Senate Republicans

Republicans in the Senate have refused vote for any director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau until the agency is weakened. Without a director, the CFPB's powers are more limited. This morning, the White House announced it would appoint Richard Cordray as director in a recess appointment.  Senate Republicans have tried to block such a move by keeping a Senator or two on the job, so there is no recess. But apparently the White House had enough, according to this press release on its website: "The Constitution gives the President the authority to make temporary recess appointments to fill vacant positions when the Senate is in recess, a power all recent Presidents have exercised.  The Senate has effectively been in recess for weeks, and is expected to remain in recess for weeks.  In an overt attempt to prevent the President from exercising his authority during this period, Republican Senators insisted on using a gimmick called “pro forma” sessions, which are sessions during which no Senate business is conducted and instead one or two Senators simply gavel in and out of session in a matter of seconds.  But gimmicks do not override the President's constitutional authority to make appointments to keep the government running.  Legal experts agree.  In fact, the lawyers who advised President Bush on recess appointments wrote that the Senate cannot use sham “pro forma” sessions to prevent the President from exercising a constitutional...

Two Republican members of the Maryland Senate will announce their plans over the next few days to leave the legislature and run for the top executive positions in their home counties. Sen. Barry Glassman plans to announce his bid for Harford County executive Saturday in Havre de Grace. Senator Allan Kittleman will kick off his campaign for Howard County executive Tuesday in Columbia. Glassman, 51, would succeed David R. Craig, who announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for governor Monday.

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans declined yesterday to punish Sen. Mark O. Hatfield for his renegade vote against the balanced budget amendment, calling it unfair and unwise to make him the scapegoat for the amendment's narrow defeat.But many Republican senators said they considered the Hatfield controversy a second setback for the party because it diverted public attention away from the six Democrats who switched positions to vote against the amendment last week, after having supported a nearly identical proposal last year.

It was 21 years ago last month that Harvard-educated attorney Robert Wilkins was traveling in a car pulled over for going 5 mph over the posted speed limit on Interstate 68 in Western Maryland. But rather than receive a ticket, the group, all African-American and all members of the same family, were forced to stand by the road while their vehicle was searched and a drug-sniffing dog summoned to the scene. They had been returning from a relative's funeral, and the fruitless investigation caused them to be detained for 45 minutes.

Sensing that their chance to push for legal changes had arrived, Senate Republicans launched a full debate on the merits of medical malpractice reform yesterday by offering a series of amendments to a more technical bill. "We gave senators an opportunity to vote up and down on individual measures of tort reform," said Sen. Andrew P. Harris, the minority whip from Baltimore County. Each provision offered by Republicans - from allowing insurance companies to spread out payments to victims to tighter caps on pain and suffering awards - was defeated by votes that largely followed party lines.

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans, trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of a White House victory, launched a final -- and formidable -- effort yesterday to scuttle the much-debated $30.2 billion crime bill.White House vote-counters, knowing that under Senate rules they need 60 of the 100 senators to bring the bill to a vote, said last night that they were close -- but not yet close enough. And so President Clinton, as he has for most of the past 10 days, spent another afternoon trying to sweet-talk moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats into rallying behind him."

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans said yesterday that in an effort to balance the federal budget they would try to increase the age of eligibility for Medicare and start charging elderly people $5 for each visit by a home health-care agency.The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) promptly criticized both proposals, saying they deviated from the "judicious and fair approach" to Medicare taken by House committees.The proposals were advanced by Sen. William V. Roth Jr., a Delaware Republican, as part of a comprehensive package of legislation to slow the growth of Medicare and modernize the program, which finances health care for 38 million elderly or disabled people.

WASHINGTON -- For the seventh time this year, Senate Republicans blocked a measure yesterday to change U.S. policy in Iraq, beating back the latest Democratic proposal to set a timeline for withdrawing troops. Democrats fell eight votes short of the 60 votes demanded by Republican leaders for an amendment to the defense authorization bill being debated in the Senate. Four Republican lawmakers joined Democrats, ending a round-the-clock session orchestrated by Democratic leaders Tuesday night to highlight what they alleged was Republican obstructionism.

NO ISSUE FACING this nation is important enough to remove it from partisan politics. That's the message Senate Republicans send by blocking almost every nomination to fill a federal court vacancy made by President Clinton. They stall whether the nominee is liberal, conservative or moderate. The result is an overwhelmed court system with too few judges to handle the huge docket that stems from drug cases and civil suits.Mr. Clinton decried the partisan politics in his radio address Saturday, but he must share the blame for the judicial appointments morass.

WASHINGTON - A growing number of Senate Republicans say John Bolton won't be confirmed as United Nations ambassador unless the White House turns over documents that Democrats say they need to assess Bolton's fitness for the post. Though the White House continued yesterday to demand an up-or-down vote on Bolton, these Republican senators say the Senate is in a standoff that only President Bush can resolve. "I hope the president will take a very hard look at the documents," said Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican.

