The Congressional Research Service has released a report to the House Judiciary Committee about ACORN, the community organizing group which has generated controversy on the right. John Conyers, who asked for the report, wanted to know about a variety of issues related to the group, and here were some of the results: There were no [...]

With the votes to pass health care in the Senate a fait accompli, everyone has turned their attention to the conference committee, and the numerous knotty issues involved in reconciling the House and Senate bills and arriving at something that can pass both chambers. Democratic Senators spent the weekend vowing that whatever comes out in [...]

US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and commander of US forces Stanley McChrystal are testifying to multiple Congressional committees today, and fellow FDLer Spencer Ackerman has all the details of that at the Windy. I want to highlight this comment from Rep. Rob Andrews as an example of the difficulty President Obama and the Administration [...]

Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of loans on primary residences, the same way they can on secondary residences or yachts (no, really). The “cramdown” provision, seen by many liberal economists as the only way to deal with the foreclosure crisis, then [...]

The AP painted a stark picture last night of skeptical anti-war Dems resigning themselves to the escalation in troops laid out by President Obama on Tuesday. A deeply skeptical Congress on Wednesday resigned itself to President Barack Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan war, even as the president’s chief military and diplomatic advisers sought to cool [...]

Since Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) called for Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to step down this Wednesday, the question has become a part of the political conversation. Republicans predictably took the opportunity to attack the Obama economic team, but progressive Democrats have started to get the question as well, a sign of things to come. [...]

The Obama Administration announced a task force on financial fraud today, seeking to rebuild an area that has gone completely fallow in the Bush years – investigative capabilities in the financial area. The SEC was gutted under Bush and tended toward willful blindness of fraud and abuse, while the investigative divisions of the Justice Department [...]

The President’s weekly message this week has generated more attention than a lot of the others, because it features him taking his hardest edge yet against the health insurance industry – the kind of message that progressives have wanted him to deliver for some time now. This is the unsustainable path we’re on, and it’s [...]