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Lobbying From The Great Beyond

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Alex Knott - Oct. 30 (Special Report) - With a little planning, you can lobby Congress from beyond the grave. Every year, hundreds of Americans continue to make campaign contributions, lobby Congress and in some states cast votes after they have died. And it’s all completely legal.

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What To Watch For At Sotomayor’s Hearing

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Keith Perine - Jul. 13 (News Analysis) - The Republicans’ theme will be that the judiciary faces a “fork in the road” that requires judges to choose between hewing to the law or allowing their experiences to influence their decision-making, according to a Senate GOP aide.

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Senators Debate ‘Public Plan’ Health Care Option

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Kathleen Silvassy - Jul. 06 (News Analysis) - A government-run insurance program would be an “obstacle” to health care overhaul, a top Senate Republican said Sunday, and such “unfair competition” would lead to nationalized health insurance, while a top Senate Democrat defended it as one means to “keep the private insurance companies honest.”

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Debating the Options on Paying for Health Care

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - Jun. 29 (News Report) - While President Obama has left the details on health care overhaul to the congressional committees charged with writing the bills, one top Senate Republican said Sunday it’s going to take “president leadership” to win bipartisan deals on paying for a plan, such as taxing employing benefits.

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What the Latest Polls Show on Health Care

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Ron Faucheux - Jun. 27 (Opinion) - On one hand, Americans believe that the health care system needs fundamental change. But on the other hand, they’re happy with the quality of their own care and don’t want medical options limited by bureaucrats.

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Putting Students on the Same High-Performance Page

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Lydia Gensheimer - May. 03 (News Report) - What happens when you have a law that’s supposed to improve performance among the nation’s school children but instead it creates confusion, lowers expectations and can result in a “dummying down” of state standards? That’s what a panel of educational experts is trying to address with a plan to incorporate common academic standards. They are urging Congress to support a state-led initiative to develop more-uniform, clear and integrated standards that reflect both the global marketplace and Americans’ mobility within the country.

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What Obama Has Shown, So Far, About His Style of Governing

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Adriel Bettelheim - Apr. 27 (News Analysis) - in the case of Barack Obama , who will mark his 100-day milestone on Wednesday, the benchmark is being treated with unusual significance. As the first new president in eight years, the first African-American president ever, and a president called upon from the start to manage both a deep recession and two wars, his every move has been guaranteed an intense level of attention — and comparisons to FDR are more direct than most new presidents face.

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Tax Code Changes: Wealth Transfer — Aggressively Progressive?

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Richard Rubin - Apr. 16 (News Analysis) - But trying to achieve fairness through the tax code is neither simple nor economically risk-free. The income tax is a crude, imperfect tool that doesn’t address the underlying causes of income disparity. Additionally, the tax system’s complexity as well as the wide regional differences in the cost of living make it difficult for lawmakers to effectively define rich and poor using a single national income standard.

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Tax Code Changes: Industry in the Cross Hairs

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Joseph J. Schatz - Apr. 14 (News Analysis) - Energized by a global summit meeting two weeks ago where world leaders called for a crackdown on abusive tax havens, Congress seems likely this year to debate significant elements of the federal income tax code as it affects corporations. But it’s not likely to be the debate those companies had been hoping for.

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G-20 Summit Communique: Implications for the Global Poor

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Madison Powers - Apr. 03 (Opinion) - The problem, as many Europeans see it, is that the U.S. stimulus package had to be as large as it was, and so much of it had to be devoted to social safety-net programs simply because the United States was not carrying its fair share of the global burden of putting in place programs that would ensure economic stability in the first place.

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Rhetoric vs. Reality: The Budget and the Campaign Promises

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Congressional Quarterly - By Adriel Bettelhein - Feb. 28 (News Report) - The budget overview President Obama released on Thursday attempts to make good on his most ambitious campaign promises in the areas of taxes, health care and the environment. It also harks back to Obama’s populist-themed rhetoric about financial excesses by, for example, proposing the elimination of some perks popular among Wall Street executives and big corporations.

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With Lobbying Rules Waived, Lynn’s Earlier Pentagon Tenure Now at Issue

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Congressional Quarterly - By Josh Rogin - Jan. 25 (News Report) - Moreover, some allege that Lynn sought to relax accounting rules while in office and misled congressional staff on Defense budget matters. The Pentagon still has never achieved financial transparency. But with fiscal reform as a top priority in a time of economic crisis, Lynn’s Pentagon record has increasingly come under scrutiny.

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Obama Should Heed Kennedy’s Cuba Lessons When Thinking About Iran

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Congressional Quarterly - By Jeff Stein - Jan. 19 (Special Report) - President Obama, 47, will inherit the latest bag of dirty tricks that, so far, have failed to undermine the regime, much less dislodge it from power or cripple its nuclear weapons effort. “The covert American program, started in early 2008,” New York Times reporter David E. Sanger revealed on Jan. 11, “includes renewed American efforts to penetrate Iran’s nuclear supply chain abroad, along with new efforts, some of them experimental, to undermine electrical systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran relies. It is aimed at delaying the day that Iran can produce the weapons-grade fuel and designs it needs to produce a workable nuclear weapon.”

