AP - The House Democratic campaign chief said Wednesday the ethics committee has ended an investigation of former Rep. Eric Massa, but the freshman's alleged harassment of his staff members — with possible sexual overtones — could spell continuing trouble for the party.
AP - Democrats claimed momentum Wednesday in their drive to enact the sweeping health care legislation sought by President Barack Obama, citing near agreement on crucial issues despite persistent Republican efforts to knock them off stride.
AP - They flew planes during World War II but weren't considered real military pilots. No flags were draped over their coffins when they died on duty. And when their service ended, they had to pay their own bus fare home.
AP - The Senate voted Wednesday to extend key pieces of last year's economic stimulus measure, including help for the jobless and money to help financially strapped states pay for health care for the poor.
AP - The Federal Reserve, still dusting itself off from a fight that threatened to trim its powers, could emerge from a congressional overhaul of banking rules as the top cop over the nation's largest financial institutions.
AFP - The US Senate has adopted a 140-billion-dollar raft of measures aimed at shoring up unemployment benefits and setting out tax breaks to spur job creation.
AP - The following products are being recalled because they could be contaminated with salmonella, an organism that can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children and others with weakened immune systems:
AP - The New Jersey Supreme Court's disciplinary committee has publicly reprimanded a lower-court judge who belittled an immigrant defendant's poor English skills and compared another defendant to O.J Simpson.
AP - Silvio Berlusconi's allies pushed a controversial measure through parliament on Wednesday that shields the Italian premier from prosecution in two ongoing trials.
AP - Russian traffic police are under investigation for ordering civilian motorists to park their cars across a highway — and remain inside — to block a fleeing criminal suspect, prosecutors said Wednesday.
AP - Honeycreeper birds, a fly and several ferns, trees and shrubs found only on a Hawaiian island were among 48 species added Wednesday to the endangered species list, boosting the number of such classifications by the Obama administration from two to 50.
McClatchy Newspapers - WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives rejected a resolution Wednesday that called on President Barack Obama to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by year's end.
CQPolitics.com - Georgia Democrats this week called for the House ethics committee to wrap up its investigation of Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.) before he leaves Congress at the end of March.
Bloomberg - Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Toyota Motor Corp.âs handling of
recalls came under mounting criticism on the eve of the
automakerâs U.S. congressional testimony, including charges that
the company misled the public on the adequacy of its recalls.
Facing an election-year backlash over runaway spending and ethics scandals, House Democrats moved Wednesday to ban earmarks for private contractors, sparking a war between the parties over which would embrace the most dramatic steps to change the way business is done in Washington.
The federal government has spent the past half year seeking to roll back its emergency efforts at propping up the financial markets -- with the notable exception of its involvement in mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The House ethics committee decided Wednesday to close its short-lived investigation into allegations that then-Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) groped and sexually harassed several younger male staffers in his office, according to two sources familiar with the decision.
ST. CHARLES, MO. -- President Obama made an impassioned case Wednesday for his health-care proposal, delivering a folksy, partisan argument for reform as industry groups prepare a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to defeat it.
As they push to finish health-care legislation by the end of the month, Democratic leaders in Congress are weighing whether to add another of President Obama's priorities to the package: a popular proposal to overhaul the federal student loan program.
The Senate approved a $140 billion package of tax breaks and aid to the unemployed Wednesday, the most substantial effort by the chamber to boost the nation's economy since it passed the stimulus bill last year.
Payday lenders, pawnbrokers, car dealers and other companies that make loans but do not hold bank charters would be shielded from the scrutiny of a proposed federal consumer protection regulator under the terms of a tentative compromise between senators who are attempting to craft a bipartisan bill.
Not long after Eric Massa joined Congress in January 2009, several male staff members began to feel uncomfortable with the sexually loaded language their boss routinely used, according to accounts relayed to the House ethics committee.
Seeking to reclaim the reform mantle amid a series of scandals, House Democratic leaders are advocating a move that would shake up the multibillion-dollar practice of awarding no-bid contracts known as congressional earmarks.
As Republicans work to prevent a health-care bill from reaching President Obama, they are scrambling to exploit divisions between Democrats in the House and the Senate.
As he takes the reins of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Sander M. Levin is vowing to raise the profile of a once-powerful panel that, in recent years, has been overshadowed by the ethics troubles of its previous chairman, Rep. Charles B. Rangel.
It's no secret that members of Congress broker deals on the treadmill or in the weight room of the House and Senate gyms. But former congressman Eric Massa's accusation that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel once berated him in the gym's shower over his vote against President Obama's budget left Washington watchers wondering how much business politicians conduct while naked.
