That all-male hearing on birth control access over at the House Oversight Committee provoked Democratic women on the committee to walk out of the hearing room. And Nancy Pelosi responded to the hearing this way: “Five men are testifying on women’s health,” Pelosi said, adding, “Where are the women? Imagine having a panel on women’s [...]

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi released a statement that probably secures passage for a standalone, unfunded payroll tax cut: “The House Republican leadership plans to bring to the floor a stand-alone payroll tax cut extension bill tomorrow. We have long proposed bringing this tax cut to the floor without payfors and House Democrats will support [...]

When the Senate passed the STOCK Act, the bill that bans insider trading on non-public information picked up in Congress (yes, that’s not against the law right now) along with some other ethics reforms, I thought that could be a vehicle that would move expeditiously through the House. However, even though Majority Leader Eric Cantor [...]

Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats pulled off a neat little trick yesterday. The two-month extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance really only allows for one month of negotiation in the conference committee, since Congress stands in recess until the end of January. But there’s no reason that the conference committee cannot [...]

Democrats signaled that they would not acquiesce to Republican demands for poison-pill policy changes as a condition for passing an extension of the payroll tax cut, and that they would keep Congress in session through the holidays if they didn’t get the extension done. First, Nancy Pelosi spoke about riders to Brian Beutler. Republicans have [...]

Republicans unveiled their package for the payroll tax cut, and the suspicions were correct on the pay-fors. Responding to a plan by Senate Democrats to pay for the payroll tax holiday by enacting a surtax on wealthy individuals, Republicans outlined a counter-proposal that would extend the current two-year pay freeze for federal workers by an [...]

I found last night’s 60 Minutes story on insider trading in Congress to be uneven, partially underwhelming and at times outright misleading. That Congress has access to insider information and does not have to sequester off their stock trades in ways that would allow them to profit from this information is beyond dispute. The simple [...]

The Jon Corzine MF Global case looks pretty cut and dried. Corzine, who has resigned as chairman and CEO of the firm, presided over the company when they went bankrupt and as they used reportedly hundreds of millions in customer funds to make bets on their own account, in violation of federal statutes. He has [...]

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi made a nice speech in the middle of deliberation over the Colombia free trade agreement, arguing that the only item worth discussing on the trade agenda was the bill forcing rebalancing of China’s currency practices. The number of jobs at stake with the China measure dwarfs that of the free [...]

Why 11 Democratic Senators and not 50 (all of them less the three on the Super Committee) signed this effort spearheaded by Jeff Merkley is beyond me, but if more sign on it could be a crucial factor in actually pivoting away from deficit talk and toward jobs. A group of senators today urged the [...]

The biggest problem with the White House’s definitional strategy on the American Jobs Act was that Democrats didn’t really give it the full-throated support it needed to draw that contrast. By the end of last week, the White House was circling the wagons on that, and Democratic leaders stepped out to say that the jobs [...]