By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday urged Congress not to extend import sanctions on Myanmar, warning that sticking with the sanctions would be "a slap in the face" to reformers in the Southeast Asian nation.
The president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press on Sunday called the government's secret seizure of two months of reporters' phone records "unconstitutional" and said the news cooperative had not ruled out legal action against the Justice Department.
Like a bad restaurant, the Obama administration attracts scathing reviews from Republicans and conservative critics who are tired of what's on the policy menu, and repelled by the signature "culture" of White House operations. The trio of scandals centered on Benghazi, the IRS and the Justice Department has ramped up the tirade, and until facts and conclusions emerge, the talk of the moment is culture-centric.
Republican lawmakers joined forces Thursday with tea party leaders on Capitol Hill, calling for a thorough investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups for special scrutiny and demanding that the Obama administration come clean about what it knew about the scandal.
As he struggles to find momentum in his second term, President Obama is setting a dubious record for the slowest pace in assembling a new Cabinet.
The White House on Friday said it was wrong for the Internal Revenue Service to target some conservative groups — notably ones that had the words "tea party" in their titles — during the 2012 election session.
One of the Republican promises in the 1994 congressional campaign, included in the "Contract With America," was to force Congress to live under the laws it imposes on everyone else. The Congressional Accountability Act followed, eliminating a number of major exemptions in the hope that lawmakers would be less likely to enact burdensome laws if they were personally affronted by them.
When crunch time comes, when the chips are down, when the rubber meets the road — employ the cliché of your choice — Americans can put away their selfish concerns and come together in common cause. Even Congress, our only native criminal class.
White House spokesman Jay Carney Tuesday said President Obama would consider a congressional attempt to fix flight delays caused by sequester cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration but blamed the traveling inconvenience on Republicans for letting the budget cuts take place.
After several years of complaining that Congress didn't have a budget, Republicans are now the ones holding up the 2014 budget process.
The man who is suspected of bugging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's office has started a legal defense fund aimed at raising $10,000 — and so far, he's received $185.
The Senate opened its session on Tuesday with reflections on the tragedy at the Boston Marathon, moments before it began debate on gun-control legislation that evoked the tragedies at Newtown, Conn., in December and Virginia Tech in 2007.
Sometimes, the nation's reporters perform their duties to the highest degree: They root out corruption, uncover scandal, speak truth to power. But increasingly, America's "journalists" are falling well short of what the founders envisioned when they sought to ensure a democracy kept honest by a free and vibrant press.
What first looked to be a campaign leak or a "Watergate-style" bugging may actually have been one guy with an iPhone.
While the Senate's Democratic rulers will ignore a Republican bill passed by the House last week aimed at conditionally shuttering the National Labor Relations Board, the upper chamber's GOP minority is determined to keep the panel in limbo until a dispute over President Obama's "recess appointments" is resolved.
"Americans want us to show we're serious about lowering the debt, so the president and his allies in Congress have a choice to make: they can either vote to reduce the deficit, or they can lock arms and dig an even deeper hole of debt," said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said he finds some of her views "quite troubling" and mentioned political speech and the First Amendment in particular.
