Six Republican Senators unveiled their legislation yesterday to roll back the defense trigger from the debt limit deal, replacing the $600 billion in savings with other cuts. However, this is not a $600 billion deal; in fact, the Senators, led by John McCain, only delayed the first year of defense cuts at a cost of [...]

Congress has mostly left Washington, with no resolution on a host of year-end measures that, if allowed to expire, will result in an average $1,000 tax increase, the expiration of unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless, and a 27% rate cut in Medicare reimbursement. House Republicans left behind eight “conferees” for a conference on the [...]

Yesterday, as part of the defense authorization bill, Sen. Jeff Merkley offered an amendment that would ask the President for an accelerated drawdown of forces in Afghanistan. It’s the kind of amendment that we’ve seen a number of times, though certainly a more modest version of it, and it always gets just a handful of [...]

Other than the payroll tax legislation, the big news in the Senate this week is the defense authorization bill, traditionally seen as must-pass legislation. It seems like every year there’s some big controversy over this bill.  This time that comes in the form of a measure that would mandate indefinite detentions of terrorist suspects in [...]

The John McCains of the world have moved right past Libya and sought NATO intervention in Syria, another country featuring a brutal crackdown of a protest movement. By some estimates, 3,000 protesters have been murdered by the security forces, with thousands more detained and tortured. The Assad regime claims that 1,000 security officers have been [...]

Leon Panetta has said time and time again since the inking of the debt limit deal that defense cuts at the level of what would be triggered by a Super Committee failure would be disastrous. He did so again at a Congressional hearing today. And we finally got a sense of what that “disaster” would [...]

From the wreckage of the jobs crisis, along comes one man willing to set things right. A war hero, to be precise, a man who spent years in a POW camp, in case you didn’t know. John McCain will make it all better with his “Real American Jobs Act,” tailored perfectly to real Americans. They’re [...]

Because of the reflexive “everything Obama does is wrong” strategy for Republican control of government, you have a spectacle where the President intervened in a foreign country and led to an apparent change in regime, and according to Lindsey Graham and John McCain the real problem was that we didn’t commit more resources into Libya [...]

One of the more confusing pieces of Harry Reid’s debt limit deal is the plan to sell publicly held spectrum for wireless broadband use. First of all, this plan is not all that new. The White House announced it last June, planning to make 500 MHz of spectrum available over the next ten years. At [...]

John McCain has now signed on for Mitch McConnell’s debt limit plan. I don’t think there’s much doubt that the votes are there in the Senate – even over 60 if someone like Jim DeMint or Rand Paul filibusters – to pass the bill. The House is another matter, as Eric Cantor has gone rogue [...]

Eugene Robinson had the best column I’ve seen about the President’s game-playing with war powers on Libya. Blasting dictator Moammar Gaddafi’s troops and installations from above with unmanned drone aircraft may or may not be the right thing to do, but it’s clearly a hostile act. Likewise, providing intelligence, surveillance and logistical support that enable [...]