S&P Warns Congress of Risks of Political Brinkmanship on Debt

The senior energy aide to Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader from the coal state of Kentucky, was praised last week by one of the Senate’s top environmentalists, Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. The compliment seems unusual amid the hyper-partisanship that’s now the norm in Washington, but when put into context it makes sense. Read more »

The group's top analyst for the U.S. government's credit rating says making big fiscal decisions in a crisis setting raises chances of another downgrade. Read more »

With the recovery underway, things are starting to look up. Consumer confidence rose to a six-year high on Friday, the housing sector is improving, the economic gears are turning. But there may also be a less-welcome rebound: fatalities could rise. Read more »

GOP members in both chambers finally feel like they have something to hang around the president’s neck.  Read more »

Senate Republicans on Thursday eased their opposition to the nomination of Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency—but her confirmation by the full Senate is not yet assured. Read more »

Even amid crisis and scandal, the two parties remain as divided as ever—especially when it comes to finding any solutions. Read more »

The president's flurry of activity includes a challenge to the GOP on embassy security. Read more »

The House Agriculture Committee prides itself on bipartisanship, but when the panel met Wednesday to consider a new farm bill, the deep cultural divides between its Republican majority and Democratic minority members were in full relief. Read more »

The face-off between Attorney General Eric Holder and some Republican House members during Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing seemed more like the opening shots of a battle than any real showdown. Read more »

Readers of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks know that I have not always treated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor kindly. I have excoriated him for engineering the debt-ceiling crisis in 2011 as a hostage-taking exercise, and then blowing up the talks between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner that could have led to a grand bargain. Cantor himself recently took credit for the latter in a profile written by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker . He told Lizza “that it was a ‘fair assessment’ that he talked Boehner out of accepting Obama’s deal. He said he told Boehner that it would be better, instead, to take the issues of taxes and spending to the voters and ‘have it out’ with the Democrats in the election. Why give Obama an enormous political victory, and potentially help him win reelection, when they might be able to negotiate a more favorable deal with a new Republican president? Boehner told Obama there was no deal. Instead of a grand bargain, Cantor and the House Republicans made a grand bet.” Read more »

Step one, name a Republican—preferably a prominent one—to head the agency. Read more »