Former Vice President Joe Biden headlines a rally at the Culinary Workers Union Local in Nevada in 2018. He campaigned for 22 House candidates that election cycle and all but two of them won their races. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)
Through 2019, most House Democrats facing competitive reelection races kept their attention focused on their own brands at home and stayed away from the crowded and hotly contested battle for their party’s presidential nomination.
Recently, however, a few vulnerable lawmakers have started jumping into the fray and backing former Vice President Joe Biden. Some strategists say those decisions could end up helping the endorsers as much as Biden, and more may follow.
Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council senior director, and David Holmes, the counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, are sworn in before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. (Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call)
Few other parts of the U.S. government under the Trump administration feel as undermined and besieged as the State Department.
The department’s funding has repeatedly come under attack in White House budget requests; the expertise of its diplomats and policy specialists has routinely been ignored in favor of the opinions of Trump loyalists with little foreign affairs experience.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., speaks in Iowa on August 9, 2019. On Friday she unveiled her ‘Medicare for All’ plan, after facing criticism that she hadn’t explained how to pay for the health care plan. (Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call)
Presidential contender Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., unveiled a $20.5 trillion plan Friday to finance a government-run “Medicare for All” system, after facing criticism that she hadn’t explained how to pay for the pricey health care plan.
Warren’s plan would dramatically reshape the health care system and the nation’s tax structure. It would draw trillions of dollars from employers and raise taxes on the financial sector, large corporations and the richest 1 percent of Americans. She says she also would pay for the shift to a single-payer program that would cost less than some projections of the existing system by reducing health costs, cutting defense spending and assuming an immigration overhaul saves $400 billion.
A memorial for the late House Oversight and Reform Chairman Elijah E. Cummings is seen in the committee’s Rayburn Building hearing room on Thursday. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
House lawmakers dialed down the partisan rancor, at least for a day, as they honored the life of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, who died early Thursday at age 68. But the impeachment inquiry, of which the Maryland Democrat was a key leader, is forging ahead.
The investigation into President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine has stoked anger among Republicans who view the probe as illegitimate. Democrats’ frustrations with the president’s conduct and his supporters in Congress are only growing. The death of Cummings, held in deep respect on both sides of the aisle, didn’t put the partisan fighting completely to rest, but it did quell the most inflammatory elements for the moment.
Two lawmakers praised Roll Call stories this week, but the real excitement on the Hill came from the hordes of staffers chasing after the “Queer Eye” guys and some members still struggling to pronounce their colleagues’ names. All that, plus nose-picking, belabored Final Four chants and questionable brownies.
Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., is expected to chair the Foreign Affairs panel come January. The panel could add an investigations subcommittee. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call file photo)
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is planning a reorganization in the new Congress that would emphasize investigating the Trump administration as Democrats take control of the chamber.
The anticipated changes, which include plans to streamline the subcommittee structure, were outlined in conversations with three House staffers, who added that the focus would be potential financial ties between foreign governments and President Donald Trump. The staffers were not authorized to be quoted discussing the changes in advance of official action.
Few members of Congress outside of the California delegation have weighed in on the Camp Fire raging north of Sacramento. Years of drought have created a “tinderbox” in the Golden State, according to NASA. (NASA)
Despite a dramatic spike in the number of people unaccounted for as the historically deadly Camp Fire rages in northern California, members of Congress have been relatively quiet on the natural disaster.
A list of missing people ballooned from 130 names to nearly 300 names within hours Wednesday, the Mercury News reported, and reached more than 600 names by late Thursday. Sixty-three people have died, and another three have died in a simultaneous blaze in Southern California.
New Mexico Democrat Xochitl Torres Small is running for the seat GOP Rep. Steve Pearce is vacating to run for governor. The 2nd District race is now rated Leans Republican. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call file photo)
Despite forecasts of a blue tsunami, it’s still not guaranteed that Democrats will win back the House majority. But the playing field of competitive House races is expanding and shifting to almost exclusively Republican territory.
After the latest round of changes, Inside Elections now has 68 Republican seats rated as vulnerable compared to just 10 vulnerable Democratic seats. And there are at least a couple dozen more GOP-held seats that could develop into competitive races in the months ahead.
Juliet Albin and Josh Wolf talk about their campaign budgeting software, called Warchest, at the WeWork in Navy Yard last month. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
The surge of Democratic candidates this cycle has given way to a new crop of campaign managers who are taking their first crack at managing millions of dollars.
And up until recently, there wasn’t a streamlined way for them to handle the money coming in and spend down to zero, which is the most important job for managers.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., was able to deliver enough of his GOP colleagues to pass the latest stopgap spending bill. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
The House’s early Friday morning passage of a bill to reopen government after a brief shutdown was not your typical budget deal vote.
Unlike similar measures Congress has passed in recent years to lift sequestration spending caps and suspend the debt ceiling, this one drew a limited amount of Republican opposition and minimal Democratic support.
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