Kate Ackley
DLA Piper hosted an elegant two-course breakfast briefing at the Willard InterContinental last week. The audience was a collection of clients, Hill aides, lawyers, diplomats and reporters. The fare was unabashedly political. And that was the point.
Amanda Becker
One year after the Department of Justice cut off U.S. access to the three biggest online poker sites, players are sending a message to Congress: We will not fold.
Kate Ackley
Look who’s coming to the Hill: beer distributors, medical professionals in white coats, restaurant owners, music makers and court reporters. This month’s recess marks a short respite right in the middle of Capitol Hill’s fly-in season, when just about everybody is a lobbyist.
Janie Lorber
For the first time in more than 30 years, lawmakers are preparing to extend the Food and Drug Administration’s authority to regulate cosmetics, setting off a battle between large makeup manufacturers and consumer safety advocates over how far the government should go.
Daniel Newhauser
The House floor today will become the Baskin-Robbins of budgets: Every political persuasion has its own flavor.
Janie Lorber
Democrats said a skeptical public would come around on the new health care law once it started to take effect. But two years and millions of dollars later, the groups that set out to convince Americans to like President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement have failed to move the needle.
Kate Ackley
Just as President Barack Obama has intensified his anti-K Street rhetoric with the November elections in view, several of his administration’s senior aides have decamped for jobs along the influence corridor.
Daniel Newhauser
House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s financial blueprint will likely pass the House this week, but resistance from conservatives reveals a growing distrust of GOP leaders when it comes to deficit reduction.
Eliza Newlin Carney
As politically active tax-exempt groups draw scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators, leaders in the sprawling nonprofit sector are torn between circling the wagons and joining in calls for reform.
Daniel Newhauser
As House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s financial blueprint wends its way to the floor with reluctant GOP support, Members and staff are stricken with a resounding sense of “Here we go again.”
Emma Dumain, Aaron Guerrero
The District of Columbia, subject to wide-reaching Congressional control, seldom gets to determine what happens to a swath of land as ripe for possibilities as that of Reservation 13, a 67-acre area along the bank of the Anacostia River.
Humberto Sanchez
The Senate appeared to be on track Tuesday to clear a House-passed small-business capital formation bill this week, but the rare spectacle of bipartisanship and inter-chamber cooperation might be short-lived. There is no grand push for other bills, and other more contentious issues, such as the budget, are beginning to crowd the legislative calendar.
Daniel Newhauser, Steven T. Dennis, Meredith Shiner
House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” might have hit a dead end. Although Democrats immediately spurned the plan, it might be a small cadre of disenfranchised Republicans who shoot it down today.
Emma Dumain
Lawmakers expressed some support Wednesday for proposals that would force Members to cooperate in the name of getting things done, which include blocking Congressional pay in some cases.
Eliza Newlin Carney
For Rock the Vote volunteers who roam rock concerts and college campuses looking for students to register, the typical dress code is jeans and a T-shirt. But this year, many organizers have traded their college clothes for suits and ties.
David M. Drucker
Sen. Jim DeMint is set to become the top Republican on the Commerce Committee — a promotion that could cause heartburn among GOP leaders but one they appear unlikely to block.
Janie Lorber
Tea party outrage over a spate of IRS letters to conservative groups has revived a long-standing dispute over the agency’s controversial role in policing politically active nonprofits.
Meredith Shiner
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), best known as his party’s top messaging lieutenant, might find that fighting Republicans is a lot easier than his other responsibility, running the Rules and Administration Committee.
Humberto Sanchez
Senate Republicans are bristling that the president has cut down on one of his ceremonial duties: signing bills in public.
Kate Ackley
About two dozen K Streeters — some of them longtime lobbyists, others newbies looking to meet Hill aides on the younger side — revealed some of their favorite gathering spots to see and be seen by the bold-faced names on Capitol Hill.
Amanda Becker
Despite amended ethics rules, Members of Congress and their staffers continue to take trips sponsored by groups that don’t lobby themselves but maintain formal affiliations with lobbyists and advocacy organizations and do so with the blessing of the House Ethics Committee.
Humberto Sanchez
Efforts to pass a transportation bill are coming to a head in the Senate, with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) setting up a test vote to shore up support for the measure, which has languished in the chamber for weeks.
Daniel Newhauser
Republicans have hammered Democrats for not passing a budget while they were in power, but divisions among House Budget Committee Republicans might leave them without a budget this year, too.
Meredith Shiner
Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) launched a wide-ranging investigation into the Obama administration’s public relations and advertising spending Tuesday, sending information requests to 11 federal agencies.
Humberto Sanchez
With an increasingly gloves-off, partisan mentality permeating the Senate, an amendment targeting a 2005 earmark for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) could pose political problems for Democrats and for Reid’s home-state colleague, GOP Sen. Dean Heller.
