House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced yesterday (on Twitter!) that she would call the House back into session next week to take up a bill dealing with education spending, state fiscal relief, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. We have a cost estimate now, that puts the version of H.R. 1586 likely to be adopted [...]
The election of Republican Scott Brown to succeed Edward Kennedy representing Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate has had huge reverberations. The meaning of it for health care legislation is now starting to become clear. The provocative, questionable idea that the House and Senate might try to pass a bill before Brown was seated had clearly [...]
With the $500 billion omnibus spending bill racing through Congress this week, there is no better time to highlight the need for a transparent and regular appropriations process. So a group of transparency advocates have put together a letter asking Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and Appropriations Committee Chairman Obey (D-WI) to provide “timely and easily-accessible disclosure [...]
[Update: In my haste to report this to you, I deviated from the usual way costs are reported here. The figures reported below and in the title are what the stimulus would add to the national debt, not the cost per family/person as we usually report it here on WashingtonWatch.com. (See the "about" page for [...]
Back when the bailout train was getting rolling, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi posted the financial services bailout legislation on her blog Sunday September 28th, 2008 at 3:12 pm. The House voted on the bill the next day at 2:07 pm. It was only 22 hours, 55 minutes later – not quite the 24 hours that [...]
Congress returns to work this week to consider an economic stimulus plan. The Senate comes in Monday and the House on Wednesday. While the broad outlines of that plan can be determined from reading news reports and watching President-Elect Obama’s first weekly address, the details are what matter. The broad outlines: – Extension of unemployment [...]
This Associated Press article notes what I wrote here yesterday morning about the annual spending process and the October 1 start of the new fiscal year: If Congress spends $700 billion this week on a financial services bailout, at least we’ll know where that money went. Before the month is out, Congress will spend hundreds [...]