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(CBS News) Showing his willingness to break from his party, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said on Friday he would accept $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in revenue increases and criticized activist Grover Norquist's no-tax pledge that most GOP lawmakers have signed.

With an exquisitely poor sense of timing, District Council members voted last week to give themselves another full year in which to file their 2011 financial disclosure forms. As The Examiner's Liz Farmer reported, the council's little gift to itself came in the form of a line item tucked into the city's 2013 budget that moves the deadline from early this month to next May -- months after the November election. The city's toothless Office of Campaign Finance will be handling any financial disclosures for the rest of 2012, instead of the highly touted but still vacant ethics panel it...

He never claim to have found it, but, in 2011, when asked about Obama's Birth Certificate, Gov. Neil Abercombie stated, "It was actually written I am told, this is what our investigation is showing, it actually exists in the archives, written down ". Also Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the former Director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, stated that she had seen it twice, and that it was, "half typed and half hand written". It appears they were telling the truth. The Pdf file released by Obama is a low resolution file, but, looking at the version released by AP,...

Maggie and Emily write this morning on the new role Sarah Palin has carved out for herself in 2012 politics, picking the races she gets involved in more carefully and seeking out opportunities where she can have (or appear to have) disproportionate impact: "This year, Palin has become almost irrelevant in the context of the presidential race she once had a chance to dominate, and is seen more than ever as a sideshow by the Republican establishment. But after seeing her celebrity peak last year, Palin has settled into a role as something of a strong Triple-A political ballplayer, picking...

GOP leadership in the House of Representatives announced that legislation to thoroughly audit the secretive Federal Reserve, a wildly popular measure pushed by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) for decades, will come up for a floor vote in July. Honest-money advocates and pro-transparency activists celebrated the news as a historic opportunity to rein in the central bank, which has come under heavy fire — especially in recent years — for debasing the U.S. dollar, manipulating markets, and showering big banks with trillions in bailouts. The legislation, H.R. 459, already has over 225 co-sponsors in the House including an impressive roster of...

Good video that explains the Smudges that the Teaparty Power Hour claims were discovered last week. Mark Gillar, from the Tea Party Power Hour, claims that smudges that appear on the edge of Obama's long form Birth Certificate Pdf, are supposed to prove that that it's a forgery. In the end, this is much to do about nothing. Yes, the document is a fraud, but, the smudges prove nothing. You can read in the comments that the Tea Party Power Hour really got in a latter over the simple explaination, and they were finally blocked from posting because they starting...

Veteran Jesse Kelly (R) is noncommittal about how he would vote in party leadership races should he be in Congress after the November elections, much like his Democratic opponent in Arizona’s competitive special election. “It depends on who is running,” he said in an email on Monday when asked if he would vote for Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) to lead his party in the new Congress. Democrat Ron Barber voiced a similar sentiment in an interview with Roll Call on Monday when he was asked if he would support Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Kelly’s general consultant, Ed Brookover, criticized...

Earlier [last] week, MarketWatch’s Rex Nutting claimed President Obama has not increased federal spending dramatically. Despite four years of evidence to the contrary, Nutting posits that the whole “misunderstanding” comes from widespread naiveté of the federal budgeting process—in fact, federal spending has grown 27 percent in just the last four years alone. To start, Nutting claims that since the 2009 Fiscal Year began in October of 2008, President Bush is responsible for the “major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year.” Really? For someone who spent an entire article bloviating on his budget acuity, Nutting has evidently not been paying...

Many in the political class, including President Obama and many members of Congress, have an interest in confusing, rather than enlightening, the public. The effort to misinform about the growth in spending and the impact of government spending on job creation reached a new level last week when the president claimed he was the most restrained spender since President Eisenhower and that spending was up only a little more than 1 percent (over what?). Presidents do not set spending levels, but they do influence them. Congress has the responsibility under the Constitution to tax and spend, and not one dollar...

Few members of Congress have taken the task of cutting federal spending as personally as Rep. Paul Broun. Whether it’s going after the USDA’s vehicle fleet or weeding out the budget for the U.S. Botanic Garden, the Georgia Republican has been all over it. But for all the cries in the Republican House to tighten the money belt, Broun has gotten practically nowhere. The vast majority of Broun’s attempts to trim this line item or that pet project have gone down — often in flames. Since the start of the 112th Congress, he has offered more than three dozen amendments....

