In our (free!) weekly email newsletter, we cut to the chase, giving you the quickest overview of what’s happening in Washington, D.C. But if you want more than the bare-bones information about what’s happening in Congress, a good resource is The Hill’s Floor Action blog. It goes through the details of what’s happening on the [...]
You’d think it was a joke, but it’s not. That’s the headline of a post on the The Hill‘s Floor Action blog: “Senate Dem Seeks Federal Funding for Diapers.” The bill is S. 1778, and according to the write-up, the bill would amend the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act of 1990 to allow [...]
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) doesn’t seem to know what transparency is. This morning the full Senate voted down a proposed rule that would have barred earmarks for the next two years. Part of the reason? Earmarks are transparent. Here’s Senator Durbin, quoted in a Hill article: “There is full disclosure in my office of every [...]
This weekend on Fox News Sunday, The Hill‘s A.B. Stoddard recited the list of things facing Congress and Washington, D.C. generally in the week following Thanksgiving, starting with a White House meeting between the incoming House leadership and President Obama. You look at that calendar. On November 30th is the day the White House meeting [...]
The American League of Lobbyists has provided a slapstick moment in the debate over earmarks. As we noted last week, the Senate Republican Conference—that’s all the folks on the “R” team in the Senate—will vote Tuesday on whether to forgo earmarks in the coming 112th Congress. So the head of the American League of Lobbyists [...]
The Hill reports that the likely Speaker of the new Republican House, John Boehner (R-OH) will move first to cut representatives’ pay. Cutting member pay would show voters the new GOP majority in the House is going to lead by example in their efforts to rein in spending and start with their own wallets, say [...]
… is gonna be what it’s gonna be. You don’t get to find out ahead of time. “CR” is short for “continuing resolution,” a bill that allows government spending to continue in the new fiscal year even though Congress hasn’t passed the regular spending bills that allocate funds for the government’s operation. The new fiscal [...]
Ben Goddard writes in The Hill about the new taxpayer revolt in California this week. The political establishment put together a package of initiatives that it thought would fix the budget process there – but the people weren’t buying it. The only thing they passed was the measure to ban salary increases for legislators if [...]
Though we’ve been collecting and reporting information on the annual spending process, OMB Watch reports that congressional leaders may allow the process to collapse, passing only temporary spending measures until there is a new president in office. Here’s how The Hill, a government-industry trade paper, describes the thinking: Democrats have little incentive to try to [...]