The sweeping immigration bill outlined by a bipartisan group of eight senators this week represents the most comprehensive overhaul of the U.S. immigration system in more than a quarter-century. It's also probably Congress' best chance this year to forge a compromise on an issue it hasn't touched since 2007. But that doesn't mean lawmakers still won't find a way to flub it. In theory, at least, the Senate compromise bill contains elements of policies both parties say they favor. In its broadest outlines, it would provide a path to eventual citizenship for the estimated 11 million people who are already in the country illegally, which Democrats have long wanted.

The Maryland General Assembly gave final approval Friday to Gov. Martin O'Malley's proposed gas tax increase, raising costs for motorists while providing an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars a year for new roads and mass transit projects. The Senate voted 27-20 to approve the bill, sending it to O'Malley for his expected signature. The legislation will raise taxes on gasoline in stages over four years — with a roughly 4-cent increase coming July 1. By mid-2016, unless Congress allows states to tax Internet sales, motorists in Maryland are likely to be paying an estimated 20 cents a gallon more in taxes than the current 23.5-cents rate that has been in effect since 1992.

The filibuster is back in the news, thanks to Sen. Rand Paul's nearly 13-hour talkathon on U.S. drone policy last week. Putting aside the merits of Mr. Paul's national security views, his feat of endurance was in the best tradition of the Senate. He used his right to unlimited debate on the Senate floor to draw the attention of his fellow citizens to an issue of profound national importance. Other recent filibusters are less noble. Last month, senators used the rules to delay, for little apparent reason, confirmation of their former colleague Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense.

After all the thunder and lightning signifying nothing but more Republican obstructionism, former Sen. Chuck Hagel has taken over at the Pentagon, vowing a realistic approach to America's military role in the world. Not surprisingly, he indicated he will pursue President Barack Obama's course of selective engagement, in contrast to the interventionism of the previous Republican administration, although he didn't specifically mention its war of choice in Iraq and other misadventurism.

Still reeling from the Republican defeat in the 2012 presidential election, House Speaker John Boehner warned in a Ripon Society speech the other day that the re-elected Obama administration is now out to kill off their party. The embattled speaker declared that the administration would focus "everything in the next 22 months," until the next midterm congressional elections, on attempting "to annihilate the Republican Party ... to shove us into the dustbin of history. " President Barack Obama undoubtedly wishes that American voters will somehow drive the GOP from its troublesome control of the House of Representatives, giving him Democratic majorities there and in the Senate.

The road to meaningful U.S. immigration reform will no doubt prove rocky and difficult, but at least Washington has taken its first big step on the most critical part of the route - down the so-called "path to citizenship" that now has bipartisan support in the Senate. That's quite a change since 2010 when so many in the GOP invoked the term "amnesty" as a dirty word. That's not to suggest that the findings of an eight-person work group have provided the definitive answer for the nation's dysfunctional immigration policy, but getting four prominent Republican senators to sign off on a path to citizenship is a notable accomplishment.

WASHINGTON -- Backed solidly by the Bush administration, Senate Republicans said yesterday that they would block a $157 billion economic stimulus package championed by Senate Democrats, who said they would have no choice but to quickly adopt a cheaper, more streamlined plan approved this week by the House. Democratic Senate leaders said they still hoped to secure changes to the House plan when they voted on it next week. They said they remained on track to get the plan, a portfolio of tax rebates and business tax breaks aimed at jolting the economy, to President Bush for his signature by Feb. 15. The Democrats also said the efforts over the past two days to shape the stimulus package to reflect their economic priorities had allowed them to lay out an agenda that they would pursue in the months ahead and use to bolster the case for electing a Democrat as president and widening their majorities in Congress.

WASHINGTON -- Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee defeated yesterday a Democratic push to investigate a domestic espionage operation authorized by President Bush, but they vowed to increase scrutiny of the controversial program through a newly created subcommittee. The developments enraged Democrats but delivered mixed results for the White House, which avoided a full-scale investigation of the spying operation by agreeing to provide detailed briefings on the program to a larger number of lawmakers, according to Senate Republicans.

U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice has become a willing pawn in Senate Republicans' efforts to force President Barack Obama into a costly and unnecessary fight over who will serve as his secretary of state when Hillary Clinton leaves that post in the new year. Once a trio of Republicans announced they would block Ms. Rice's confirmation for a job to which she had not been appointed, her aggressive efforts to smooth matters over have only given her opponents more opportunity to put the president in a box. Secretary of state is a position for which presidents do not typically have to use political capital, but now, at a time when Mr. Obama needs every bit of power he gained through re-election, he is being forced to expend it to defend someone he may or may not have intended to nominate in the first place.

If Maryland's resident pit bull, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, has demonstrated anything in her several decades in Congress and as dean of Senate women, it's a willingness to stand up for the less powerful in society, and she was at it again this week advocating for the Paycheck Fairness Act and the rights of women to secure equal pay for equal work. To the surprise of no one, Senate Republicans were unmoved by the cause and blocked the much-needed legislation from floor debate as it fell eight votes short of the 60 required.