Here’s how to ruin your chances at winning a U.S. congressional seat: Get arrested for driving under the influence and unlawfully possessing a firearm, with a female college student who is not your wife in the car.

Unlike most normal people, we closely follow Twitter wars between competing economists. On Wednesday, AEI economist James Pethokoukis took issue with Rex Nutting of MarketWatch.com who claimed Obama is not a big spender because spending rose 1.4 percent during his Presidency. First of all, Nutting doesn’t give credit to Tea Party conservatives for preventing rapid spending growth of the kind President Obama’s budget proposes. Secondly, Pethokoukis points at two overlapping metrics which accurately show Obama’s big spending tendencies—baseline spending and spending as GDP. Nutting’s baseline is FY2009 part of which fell under Bush’s final budget and represented the initial injection...

Republicans in Congress better wake up and start freezing some of their own targets against the left if they hope to see a GOP victory in November. The level of corruption, from murdered federal agents to looting taxpayer monies got green companies like Solyndra to the war on religion should be enough to have our elected representatives up in arms. Yet, there are still legislators who remain squeamish in the face of our constitutional republic's impending demise. Sarah Palin got it right on Monday while on Fox News' "Hannity." "This phony, hypocritical, one-sided call for a cease-fire by the left...

Before the dust began to settle around New York City’s twin towers, Washington’s political elites were contemplating the benefits in sheer legislative power a terror attack of such magnitude could bestow upon the benevolent despots of Capitol Hill. In a secretly recorded, 1992 address to the Bilderberg Organization, Henry Kissinger made this statement: “Today’s Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened [their] very existence.” Though Kissinger was speaking...

A bill that would close an IRS tax credit loophole that allows the IRS to funnel over $4 billion to illegal immigrants is being held up by Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, has been vocal in his disdain for the blatant misuse of taxpayer monies: I’m disappointed that the Majority Leader objected to our effort today to prevent billions in tax credits from being wrongly sent to illegal immigrants claiming they have dependents, many of whom do not live in...

When Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., lost the GOP primary to challenger Richard Mourdock this month, Beltway types saw the voters' verdict as a victory for the Tea Party and a defeat for the kind of Republican who could work across the aisle. I think Lugar, 80, lost because he was out of touch with Indiana. He started the primary registered to vote at an Indiana home he had sold in 1977. The Lugars have resided in Virginia ever since. Lugar had been working in Washington for so long that he didn't realize he needed to keep up at least the...

Lapdog AP reporter Jordy Yager writes: Rep. Issa might not have the votes to push forward Holder contempt charge> Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) might not have the votes in his own committee to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. A number of Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are wary of moving forward with Issa’s proposed measure, putting the powerful chairman in an awkward position as he attempts to build support for the move. . . Two of the committee’s 23 Republicans have declined to support the measure at this point, while five other...

Excerpt from Elaine May's "A New Leaf" (1971). The idle and spoiled Henry Graham (Matthau) learns from his accountant/lawyer (William Redfield) that he (Graham) is broke.

Another line in the sand has been drawn as Congress faces a daunting lame-duck year-end fiscal crisis dubbed around Capitol Hill as "Taxmaggedon." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., responded to a letter from Senate Republicans today in which they called for an immediate extension of the Bush tax cuts, with a message of his own: that's impossible before the election.

President Obama is campaigning heavily for Congress to prevent the lapsing of a special low-interest rate on student loans. Specifically, unless deferred, the interest rate will rise from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on federal Stafford student loans issued after July 1, says Curtis Dubay, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) has proposed to offset the cost of continuing to subsidize these loans by raising taxes on small businesses to the tune of $9 billion over 10 years.[2] This is the latest in a series of tax increases on small businesses pursued...

Ted Deutch has passed the point of merely being wobbly on business issues. The Florida congressman is now firmly entrenched in the anti-business ranks of the Beltway. Deutch crossed the line when he introduced a bill in the U.S House to silence the financial voice of American business in our elections process. He is proposing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning businesses, and political groups created by businesses, from contributing money to political candidates at the federal, state and local levels. Deutch would also forbid spending money to influence the outcome of ballot issues. He believes that businesses should...

