Washington Insider
February 7, 2012
Insider Trading Bills Gain Traction in Senate This Week
Legislation intended to block members of Congress and their staffs from insider trading and calling for internal ethics panels to enforce the ban moved forward in the Senate on Monday. Spurred by a November "60 Minutes" report on potential insider trading by members, the STOCK Act is geared toward cutting off lawmakers from drawing on non-public information for profit. But the Senate effort is encountering...
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January 30, 2012
Legislators Push Alternate Online Piracy Bills
While other websites were going dark earlier this month to protest online piracy legislation, KeepTheWebOpen.com was lighting up. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), (pictured in foreground), is using crowdsourcing to gauge public opinion and gather suggested edits to the text of his online piracy bill.
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January 23, 2012
Multi-Year Goal for Farm Bill: Doing More With Less
The House and Senate Agriculture committees face time and funding constraints as they work to produce a multi-year farm bill that will revamp farm-support programs, consolidate conservation programs and affect nutrition policy — while also cutting mandatory spending.
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January 19, 2012
United Front, Tension Beneath
With less than 10 months to go before the 2012 election, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) can see a path to becoming majority leader. It will involve pragmatism, occasional compromise and careful choices about when to fight with the Democrats. In the House, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has the majority, but he does not appear to have the luxury of picking his fights. And that’s where...
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January 9, 2012
A Lot of Symbolism, A Little Substance from 112th Congress
In a divided Congress, with one chamber’s majority in basic agreement with White House policy and the other vehemently opposed, Congress assumed a split personality on many pivotal votes in the first session of the 112th Congress. The result was that many votes in 2011 carried only symbolic weight.
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January 3, 2012
Mayors Begin to Cope With Congress’ Spending Cuts
Over the past 12 months, Congress has reduced federal spending by about $47 billion, spread over two appropriations cycles. One of the first groups to feel the pain of the spending cuts are the nation’s mayors, who already have begun to receive less of the federal grant money that helps them run many programs in their cities and towns.
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December 27, 2011
Speaker’s Political Capital Diminished as Party Enters Critical Election Year
At the beginning of last year, newly elected House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) accepted a large gavel from Democrat Nancy Pelosi (CA) and laid out a vision for how things would be different under his leadership. At year’s end, Boehner conducted a brief call...
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December 19, 2011
House GOP Rises Up Against Tax Deal, Limits Extension
A tumultuous congressional session is coming to a fitting end, with House lawmakers threatening to jettison a Senate compromise on a popular payroll tax break, even though senators have already left town thinking they had finished the year’s legislative business. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said Sunday that House Republicans oppose the Senate-passed two-month extension of the Social Security...
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December 13, 2011
House Sets Up Battle Over Payroll Tax Cut, Pipeline
The House and Senate are set to clash this week on a high-priority package to extend the Social Security payroll tax cut as part of the ongoing partisan debate over how to boost the economy and spur job creation. Although party leaders in both chambers support renewing the tax cut and long-term unemployment benefits, lawmakers are divided over how to finance the measure and whether to include unrelated...
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December 5, 2011
Competing Payroll Tax Bills Both Rejected by Senate
The contours of the debate over preserving a year-old Social Security payroll tax cut came into focus last week, with senators from both sides of the aisle embracing an extension of the benefit even as they disagreed over how to pay for it. The dispute over offsets sank two bills in the Senate, one each by the Democrats and Republicans.
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