Mitch McConnell said he wouldn't block the bipartisan immigration overhaul on Tuesday, and Patrik Leahy said he will hold off — "with a heavy heart" — on a controversial amendment to green cards to spouses of gay couples. But the path to passage is surprisingly clear, even amidst the Obama administration's scandals.
Lois Lerner will plead the Fifth on Wednesday before a congressional committee investigating the IRS's targeting of conservative groups. Lerner broke the news of the scandal — even to President Obama! — by planting a question at a tax lawyers' conference. In hindsight, that strategy for releasing the news does not look like it was a great idea.
Michele Bachmann was the muse for a new romance novel called Fires of Siberia, to be published June 1, about a fiery presidential candidate who tries to bone up on her foreign policy credentials only to get stuck in the wilderness with a sexy stranger.
Nearly four months ago Oklahoma Senators Tom Coburn and James Inhofe voted against H.R.152, the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act that eventually sent $50.5 billion in relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy. And in the flurry of last night's devastation in Moore, Okla. it was impossible not to forget that fact.
Anthony Weiner will announce he's running for New York City mayor sometime this week, but he won't get the Clintons' official support or endorsement, Politico's Maggie Haberman reports.
A majority Americans approve of the job President Obama's doing and think he's focused on issues that are important to them, even though a majority also thinks the IRS intentionally singled out conservative groups for harassment, according to a new Washington Post/ ABC News poll. Why is Obama doing so well in scandal season?
In the wake of what he is calling "Hurricane Scandy," Jon Stewart last night looked at Obama's defense strategy: sending out a random guy to Sunday morning talk shows.
During last week's first-of-many hearing into the IRS scandal, one subplot emerged: Conservatives presented anecdotes to argue that the IRS didn't just target Tea Party groups seeking tax exempt status but a broader swath of conservative individuals and organizations. But the anecdotal evidence does not stand up to the data on tax audits.
Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are quite entrepreneurial in their attempts to influence public policy in their favor.
So far the facts of the three scandals facing the Obama administration do not tie President Obama himself to the scandalous acts. Since Republicans can't yet indict President Obama, they're shifting to indicting all of liberalism.
Now that Hillary Clinton no longer has a nonpartisan badass day job, the universe is reverting back to its natural state in which Clinton is a controversial figure with a complicated past and more than a few enemies as well as the symbol of some people's anxieties about women in power.
The government will use any and all information at its disposal to find journalist sources, as shown in The Washington Post's report this morning on a Department of Justice investigation into Fox News chief correspondent James Rosen, who may face criminal charges for reporting government secrets.
Here's one place where the president didn't have a dramatic week: in his approval ratings.
The President's senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer did a tour of the sunday shows to try and calm everyone down about this whole IRS targeting Tea Party groups scandal.
The IRS' office of Exempt Organizations sounds like a terrible place to work. Four sweeping media assessments this weekend show a department that is overwhelmed, underfunded, and poorly managed.
There was a brief moment where some conservative were trying to make a scandal out of the President's moment in the rain on Thursday. But unfortunately that scandal died before it could really take off.
The IRS official who revealed the IRS had inappropriately targeted conservative groups on Friday did so on purpose -- by asking a tax lawyer to ask her about it at American Bar Association tax section’s annual meeting.
The IRS division responsible for flagging Tea Party groups has long been an agency afterthought, beset by mismanagement, financial constraints and an unwillingness to spell out just what it expects from social welfare nonprofits, former officials and experts say.
When, in 2006, the website The Smoking Gun released a secret CIA memo documenting prisoner organizing strategies at Guantanamo Bay, the FBI took notice. Now the site has posted details of the ensuing 44-month-long investigation, offering a timely glimpse into the black box of a Department of Justice leak prosecution.
As Scandal Week comes to a close, it's worth reviewing the policy proposals that have followed in the revelations' wake. There aren't many.
ABC News' Jonathan Karl's revelation of the White House's role in 12 revisions to the Benghazi talking points propelled the story, long percolating in conservative media, into a bona fide scandal. But then CNN's Jake Tapper's revelation of what the emails actually said revealed that to be a fake scandal. So who lied to Karl?
The scandal surrounding New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez has evolved from a sex scandal to a donor scandal to a weird mystery about who set him up, with the FBI talking to sugar baron brothers and an ex-CIA operative.
Huma Abedin remained Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff when she came back from maternity leave in June 2012, even though she worked part-time from her home in New York and was allowed to start a side gig as a consultant.
Acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller is testifying in front of a House committee this morning. It's one of the Congress' first opportunities to grill the agency on its use of politically loaded differentiation in assessing applicants' non-profit status.
Now that everyone is paying attention to the scandal stories Republicans have been pushing for months against President Obama, they have a bit of stage fright.
Outgoing members of Congress are rarely hard-pressed for jobs. Tea Party star Allen West just accepted the one that was perhaps the most predictable.
Mark Sanford did it. Anthony Weiner is trying it. Jonah Lehrer botched it. And now, it looks like disgraced politician John Edwards could be gunning for his own public redemption moment.
Because no Scandal Week would be complete without some good, old-fashioned tilting at the windmill of Obamacare, the House today voted (again) to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Anthony Weiner was spotted on Thursday filming pretty much exactly the kind of ad you'd expect him to air if he runs for mayor of New York: sitting on the stoop of his childhood home in Brooklyn with his loving wife at his side.
A long time ago (last week, basically) if you were a political person, it was definitely a bad thing to get in a fight with the IRS. But the scandal over the IRS targeting Tea Party groups — another official just took the fall, as Obama hired a new replacement — has had an interesting side-effect in the last seven days: turning on the IRS can now win you major political points.
Earlier this week, Attorney General Eric Holder said the story that was leaked to the Associated Press last year was "within the top two or three most serious leaks I've ever seen." But another examination of the story suggests any threat of disclosing the information had passed before it was published. And both the CIA and the White House knew it.
The main thrust of all of President Obama's press conferences for the last two years has been to tell Congress to do its job, and that held true on Thursday, when he answered questions about a trio of scandals by repeatedly saying he was looking forward to "fixing a problem" by working with Congress to pass laws he's wanted all along.
On Thursday, the House of Representatives will hold its 37th vote on curtailing the Affordable Care Act. A little clarification about what that means is in order.
To be clear: There are not three scandals plaguing the Obama White House. By embracing the leaked talking points, Obama's opponents may have taken Benghazi off the table completely.
Prominent figures on the right are calling for harsh consequences for the IRS's inappropriate targeting of Tea Party groups — Michele Bachmann floated impeachment of President Obama on Thursday — but it's worth remembering that prominent figures on the right, like Erick Erickson just five weeks ago, wer insisting that some of these Tea Party groups get some extra scrutiny.
President Obama held a joint press conference today with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, but the press had plenty of other things they wanted to talk about.
In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Rep. Devin Nunes dropped a bombshell: the Department of Justice had bugged the House cloakroom as part of its AP investigation. It's an explosive allegation — and almost certainly an incorrect one.
In continuing to address "Hurricane Scandy," Stewart had to admit that Republicans has something with the IRS and Benghazi dust-ups. He even proposed teaming up with Fox News! But you know who still doesn't get to take a GOP victory lap? Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
After winning a closely-watched South Carolina special election, Mark Sanford was sworn into Congress on Wednesday
As expected, President Obama's remarks Wednesday evening on the investigation into the IRS's targeting of "Tea Party" and "Patriot" groups were short, but not without consequence: the acting commissioner of the IRS, Steven Miller, has resigned in the wake of the scandal.
The White House took a step Wednesday to try and limit any political fall-out of the seizure of phone records from the AP. By making overtures to renew a media shield law, the administration gets to have its beloved subpoena power and condemn it, too.
President Obama and Jay Carney have now more or less officially shifted their public energy to dealing with the IRS targeting of "tea party" and "patriot" keywords, and more or less ignoring Benghazi and the AP investigation. After all, people are getting in actual trouble with the IRS affair.
It seems as if the battle over the IRS' improper focus on Tea Party groups has splintered into an attack on Obamacare. But it's simply the latest justification being used to attack the president's health-care legislation. Here's how the two are linked.
After gamely donning Google's face computer on Capitol Hill this morning, Bachmann has already suffered the same aesthetic fate as those so-called "Glassholes" before her: Even a politician who's somewhat famous for her stare can't make the glasses of the future look any less weird.
For the third time, it's official: Anthony Weiner is running for Mayor of New York. It will be official for the fourth time, if the rumors are true, when he "officially" announces it next week. Here's what comes next.
The attorney general probably wishes that this afternoon wasn't the afternoon one on which he'd agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. It is, and right in the middle of several brewing controversies, but it's unlikely that the hearing will be job-threatening.
How bad is it in Washington for the Obama Administration? It's Obama "needs to fire somebody" bad, according to former Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan — and, you know, Politico.
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