Work on the National Defense Authorization bill in the House wrapped up today, and there were high points and low points. Among the lows was that House members voting against stripping the “forever war” provision from the bill, essentially a reauthorization of the AUMF, by a 234-187 margin (20 Democrats voted against that, by the [...]

Democrats unveiled their legislation to repeal Big Oil tax subsidies today, giving the high-profile legislation to three Senators with elections next year in tough states (Claire McCaskill, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester) along with Bob Menendez, who appears to be the point person on oil-related issues in the caucus. Given that he was so successful [...]

The House will vote on a meaningless bill today to basically destroy the EPA as we know it. But the Senate has been puzzling over how to react to said meaningless bill for months. There are Democrats – led by Jay Rockefeller – who want a kinder, gentler version of EPA destruction, blocking its ability [...]

Virtually every time that Republicans or the Obama Administration talk about working together, they specifically cite the South Korea free trade agreement as a point of covergence. The agreement, modified by Obama’s negotiators last year but substantially similar to the corporate-written agreement originally negotiated under George W. Bush, looks like it’s on a glide path [...]

Let’s move out of the tax-cut frying pan and into the South Korea free trade agreement fire. The Wall Street Journal says that KORUS, which is the nickname the White House has been using for the deal, is picking up support. But the first piece of their article concerns how Max Baucus, the chair of [...]

Max Baucus just got around today to introducing a one-year extension of unemployment benefits, at a one-time cost of $56.4 billion dollars. Baucus did not offset the bill (though isn’t that equal to the cost of the federal employee pay freeze over ten years, and less than canceling ethanol subsidies, FWIW). And that’s because he [...]

The new-look Senate, after swearing in Mark Kirk (R-IL) to replace Democrat Roland Burris, expects to finish work on S.510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, today. But not before a series of votes on a number of Republican amendments that send messages more than contribute to the debate over food safety. The food safety [...]

It’s still unclear whether we’ll have any votes on the Bush tax cuts before Congress retreats for the midterms at the end of next week. The Senate leadership put the chances at around 75% that they would hold a vote. Incidentally, here’s what that vote would actually look like: Yet, on this same point, Baucus [...]

Yesterday, I mentioned the Office of the Homeowner Advocate, an attempt by Sen. Al Franken to get an independent review process for HAMP, the Treasury Department foreclosure mitigation program which has failed homeowners while merely extending foreclosures out a bit and squeezing additional payments into the hands of the banks. Today, this common-sense effort to [...]

I’m going to be counter-intuitive and say that I don’t fear the cat food commission mucking around with Medicare at all, and that this story from Brian Beutler about the internal deliberations only confirms my suspicions. As you can see, the Democrats on the commission don’t want to deal with health care in any way [...]

Business groups want to steer the debate over the Bush tax cuts into a friendly Senate committee, where their lobbying efforts can be more concentrated, according to The Wall Street Journal. Washington business groups are urging Democratic leaders not to use procedural shortcuts to bring major tax legislation to the Senate floor later this year, [...]