Back in 2008, after the Presidential election, I remember Rachel Maddow doing an interview with President-elect Obama and asking him about infrastructure needs, citing an American Society of Civil Engineering report giving the country a failing grade for infrastructure, with hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in projects needed for upgrades and maintenance. [...]

There are two big transportation-related bills awaiting completion in Congress. Yesterday Congress passed, and the President signed, the annual appropriations for the Department of Transportation, which included a zeroing out of funding for the Administration’s cherished high-speed rail project. The other two big measures are an FAA authorization bill, and a surface transportation bill. The [...]

One thing that Democrats and Republicans were able to get together on yesterday was to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government for an additional four weeks beyond today’s deadline, until December 16. The continuing resolution was attached to a “minibus” of three appropriations bills, for various federal departments, including Commerce, Justice, Transportation, Housing [...]

Members of the Occupy Wall Street movement said today on a conference call that the police action to evict protesters from Zuccotti Park will only amplify future efforts, starting on Thursday with a planned day of action that will occur at sites across the country. “We’re going to get in the streets by the tens [...]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the economy added 80,000 jobs in October, and the topline unemployment rate ticked down a notch to 9.0%. This is the seventh straight month that the unemployment rate has been between 9.0 and 9.2%, a period of stasis for the economy, a low-growth holding pattern. The private sector [...]

Republicans successfully filibustered the Rebuild American Jobs Act today, rejecting a cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the bill by a count of 51-49. 60 votes were needed for passage. All 47 Republicans voted against cloture, and they were joined by two members of the Democratic caucus – Democrat Ben Nelson and the [...]

Today, the Senate will vote on a motion to proceed on the Rebuild American Jobs Act. This version of the jobs legislation proposed by President Obama in September basically takes the infrastructure pieces from the bill, including an up-front $50 billion investment and $10 billion in seed money for a national infrastructure bank. It’s all [...]

After being stymied on the American Jobs Act and a smaller bill on state fiscal aid to hire teachers and first responders, the Senate has come back with another bill, called the Rebuild America Jobs Act. This bill takes the infrastructure pieces out of the AJA, and again pays for them with a small surtax [...]

Yesterday the House GOP continued its bold jobs agenda by passing a bill to ban abortion coverage in the health insurance exchanges. But on a parallel track, Republican leaders are also bringing forward additional measures that have a jobs component. House Republicans are doing an about-face, breathing life into expensive legislation long considered dead in [...]

The perfectly logical idea that Republicans are resisting any effort to aid the economy because they would rather things be worse in November 2012 so they can help themselves to winning the elections has been around Democratic circles for a while. Some Democrats used this line of attack in 2010 to criticize Republican obstruction when [...]

The House GOP leadership has written a memo to their caucus picking and choosing what they would be willing to support in the American Jobs Act. The numbers come out to support for 1/44th of the overall price tag, about 2% of the total bill. As you may know, the AJA is comprised of about [...]