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McCain Picks Up Where He Left Off on Earmarks, Lobbying

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Congressional Quarterly - By Jonathan Allen - Jan. 08 (News Report) - The Arizona Republican was on familiar turf Wednesday inside the Senate television studio — nine weeks and one day after losing the presidential election to Barack Obama — pushing for earmark and lobbying overhauls alongside longtime legislative partner Russ Feingold , a Wisconsin Democrat.

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Obama Tries to Be the Un-Cheney

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Congressional Quarterly - By David Nather - Dec. 09 (News Analysis) - But how much of this openness in the transition team can actually transfer to the new administration? Obama promised to require his executive branch departments and rulemaking agencies to “conduct the significant business of the agency in public,” including posting videos and transcripts of the meetings online.

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Obama Might Change Cuba Policy

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Congressional Quarterly - By Shawn Zeller - Dec. 08 (News Report) - The business community had some success in persuading Bill Clinton to loosen travel rules and sign a law allowing trade in food and medicine. But George W. Bush was not nearly as persuadable. He tightened travel rules; restricted humanitarian, agricultural and religious missions that Clinton routinely permitted; and even limited the travel of Cuban-Americans to see relatives on the island.

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Muscling Up the Majorities

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Bob Benenson - Oct. 27 (Special Report) - The reasons go beyond the flagging popularity of the Republican “brand,” which has been in evidence all year, and the coattails of Barack Obama , who appears well-positioned to win back the presidency for the Democrats next week with a clear-cut majority in the Electoral College. The GOP has been on the outs with the public in plenty of other election years, and the opposing party has not positioned itself to capitalize on the opportunity the way it has now. What’s different this time is the increasingly aggressive and agile tactical savvy of the Democrats’ congressional campaign operatives, who committed early on to “expanding the playing field” of competitive races in 2008 — and have shown they know how to pounce whenever they see an opportunity. The result has been one of the party’s best years in decades for candidate recruiting, fundraising and media strategy.

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Presidential Ground Games Go Hyper-Local in Northern Virginia

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Andrew Satter - Oct. 22 (News Report) - Part of the shift toward the Democrats is demographic: Prince William County has grown by more than 50,000 people since 2004, many of them from the heavily Democratic counties to the north. Housing and the economy are big issues as well. Foreclosures have increased by more than 300 percent over the past year and the medium home price dropped 40 percent since Sept. 2007.

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The Cabinet: Who Will Fill These Seats?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By David Hawkings - Oct. 06 (News Report) - the collected members of the Cabinet make an important statement about both the policy direction and the governing credibility of a new administration. And that’s why, starting Nov. 5, there will be intense public interest in the president-elect’s top appointees. The people he brings before the cameras will telegraph to the nation the initial signals about his approach to presidential decision making.

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McCain's Bailout Gamble Looks Like a Bad Roll

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Jonathan Allen - Sep. 30 (News Analysis) - ... despite a McCain intervention in the process that was dramatic -- or melodramatic, as some critics describe it -- only 65 House Republicans voted for the measure. The figure fell far short of the number that House Republican leaders had promised to deliver to ensure wide bipartisan support.

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Obama Tax Plan Veers From Pay-as-You-Go

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By David Clarke, Richard Rubin - Sep. 15 (News Report) - Barack Obama 's campaign-trail accounting method is putting congressional Democrats in an awkward position: Their own presidential candidate is undermining the rule they use to fight the federal deficit.

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Palin's First Interview: "I'm Ready"

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Jonathan Allen - Sep. 12 (News Report) - In her first nationally televised interview since being named Republican John McCain 's vice presidential running mate late last month, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin appeared to be unfamiliar with the term "Bush Doctrine" even as she echoed some elements of the president's foreign policy.

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Will GOP Ticket's 'Values' Appeal Reach Swing Voters?

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Joseph J. Schatz - Sep. 05 (News Report) - The abrupt shift to bare-knuckled partisanship in the middle of this week's convention appeared to indicate that Republicans intend to rally their rural and socially conservative base with culturally-tinged attacks painting Democrats as elitists, even as Democrats say it's McCain who is out of touch with the middle class. "This is going to be a 'values' election," Rep. Thomas M. Davis III , R-Va., said Thursday morning at a convention roundtable in Minneapolis.

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Convention Watchdogs Sniffing Around Lobbyist Parties

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Bart Jansen - Sep. 03 (News Report) - Participants remain squeamish about publicizing their attendance. Watzman stopped by Nathan's Monday after hearing from a cab driver that there was a party for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. She found the table piled with the name tags and the placard of sponsors such as Anheuser Busch, but not a ticket to get in.

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Republicans Think Palin Can Help Close the Enthusiasm Gap

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Congressional Quarterly - By Jonathan Allen - Sep. 01 (News Report) - Even as the GOP was making plans on Sunday to truncate its convention, Republican officials bubbled about McCain's new running mate. They said she will energize grassroots Republican voters, touted her appeal to independent suburban "hockey moms," and even claimed that Alaska's position between Canada and Russia qualifies her as a foreign policy expert.

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