A proposed Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which has been signed by President Obama but not yet ratified by Congress, will subordinate U.S. naval and drilling operations beyond 200 miles of our coast to a newly established U.N. bureaucracy. If approved, it will grant a Kingston, Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority (ISA) the power to regulate deep-sea oil exploration, seabed mining, and fishing rights. As part of the deal, as much as 7% of U.S. government revenue that is collected from oil and gas companies operating off our coast will be forked over to ISA for redistribution to poorer, landlocked...

House Speaker John Boehner is playing a heroic role right now. In his efforts to prevent the Bush tax cuts from expiring, Boehner is aggressively taking on President Obama's leadership ineptitude on the economy. In essence, Boehner is pushing a Republican policy to wrap up a debt-limitation bill and extend the Bush tax cuts in one fell swoop before the election -- and before all the last-minute, crisis-oriented political machinations that would come in a lame-duck Congress, threatening another credit downgrade and leading to a business-hiring freeze and plunging stock market, all of which happened last year. Tax-cut certainty is...

The Republican led House has voted to allow U.S. military action against Iran if the regime threatens the U.S. or it’s allies (Israel) with nuclear weapons. According to a section of the National Defense Authorization Act, “it shall be the policy of the United States to take all necessary measures, including military action if required, to prevent Iran from threatening the United States, its allies or Iran’s neighbors with a nuclear weapon,” reported Raw Story. The use of the word threaten literally makes it possible for the U.S. to attack Iran whenever they please by simply claiming that they were...

In a considerable setback for a president eager to ravage the due process rights of the American people, Federal Judge Kathleen Forrest granted a preliminary injunction on Wednesday, striking down those sections of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2012 which sought to provide Barack Obama the power to indefinitely detain citizens without benefit of their 5th Amendment rights. Signed very quietly into law on New Year’s Eve, the controversial Act has been roundly criticized as unconstitutional by groups on both the political left and right. Of greatest concern was Section 1021 which grants the United States military authority...

Senators to Unveil the ‘Ex-Patriot Act’ to Respond to Facebook’s Saverin’s Tax ‘Scheme’ Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a status update for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin: Stop attempting to dodge your taxes by renouncing your U.S. citizenship or never come to back to the U.S. again. In September 2011, Saverin relinquished his U.S. citizenship before the company announced its planned initial public offering of stock, which will debut this week. The move was likely a financial one, as he owns an estimated 4 percent of Facebook and stands to make $4 billion when the company goes public. Saverin would reap...

Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who renounced his U.S. citizenship, is now facing backlash from politicians: Two U.S. senators are proposing a plan that would prevent people like Saverin from reentering the country. As we reported yesterday, by some estimates Saverin may save $67 million in taxes by giving up his citizenship."We simply cannot allow the ultra-wealthy to write their own rules," Sen. Bob Casey, the Democrat from Pennsylvania said in a statement. "Mr. Saverin has benefited greatly from being a citizen of the United States but he has chosen to cast it aside and leave U.S. taxpayers with the bill....

It’s generally best to speak to experts when making broad claims about national policy. For instance, if we want to analyze U.S. corporate tax policy it’s probably best to take the word of a few tax attorneys than, say, a constitutional law scholar. A new study by Jonathan Sallet and Robert Rizzi, partner attorneys in the tax practice of O’Melveny & Myers LLP, highlight the constricting nature of corporate tax rates. ATR has previously highlighted the job-killing nature of high corporate taxes and the anti-growth effects of maintaining the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. Published by the...

For the second consecutive year, the Democrat-controlled United States Senate has unanimously rejected President Obama's 2013 budget.  The final vote was 99-0, making the the running two-year tally 196-0.  This move follows the House of Representatives' 414-0 rebuke of the same fiscal blueprint earlier this year.  Astonishingly, not a single Senate Democrat has voted in favor of any budget for three years, even as they refuse to offer a plan of their own.  Democrats have claimed that three fig leaves mitigate this embarrassing spectacle:   (1) "The Senate has already passed a budget!"  False. The Senate has not passed a...

President Obama's budget suffered a second embarrassing defeat Wednesday, when senators voted 99-0 to reject it. Coupled with the House's rejection in March, 414-0, that means Mr. Obama's budget has failed to win a single vote in support this year. Republicans forced the vote by offering the president's plan on the Senate floor. Democrats disputed that it was actually the president's plan, arguing that the slim amendment didn't actually match Mr. Obama's budget document, which ran thousands of pages. But Republicans said they used all of the president's numbers in the proposal, so it faithfully represented his plan. Sen. Jeff...

