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Today, four subpoenaed U.S. attorneys who have been fired by the Bush administration in the last three months will undergo questioning in two separate congressional hearings. David Iglesias, Carol Lam, Bud Cummins, and John McKay will testify about the conditions surrounding their dismissals -- first, before the Senate Judiciary Committee at 10 AM, then again before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law at 2 PM. At the house hearing, the four prosecutors will be ...

In Congress this week, the Senate and House of Representatives will be at opposite ends of highly controversial legislation. By the end of the week, when the Senate hopes to put S.4, a major Homeland Security bill to implement the unfinished recommendations of the 9/11 commission, to a final vote and the House Appropriations Committee begins to take up President Bush's $100 billion-plus supplemental war funding request, Congress will be holding a couple of the most important issues of our time i...

In the Senate, a week of debate on S.4, a bill to implement the unfinished recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, is coming to and end. More work remains to be done, but a lot has been accomplished in this past week in the way of fine-tuning the bill and perfecting its provisions for ideal efficacy. For example, amendments to create a Rural Policing Institute, expand the reporting requirement on cross border interoperability, and to specify the criminal offenses that disqualify an applicant fr...

The House of Representative is beginning debate on the second piece of labor-related legislation considered this week in Congres, despite presidential veto threats on both. The bill being debated in the House is H.R.800, the Employee Free Choice Act. The bill would remove the requirement that union elections be held by a secret ballot vote, a voting process similar to the one we use when voting for elected officials. Under the current rules, once 30% of a group of workers sign an authori...

OpenCongress launched just this past Monday morning, and already we've been fortunate to receive some great notices from around the web. We're especially pleased that the links come from a mix of political bloggers, activists, tech observers, and broad-based social bookmarking sites. We hope that, in the future, these communities will continue to link to OpenCongress as a rich resource for capturing the "big picture" around bills and issues at stake in Congress. Here are a few noteworthy me...

The House Appropriations Committee today set a target date of March 7 to begin their role in preparing President Bush's $93.4 billion war supplemental appropriations request. Once the committee is done tweaking the supplemental war request, probably about a week later, it will be sent to the House floor, where its future is looking more and more uncertain. This morning at the Republican Conference meeting, House Minority Leader John Boehner told members to vote against the supplemental fundin...

After a series of repeated defeats in the Senate, Democrats are slowing down to reevaluate their plans for dealing with Iraq legislation. So far, three Iraq resolutions have been pushed forward by the Senate Democratic leadership, including one by Joe Biden (pictured at right), but all three failed to find enough support to even make it to debate on the Senate floor. On the other hand, the House of Representatives was successful in passing a non-binding resolution expressing their disapprova...

In response to a comment on one of this site's recent blog posts, we would like to try to describe what a cloture vote actually is. Cloture votes have been invoked and rejected three times recently in the Senate, each time on a motion to proceed to debate of an Iraq resolution (S.Con.Res.2, S.470, and S.574). The events have been covered by the media as "blocked debates." The reports generally mention the cloture procedure in passing, but do not go into the details of what cloture is and ho...

The next phase in the budgeting process begins today. The Congressional Budget Office today issued its biennial "Budget Options" report. The report comes about three weeks after President Bush issued his 2008 budget proposal. The CBO report's basic functions are to examine the presidential budget proposal and suggest options for altering it to make it fit with the budget goals on Congress. It will serve as a guidebook for lawmakers as they begin to set budget priorities, make changes, and ada...

We've just completed the first day of public launch here at OpenCongress -- welcome to everyone reading. Thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about our launch by blogging about our site, and especially to everyone who wrote in with feedback and suggestions, please keep it coming: writeus@opencongress.org. Every day, our Congress Gossip Blog will highlight useful news and blog reporting from around the web and offer summaries of Congressional actions. Today, I wanted to start out by...

The Senate will be back in session at 2PM this afternoon to begin debate on S.4, a bill to implement the unfinished recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. The thing that has people holding their breath as this debate begins is whether or not legislators will try to attach their competing Iraq resolutions to it as amendments. Doing so could potentially cause the whole bill, which has overwhelming majority support, to be scrapped. Articles outlining this possibility can be found all over the in...

Members of Congress will face some tough legislating as they return today from a week-long President's Day recess. On Thursday, the House of Representatives is scheduled to debate the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that has almost no support from Republicans but has enough support to pass on the Democratic sponsors' votes alone. The Senate is where things could get really tense this week, as Senators address the largely bi-partisan 9/11 Commission bill under the shadow of dueling partisan reso...

Democratic Senators Joe Biden (DE) and Carl Levin (MI) will be returning from recess on Tuesday the 27th, ready to place their new Iraq resolution on the table. Their new plan is different from the non-binding resolutions that have been repeatedly blocked from debate in the Senate -- if approved, it would actually become law. The plan calls for Congress' 2002 authorization of the war in Iraq to be replaced with an obligation to begin deploying the majority of U.S. troops out of Iraq by March, 2...

The continuing resolution (CR), which must be approved by the Senate by Thursday, Feb. 15th in order to avoid a partial shutdown of the federal government, is currently the topic of Senate debate. But even before debate on the CR had begun in the Senate, the bill was already weighed down with the maximum amount of amendments that can be offered to any one bill. All of theses amendments came from one person, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Reid proposed the amendments as a procedural...

The Senate and House of Representatives will be trading tasks for the rest of the week. Each chambers will spend the week debating what their opposite chamber debated last week; the Senate will focus on the House-passed continuing resolution that will fund much of the federal government for the current fiscal year, while the House of Representatives will attempt to pass what the Senate failed to pass last week: an Iraq resolution. As Carl Hulse points out in the New York Times' Caucus blog, t...