryan budget, which will get a vote on the House floor this week, only one week after it was introduced. Both sides feel they have a story to tell about that budget: Republicans because they’re passing a budget at all, Democrats because that budget is unnecessarily cruel, forces the [...]

The Senate plan for the JOBS Act today, a financial deregulation bill that would weaken investor protections with no economic benefit, was for three cloture votes – an amendment to add investor protections to the bill, an amendment to attach a reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank to the bill, and, if those failed, a cloture [...]

Paul Ryan’s budget was released this morning. He kicked it off with another pretentious video preview and a somewhat less pretentious and more standard op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Ryan’s budget resolution is similar to last year’s version, which passed the House and went nowhere in the Senate. The charges are similar, too. He [...]

It appears a few Democrats have finally gotten around to reading the JOBS Act, the financial industry deregulation bill that would bring back penny-stock scams and remove investor protections. Multiple Democrats in the Senate have proposed changes to the legislation, which breezed through the House with ample Democratic support. “We can dial back this excessive [...]