Harrison Schmitt's credentials as a space policy analyst include several days of walking on the moon. The Apollo 17 astronaut, who is also a former U.S. senator, is aghast at what President Obama is doing to the space program.
As Republicans work to prevent a health-care bill from reaching President Obama, they are scrambling to exploit divisions between Democrats in the House and Senate.
Dozens of former federal officials are playing leading roles in helping carmakers handle federal investigations of auto defects, including those for Toyota's runaway-acceleration problems.
The White House is mounting a stinging, sustained broadside against health insurance rate increases as President Obama and his aides enter what they hope will be the final stretch of a year-long political war over health-care reform.
Millions of Americans have been forced to rely on unemployment payments for extended periods as the nation struggles through its longest period of high joblessness in a generation, and critics are taking aim, saying that the Depression-era program created as a temporary bridge for laid-off workers is turning into an expensive entitlement.
Conservative activists rallied Monday to the side of a liberal New York Democrat who had resigned from the House, after he charged that his party's leaders had conspired to oust him over his opposition to President Obama's health-care legislation.
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou will seek President Obama's support at the White House on Tuesday for a European campaign to crack down on global financial speculation that critics say has exacerbated Europe's worst debt crisis in decades.
Liberals in the House, who have spent much of the past year complaining that other congressional Democrats and the White House are insufficiently progressive, will get a chance this week to vent about one of their biggest concerns: the war in Afghanistan.
President Obama nominated retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert A. Harding on Monday to lead the Transportation Security Administration, selecting someone unknown to the aviation industry and federal unions to lead one of the government's most visible agencies.
NEW YORK -- Few will deny that the political landscape here in Harlem has yielded rich and galvanizing story lines. The arcs of those narratives have been taught and shared in classrooms across America.
MASON CITY, IOWA -- Republican Terry Branstad's lines have a familiar ring as he campaigns to return to the governor's office after 11 years away. He blasts the incumbent Democrat for "mismanagement," promising an "economic comeback" and the end of "more government than we can afford."
BEIJING -- Of the nearly 3,000 members of China's ruling elite in the country's capital this weekend to kick off the biggest political gathering of the year, only one has the state media and online commentators abuzz: Bo Xilai.
President Obama has the chance during his first term to appoint leaders for each of the federal agencies that oversee banks, an important opportunity to reshape the government's approach to regulation even as the White House struggles to push structural reforms through the Senate.
In "I, Alex Cross," the new bestseller set in Washington by James Patterson, fictional detective Alex Cross scans the ego wall in the office of a senator he's investigating:
As Obama administration officials tried in recent weeks to anticipate what could go wrong in Sunday's elections in Iraq, they realized with some relief that they are largely powerless to control what happens.
Democratic activists flooding money into a primary challenge against Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) say the race isn't simply about defeating the incumbent. It is also about rebuking a Democratic-controlled Congress that they say isn't pursuing an aggressive, populist agenda.
House Appropriations defense subcommittee member James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) works hard at fundraising: Two to three times a week, he telephones contributors to ask for more. Yet, according to the account he supplied to the Office of Congressional Ethics last year, he is unaware of "who made donations" or how much they gave, and so that information plays no role in his earmarking -- the systematic granting of public funds for mostly private purposes.
Remember how Republican Scott P. Brown's victory in January's Senate race in Massachusetts was supposed to represent a mortal blow to health-care reform?
President Obama's top national security advisers will within days present him with an agonizing choice on how to guide U.S. nuclear weapons policy for the rest of his term.
Congressional Democrats reclaimed control of Congress in 2006 by pledging to "drain the swamp" after Republican ethics scandals rocked Capitol Hill. Now, a series of controversies involving Democratic members has robbed the party of its claim to hold the higher moral ground -- and could threaten its hold on power in this fall's elections.
The setting was seemingly random: an outer gate at the Pentagon at evening rush hour. But John Patrick Bedell's violent rampage Thursday made him only the latest in the growing ranks of the disaffected and disturbed to take aim at a symbol of official Washington.
Lobbyists and corporate officials talked bluntly in e-mail exchanges about connections between making generous campaign donations and securing federal funds through members of an important House Appropriations subcommittee, according to not-yet-public documents reviewed by ethics investigators.
In the three days since the leak of a confidential and crude Republican fundraising pitch, the party's leaders have scrambled to distance themselves from the 72-page PowerPoint depiction of President Obama as a socialist Joker -- and from the man behind it. Michael S. Steele, the Republican National Committee chairman, declared the pitch inappropriate and said it was the work of a "staffer."
