Is It Mourning in America?

Republicans take control of the House
The results of the mid-term election became a reality for Democrats yesterday as Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and more than 90 new members were seated. John Boehner (R-OH) defeated Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in the election for Speaker. In fact, 19 members of her own Caucus voted for someone else (11 voted for Heath Shuler), voted present or did not vote at all; the most members of a Caucus to vote against their party’s nominee since 1923. The power exchange wasn̵...

Boehner Gets Warm Reception at Senate GOP Retreat
House colleagues greet Rep. John Boehner on his way to accept the Speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi on Jan. 5. Featuring more than 80 pages of analysis, this essential issue provides Election Results and detailed profiles of the new Members — giving you the insight you need on the new Congress before any other source....

Could John Boehner be a Great Speaker?
I have long been Bullish on the man who is now Speaker of the House.  Perhaps, it’s that John Boehner and I grew up not far from one another, he in the Working Class Cincinnati suburb of Reading, I in the more affluent enclave Wyoming just west of the Republican leader’s hometown. Cincinnati folk have always struck me as hard-working, decent Americans, largely respectful of their peers and generally treating people from different backgrounds with dignity.  It is no wonder that th...

HOH's One-Minute Recess: Hats Off for Wilson
Freshman Rep. Frederica Wilson isn’t completely giving up her Trademark hats, but it appears she’s going to abide by rules prohibiting them on the House floor. Not a Subscriber? To continue reading, sign up for a free trial. House colleagues greet Rep. John Boehner on his way to accept the Speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi on Jan. 5. Featuring more than 80 pages of analysis, this essential issue provides Election Results and detailed profiles of the new Members — giving y...

Underwhelmed by Speaker Boehner
Bill Daley: Is it about competence or ideology? Is Darrell Issa the new Joe McCarthy? Nancy Pelosi spoke of combating Climate Change, ensuring college affordability, expanding access to Health Care, ending the war in Iraq. Newt Gingrich envisioned a Balanced Budget amendment, welfare reform, Tax Cuts, Deregulation, term limits. John Boehner promised... well, not very much. The 112th Congress, he said, will not "kick the can" or "fall short." It will be "the people's House," a place where "we ca...

Speaker Boehner: GOP Will Not Increase Debt Limit Without Spending Cuts
Shouldn't Obama be in 100% agreement with Boehner here? Didn't he promise to reduce the Deficit by going through the Federal Budget line by line and get rid of those programs that do not work? gatewaypundit reported Speaker John Boehner said that Republicans will not agree to increase the Debt Limit without Spending Cuts. Boehner released a statement: Washington (Jan 6) House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued the following statement on the Debt limit: “ I’ve been notified that the...

Conservative leader urges House to follow through on spending
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Influential conservative Dick Armey on Thursday urged the new House to take leadership in reducing the size of government and reining in spending by cutting "obnoxious programs" out of the Budget. Armey, a Republican and Veteran Washington insider who was the House Majority Leader in the late 1990's, has emerged as a force within the Tea Party movement. His FreedomWorks political action group has given direction, know-how, and financial support to many within Congress' rec...

Obama challenges Republicans on US debt
Newly empowered US Republicans faced stiff early challenges as President Barack Obama pressed them to raise the US Debt Limit and his Democratic Senate allies vowed to defend his policies. One day after Republicans took over the House of Representatives, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner formally asked politicians to let the US government to borrow more money, the opening shot in a political war over the giant US Debt. Geithner warned in a letter to senior members of Congress that failure to r...

And on the second day, they read
Day Two of Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives was highlighted with a reading of the 223-year-old Constitution — the document that formed the American government and guides it to this day. It’s often a raucous scene on the House floor. Today, it was raucous in the visitors’ gallery, when a woman calling herself “Theresa” disrupted the recitation of the Constitution at the exact point in which a lawmaker read that the president must be a “na...

Boehner claims he'll hold debt limit hostage
Reuters: U.S. House Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday that any move to increase the United States' $14.3 Trillion Debt Limit must be accompanied by Spending Cuts. "The American People will not stand for such an increase unless it is accompanied by meaningful action by the President and Congress to cut spending and end the job-killing spending binge in Washington," Boehner said in a prepared statement. Boehner is doing his best to pretend that he has a strong hand, but let's not forget, if ...

Hume on Pelosi: It was as if the nations first woman speaker could not quite believe today was not about her
Jeff Poor covers the media for The Daily Caller. He covered business news at the Media Research Center prior to coming to The Daily Caller. Jeff is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Alabama. He is also a political columnist for Mobile, Ala.-based Lagniappe. On the opening day of the new Congress, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi spoke longer than the newly minted Speaker of the House John Boehner. What should one make of that? On Wednesday’s “Special Repor...

House Speaker John Boehner makes a big deal on his first day about being humble.
By John DickersonPosted Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2011, at 7:50 PM ET Usually when politicians come to their big moment they crank up the lofty Rhetoric. They swirl around in the heavens, or do some resolving, or take a backstroke through the great American this or that. Backward run their sentences as Kennedy they try to approach but closer to Yoda they come. John Boehner, the new House Speaker, went the other way. He started in the dust—the Catholic Ash Wednesday ritual of smearing ashes on the...

Democrats Turned Away From Pelosi in Record Numbers in Ceremonial Vote
The abandonment of Rep. Nancy Pelosi by 19 Democrats in the pro-forma vote for speaker of the House marked a breakdown in party loyalty of historic measure, according to the Washington Post. Not since 1913, when 23 Republicans bolted from the GOP's speaker nominee, has a Party Leader suffered so many defections, Congressional Research Service records show. Of the 19 Democrats who didn't support Pelosi, one voted "present" and the other 18 cast Protest ballots for some other Democratic House memb...