Illegal immigrant students and members of the House sued the Senate this week to try to overturn the upper chamber’s filibuster rule, arguing that the 60-vote supermajority requirement violates the Constitution and is blocking important legislation such as legalization for illegal immigrants. If successful, the lawsuit, filed Monday, would rewrite the way the Senate operates — though courts generally have been reluctant to meddle in internal congressional rules.

According to Best Lawyers — “the oldest and most respected peer-review publication in the legal profession” — Emmet Bondurant “is the go-to lawyer when a business person just can’t afford to lose a lawsuit.” He was its 2010 Lawyer of the Year for Antitrust and Bet-the-Company Litigation. But now, he’s bitten off something even bigger: bet-the-country litigation.Bondurant thinks the filibuster is unconstitutional. And, alongside Common Cause, where he serves on the board of directors, he’s suing to have the Supreme Court abolish it. In a 2011 article in the Harvard Law School’s Journal on Legislation, Bondurant laid out his case for...

If Darrell Issa has any thoughts of the full House voting on his Oversight Committee’s citation of contempt against Eric Holder, he will first have to clear the idea with the Attorney General’s staunchest allies and political defenders—Republican Speaker John Boehner, Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Republican Majority Whip, Kevin McCarthy. Upon the Speaker’s office being provided a draft of the citation last week, a spokesman for the Republican leadership said “While there are very legitimate arguments to be made in favor of such an action, no decision has been made to move forward with one by the Speaker...

U.S. lawmakers have been unusually silent about federal regulators' decision to allow a Chinese bank to take over 13 bank branches in New York and California, suggesting that they think American banks have much to gain. Members of both parties usually relish the chance to bash China on everything from government subsidies to the yuan's exchange rate. Yet Wednesday's decision by the Federal Reserve to certify a Chinese bank acquisition for the first time was met by near-universal silence.

Republican lawmakers love to say they are protective of religious freedom and supportive of the military. Last week, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee passed two measures that undermine both in an effort to deny equal rights to gay men and lesbians. It was particularly disturbing to see this implacable campaign of intolerance at work during a week in which President Obama announced his support for the expansion of the right to marry to all Americans. Just hours after Mr. Obama tried to lead the nation forward, the House Armed Services Committee was turning the clock back. On a...

Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein ignited a bit of a firestorm with their column describing Republicans as main drivers behind Washington's problems. The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has made some excellent points with regard to Mann and Ornstein's qualitative arguments, and other thorough responses abound. Rather than revisiting these points, I would like to focus my attention on the quantitative arguments made at the end of the article. Mann and Ornstein note that: “[P]olitical scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now...

As we all know, the National Mediation Board (NMB) is a government agency full of unelected bureaucrats looking to promote unions. Most recently the Board worked on further limiting workers’ rights by changing union election rules. The political allies of the unions are now trying to explain that the NMB oversees union elections in the same manner that Congressional elections are held. However, we all know that there are inherent differences between these elections. These include unions lack of term limits, the fact that elections last several weeks and the voting members can cast their ballot from home over the...

The House voted on a controversial funding limit amendment Wednesday evening to stop Attorney General Holder from lying to Congress. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) Comments the move to cut off Holder's DOJ allowance for 2013 unless he tells the truth about the gun walking operation known as Fast and Furious. The amendment to H.R. 5326, an appropriations bill funding Holder's agency for 2013, was in response to a February 4, 2011 letter to Congress in which DOJ officials denied any involvement in Operation Fast and Furious. Months later after damaging contradictions and discrepancies surfaced the Department was forced to rescind...

This week, the House will vote to slash Agriculture spending by $33.7 billion. This presents a huge opportunity to reform agriculture in a free-market direction, yet it’s an opportunity being squandered by Congress. For one thing, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, is pushing a Farm Bill that reportedly contains only $24.7 billion in spending cuts. Yet not all farm programs are treated equal and some don’t even rely on direct payments to farmers at all. The most market distorting programs rely on a convoluted system of supply management and price control programs, where government buys...

The House Wednesday evening voted overwhelmingly to prevent the Justice Department from using taxpayer funds to lie to Congress. The vote came in a Wednesday evening series of amendments to a bill, H.R. 5326, funding the Justice Department for 2013. Members approved the language in a 381-41 vote; all 41 "no" votes came from Democrats, although 142 Democrats voted with Republicans in support of the amendment. The vote reflects the ongoing frustration Republicans — and apparently some Democrats — have with Attorney General Eric Holder. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) offered the novel funding limitation amendment earlier in the day. The amendment...

