The Senate plans a floor vote on the Ryan budget at some undisclosed point. Initially the thought was it would come up this week, but now that has been pushed back to “sometime this month.” There are only two weeks left before the Memorial Day break, so that doesn’t leave much time. It would be [...]

A couple weeks ago, we saw the enormous lobby culture massing around swipe fees, the relatively obscure issue that determines where billions of dollars go between banks and retailers. The important thing to start with is that this was already determined through a public process. Last year, Congress held a vote, Dick Durbin got over [...]

There’s a conceit that Congress is where public servants go to improve the quality of American life. OK, nobody has that conceit anymore. But surely many believe Congress has a set of priorities other than what Zach Carter and Ryan Grim describe in a spectacular piece today, which is as a mediator between competing corporate [...]

This story from the NYT suggests that the White House responded favorably to a request from Senate Democrats to stop the deportations of DREAM-eligible students and focus ICE resources on other undocumented immigrants. Olga Zanella, a Mexican-born college student in Texas, should have started months ago trying to figure out how she could make a [...]

I’m a bit disinterested in reading the tea leaves of the Gang of Six, mainly because I think that reading the roster of the six members is enough: Durbin, Conrad, Warner, Chambliss, Crapo, Coburn. Four of them voted for the Bowles-Simpson cat food plan, and the other two put together the gang specifically to put [...]

The President held a town hall meeting in Annandale, Virginia, and these are usually events that serve as a conduit for a message that the President wants to get out. Therefore, it’s worth paying attention to his entire answer about Social Security: Q Hi, Mr. President. My name is Vinita Griffin (ph). I’m a late [...]

Late yesterday, the White House announced that Vice President Biden would convene a meeting at Blair House on May 5 on fiscal policy. Biden “will lead a bipartisan, bicameral group to begin work on a legislative framework for comprehensive deficit reduction.” There’s only one problem: Republican leaders have not agreed to this meeting. Both Nancy [...]

Georgia has followed Arizona and become the second state to pass an anti-immigration law which would empower law enforcement to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect of a crime, which could be applied even for something as trivial as a traffic violation. The bill, HB 87, would also force businesses to do the [...]

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), a member of the Senate leadership, said today that he supported the call for a vote authorizing military action in Libya, consistent with the War Powers Act. “Under the War Powers Act, any Senator can call this question,” said Durbin on a conference call. “I supported that (during Gulf War I), [...]

Maybe the most surprising amendment to pass in the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform bill was Dick Durbin’s interchange fee amendment. The banks had collected this exorbitant fee for a long time, even on debit cards, where the transaction costs were almost nil. But Durbin somehow won the amendment on the floor of the Senate. There [...]

Good thing the White House is taking the imminent government shutdown so seriously. President Obama designated Joe Biden as his lead negotiator with Congress on a long-term plan to set spending for the rest of the year. They had a meeting Thursday, and I’m not certain they followed up on Friday. And now, Biden’s headed [...]