Backed by a larger caucus, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will stay onin the post for another two years. She will make the announcement at this hour. Nobody will challenge her for the Democratic leadership position. A delay in leadership elections and the rumor mill pointed to the possibility that Pelosi would step down from [...]

Former House Speakers don’t typically spend a lot of time in Congress after their ouster. Nancy Pelosi felt she had a chance, aided by the coattails of the President, to win back the House in 2012. It turns out that the Democrats picked up, if all the current too-close-to-call races hold, eight seats. Key states [...]

If you’re into that sort of thing, I thought the President gave an excellent if a bit stentorian speech last night, weaving in plenty of different themes we should look for in a second term. But the most important part of this was a throwaway line that was probably not in the prepared text, something [...]

Nothing else needs to be said about the sociopathy of Joe Klein than what Glenn Greenwald describes today. Klein’s justification for drone warfare comes down to “we have to kill their children before they kill our children,” and frankly that’s about as nuancedas our foreign policy debate gets these days. Greenwald goes into all the [...]

Wow, if this isn’t a perfectly correct critique of the President, from of all people, David Frum. He’s not an alien, he’s not a radical. He’s just not the person the country needs. He’s not tough enough, he’s not imaginative enough, and he’s not determined enough. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since [...]

The fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling on California prisons has been predictable. Law and order politicians rail against “activist judges” who are meddling in California’s business (by protecting 8th Amendment rights and rejecting the ability for the state to continue killing its prisoners through negligence to their medical care). They claim that this order [...]

While we’re all waiting to see what happens with the 2011 budget, I didn’t realize that Paul Ryan had fast-tracked his 2012 budget, taking it through the Budget Committee this week in a markup that lasted all of one day. Erik Wasson writes that the bill would get a vote next week, but House Republicans [...]

The military airdrops of seawater onto the Fukushima Daiichi plant continued throughout the day today, and Tokyo Electric Power Co. was nearing completion on a new power line that would restore the cooling systems in the reactors. The outlook remains bleak after a week of crisis, but Japanese officials appear to have settled on a [...]

SOMEWHERE ABOVE MILWAUKEE (FDL) – I’m sorry I was unable to finish my reporting from inside the Capitol tonight, but within about 20 minutes of the order from the Capitol Police to “close” the building, you could tell where everything was going. The protesters were organized, on the floor, ready to call the bluff off [...]

Last night, it appeared that Elijah Cummings would attempt to leapfrog seniority and obtain the ranking membership of the House Oversight Committee with the backing of outgoing ranking member Ed Towns. However, Towns reversed course last night, saying in a statement, “I support Carolyn Maloney to become Ranking Member of the Oversight and Government Reform [...]

In a press conference outside the House Democratic caucus meeting, four members discussed their effort to delay leadership elections for a month, in a potential rebuke to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Ultimately, leadership beat this back by a 2-to-1 margin (129-68 in a secret ballot), and leadership elections will be held today. All leadership members from [...]