Remember the NDAA? Yeah, for a variety of reasons that bill got a lot of attention last year -- mostly focused on the question of detainment of terrorists. But there are some other nuggets in the bill, including one tidbit about "military activities in cyberspace." The existing version of the NDAA does grant the Defense Department the ability to conduct such military activities, but only "upon direction by the President" and if the purpose is to "defend our Nation, Allies and interests," subject to existing laws. However, the House Armed Services Committee is getting ready to do a markup on...

House Democrats said Tuesday they will offer an amendment to push to overturn stand-your-ground self-defense laws in states like Florida. The amendment, which would withhold some grants from states that have such laws, will come as part of the House's debate on the Commerce Department spending bill. Emphasis added

President Obama is breaking new ground in his campaign for reelection. He is going where incumbent presidents have never gone before. He is doing things for which President George W. Bush would have been pilloried. And Obama is doing all this in plain view.

The NAACP Washington Bureau has produced an annual Civil Rights Legislative Report Card since 1914. This resource is designed to provide NAACP members with insight into the general voting patterns of their congressional representatives over the course of the year. The NAACP Civil Rights Legislative Report Card demonstrates how every Member of Congress voted on the bread and butter civil rights issues and priorities important to the NAACP.

..."The overwhelming majority of Americans do not understand that Obama's first term was dedicated to putting in place executive power to enable him and the administration to fulfill the campaign promise of "transforming America" in his second term regardless of which political party controls Congress. That is why his re-election team is virtually ignoring the plight of incumbent or prospective Democratic Party office holders... "The most significant accomplishment of Obama's first term is to make Congress irrelevant. Under the myopic and blindly loyal leadership of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats have succeeded in creating an imperial and, in...

...Now comes Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) with a comparable contribution to another debate, the one concerning government regulation of political speech. Joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), 26 other Democrats and one Republican, he proposes a constitutional amendment to radically contract First Amendment protections. His purpose is to vastly expand government's power - i.e., the power of incumbent legislators - to write laws regulating, rationing or even proscribing speech in elections that determine the composition of the legislature and the rest of the government. McGovern's proposal vindicates those who say that most campaign-finance "reforms" are incompatible with the...

For three years Barack Hussein Obama and his handlers have labored to create a functioning dictatorship in the midst of a constitutional republic. It was shamefully easy at first. With unassailable majorities in House and Senate, even a Republican leadership unafraid to contest the excesses of the first black president would have been powerless to slow the implementation of his agenda. The left passed ObamaCare, giving itself the means of executing a calculated program of attrition against millions of reliably Republican seniors. At the same time, a corrupt Department of Justice worked to undermine the 2nd Amendment, interfered with the...

Now that it appears Romney will be our nominee I have little hope of taking the White House this election year. So instead our efforts should move to taking the Senate and keeping the House to ensure that anything Obama tries to do in his continuing destruction of this country is stopped dead in its tracks. So far we are not in bad shape. In the Senate currently there are 51 Democrats, 47 Republicans and 2 Independents (who should be counted as Democrats since they always vote with the Dem's) so 53 to 47. 23 Democrats and 10 Republicans have...

After using an Obamacare slush fund to pay for the student lending bill last week, House Republicans have sparked a firestorm of public speculation on what the $15 billion pot of taxpayer money has actually been used for. Reports now reveal hundreds of millions are being spent from Obamacare’s Public Health and Prevention Fund on a variety of government-run programs under the guise of public health. Among the more ridiculous examples of government waste, slush fund grants from the fund distributed through the CDC’s Communities Putting Prevention to Work program went to $7.5 million on pet spaying in Nashville because...

Millions of illegal immigrants are getting a bigger tax refund than you. Eyewitness News shows a massive tax loophole that provides billions of dollars in tax credits to undocumented workers and, in many cases, people who have never stepped foot in the United States. And you are paying for it! Note: This is part one in a two-part series. Read part two here. INDIANAPOLIS - Inside his central Indiana office, a longtime tax consultant sits at his desk, shaking his head in disbelief. "There is not a doubt in my mind there's huge fraud taking place here," he said, slowly...