The White House formally threatened a veto of the House version of a surface transportation bill, opening the question of whether any long-term bill will get signed before March when current funding on roads and bridges expires. There are currently different versions of the surface transportation bill moving through each chamber of Congress. The House [...]

A Gallup poll out today shows virtually no ill effects to President Obama’s poll numbers among Catholics after a week of controversy about birth control access rules opposed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. The poll shows that support for Obama has hovered between 45% and 51% over the past couple months, and after [...]

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 [...]

As a kind of counterpoint to House Speaker John Boehner’s vow to legislate away the Administration’s regulations on universal access to birth control, including for certain religiously affiliated institutions, five Senate Democrats will “reaffirm their commitment to ensuring that women have access to the full range of preventative health services covered under the Affordable Care [...]

Despite fierce opposition from major transit unions, the Senate yesterday gave final approval to the FAA Authorization bill, a five-year extension that removes uncertainty from the FAA, approves a next-generation air traffic monitoring system and, in Harry Reid’s telling, creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. But unions were unhappy about changes to labor law insisted [...]

The Senate will vote as early as today on whether to punish transportation unions in a bid to get Federal Aviation Administration authorization through 2015. The House already passed its version of what negotiators called a bipartisan compromise. But unions object to the deal and have gotten more vocal about it in recent days. The [...]

The STOCK Act was a media-driven bill that politicians felt they could not resist after 60 Minutes ran a (somewhat flawed) exposé on the insider trading activities of members of Congress. Once a must-pass bill like that gets into circulation, it’s going to become an attractive target for messaging amendments where members try to hitch [...]

House Republicans are honoring a deep tradition in American politics by trying to save their political skins and their majority through the passage of a highway bill. In past years these would be earmark-laden affairs designed to channel resources to particular districts and bolster the case for re-election. That’s not quite the case this year. [...]

Those of us in the blogosphere have become inured to defenders of the President ticking off a laundry list of his accomplishments. On the domestic policy front, this includes health care and financial reform, the auto industry rescue, and a series of other smaller bills that have taken on a much larger significance in the [...]

A collection of 18 transportation unions have demanded that Congress reject a compromise measure on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Authorization bill which they say will hurt unions. Unions like the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, Teamsters, the International Association of Machinists, the Association of Flight Attendants (CWA) and more object to several hidden provisions [...]