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 [...]

The Republican theory on the Keystone XL pipeline is that the President is holding back the immediate creation of eleventy billion jobs by refusing to give approval to a permit for construction. Under their various pieces of legislation, TransCanada, the pipeline operator, would be able to immediately begin construction and create jobs hauling tar sands [...]

Senate Democrats have a plan for the payroll tax cut legislation that House Republicans basically gave up on yesterday. When we last left our story, Republicans said that they would offer a bill in the House extending the payroll tax cut to the end of the year without an offset. This would mean that the [...]

In an impressive bit of caving, the House Republican leadership has given up on finding offsets for the payroll tax cut, proposing a bill that would extend the current cut to the end of the year without any funding. However, the other two pieces that were tied to the overall legislation at the end of [...]

We know that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has rejected the new compromise policy on birth control access, and that the Republican leadership agrees with them. But does that mean they have a chance to shift policy legislatively? The chances of that took a severe blow today, when Maine Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and [...]

Noam Scheiber has an excerpt of his new book on Obama’s economic policy in The New Republic. It focuses on 2011 and the series of bruising negotiations with Republicans over the deficit. And it includes the now-familiar internal White House struggles between deficit reduction and economic stimulus, with deficit reduction winning out through 2010 and [...]

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 [...]

Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White can no longer serve in that position after he was found guilty of felony voter fraud charges. The verdict was delivered at 2:20am this morning. White, the state’s chief election officer, was found guilty of six out of seven felony counts. The jury found him not guilty on a [...]

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 [...]

New polling shows overwhelming support for the Buffett rule. The National Journal poll shows 76% in support of a minimum effective tax rate of 30% for millionaires. It’s a simple policy, easily explained. And so it does well in public opinion polling. But another simple policy, easily explained, is the facile notion that America should [...]

It appears that Mitt Romney will win the Florida primary going away, as polls show a double-digit lead or more. Newt Gingrich has downplayed the loss already and vows to take the fight to Super Tuesday and all the way to the convention if necessary. Gingrich’s problem is that there aren’t 10 Sheldon Adelsons willing [...]