The Onion: Harry Reid Sleeping with Mitch McConnell's Wife in 1986 at Core of Senate Gridlock
The Onion drills down and uncovers the true reason that the U.S. Senate can't get anything done… In a stunning disclosure this week, congressional sources revealed that the acrimonious gridlock in the U.S. Senate traces its origins to a single November evening in 1986, when Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) engaged in Sexual Intercourse with Sen. Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) then-wife, Sherrill. "The impenetrable stalemate on crucial issues is not due to a widening ideological divide bet...

DCCC chair: Our 2012 agenda will be making Pelosi Speaker again
The reknowned political satirist Tom Lehrer once declared that Henry Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 made political satire redundant.  After reading about the DCCC’s new strategy to win back the House in 2012, I must admit that for the first time in my life I feel a bit of sympathy with the general sentiment.  Guess who Rep. Steve Israel, the DCCC chair, wants to make as his poster girl for 2012? House Democrats’ goal is to make Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) the Speaker of ...

Congress to Tackle Healthcare, Filibuster Rules
On Wednesday, congressional observers were treated to a spectacle which used to be rare—a changeover in power at the House of Representatives. Both the House and the Senate swore in new members, and the new 242-seat Republican majority in the House handily elected Ohio Representative John Boehner to become Speaker of the House. In between raucous cheers and some campaign-style Rhetoric from both sides, now-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi handed Boehner the gavel and watched him give h...

Barney Frank: This GOP House Worse Than in 1994
Openly gay Rep. Barney Frank is known for his smarts, his biting humor and his hard work as chair of the House Financial Services Committee.  However, he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, he’ll be working less on that important committee with the Republican takeover of the House.  Olbermann asked Frank what he thought of the new House Republicans, since he “survived” the “Republican revolution” lead by Newt Gingrich in 1993. “It’s going to be...

Ms. Magazine Pelosi Cover Takes A Dig At Time And Newsweek (PHOTOS)
Ms. magazine is hitting back at Time and Newsweek for putting John Boehner on their covers after he became the presumptive Speaker of the House in the wake of the 2010 Midterm Elections--and they're doing it by putting someone those magazines never featured on their covers during her four years as Speaker: Nancy Pelosi. The cover line? "The Woman Time and Newsweek Won't Put On Their Covers." PHOTO: Pelosi herself mentioned this discrepancy to the New York Times' Deborah Solomon in a November...

Boehners Aria; No Hook for Now
My schedule yesterday precluded watching Wyle E. Coyote Nancy Pelosi hand off the gavel (finally!) to John Boehner, but I had planned to skip the event, anyway. A lifelong poli-junkie, I have lately grown positively allergic to political theater and repelled by the showboating, the preening and the pride; I’ve had a bellyful of politicians gassing away about the wonderfulness of themselves and their marvelous ocean-receding powers; how they...

The GOP's Health Care Repeal Problem: $230 Billion In Lost Revenue And Counting
Since taking the majority -- and even before that -- Republicans have been at pains to explain away a problem they've seen coming for months: the fact that CBO and most analysts find that repealing the Health Care law will cost money. Big money. But they have a separate, less appreciated problem. Today, CBO forecast that the 10-year cost of repealing Health Care reform is actually $230 billion. That's nearly $100 billion higher than one might have expected, given that just under a year ago, t...

Conservative leader urges House to follow through on spending
Armey, a Republican and Veteran Washington insider who was the House Majority Leader in the late 1990's, has emerged as a force within the Tea Party movement. His FreedomWorks political action group has given direction, know-how, and financial support to many within Congress' recent wave of rookie conservative members. "Reduce the size of the government," he urged the new Congress. "It's big. It's obnoxious. It's counterproductive. Being in control of this monster that has been out of control, ...

Steny Hoyer, family psychologist
**Posted by Phineas I’m getting so confused. You see, I thought I and others like me opposed ObamaCare and other liberal-fascist Democratic programs because we believe strongly in Limited Government that operates within the bounds of the Constitution and that those same programs were actually harmful to the nation. In other words, we were acting in good faith and on principle. Silly me. Since the (Social) Democratic Party was given free reign with the election of President Obama, we’...

Exclusive: Polluter Billionaire David Koch Says Tea Party Rank And File Are Just Normal People Like Us
This is Part 1 of three-part installment of ThinkProgress’ interview with David Koch. Yesterday, David Koch — one of the Richest men in America, co-owner of the conglomerate Koch Industries, and a top financier of right-wing front groups — attended the swearing-in ceremony for Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and also hosted a party for the new Republican majority he helped bankroll. Perhaps no one has been more aggressive in exposing Koch’s activities than ThinkProgress. We fi...

Bachmann intel post about politics?
The country has a new guardian for its National Security secrets: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). The outspoken Minnesota congresswoman, and Tea Party favorite, has been tapped by House Speaker John Boehner for a coveted slot on the House Intelligence Committee, giving Bachmann a new role as overseer of the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, her office confirmed today. The move comes at a time when Bachmann is seeking to burnish her national securit...

Boehner defends GOP against charges it's backtracking on promises
Washington (CNN) - Under fire for already backtracking on promises for more openness, House Speaker John Boehner admitted Thursday there are limits. "I promised a more open process. I didn't promise that every single bill was going to be an open bill," said Boehner during his first news conference as the new House Speaker. "There will be many open rules in this Congress, just watch," he said. Boehner was responding to a question from CNN about the fact that House Republicans plan to bring a hea...