'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
President Obama nominated longtime fundraiser and hotel heiress Penny Pritzker Thursday to run the Commerce Department, gambling that her role in a failed bank and opposition from labor groups won't derail her Senate confirmation.
Sen. Rand Paul said Monday that the immigration reform debate should be halted until Congress first understands what went wrong in Boston, where two brothers who came to the U.S. legally under the asylum program have been accused of the deadly bombings at last week's marathon.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that she didn't order immigration agents to delay arresting an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender working for Sen. Robert Menendez's New Jersey office in the middle of his re-election campaign last year.
Democrats and Republicans found little common ground Wednesday as Congress kicked off the first major gun-control debate in years, showing last month's school shooting rampage in Connecticut left emotional scars but has not broken the gridlock that has doomed gun legislation for two decades.
The Senate is poised to take up this week a bill addressing domestic violence, but past bipartisan support for reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has frayed and two Republican lawmakers are preparing their own alternative measure.
The House overwhelmingly passed legislation banning insider-trading on Thursday, sending it to a conference where lawmakers will try to reconcile the bill with a more restrictive version passed by the Senate.
Support for an anti-online piracy bill — drafted with rare bipartisan support — is eroding in the face of mounting public and corporate backlash.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. says an investigation of arms traffickers called "Operation Fast and Furious" was flawed in concept as well as in execution, never should have happened and "it must never happen again."
Lawmakers on Thursday put off a much-anticipated debate on a bill to repeal the law that forbids recognition of gay marriage at the federal level.
Eighteen Republican senators led by the Senate Judiciary Committee's ranking member, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, are questioning the Obama administration's immigration policies, saying they go beyond the scope of the law and allow those who entered the country illegally to remain.
A senior Republican senator is determined to force the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic to give up his post over charges that the envoy misled Congress two years ago when he served as an adviser to President Obama.
The Justice Department and several of its agencies engaged in "extravagant and wasteful" spending on food, beverages and event planning for law enforcement conferences, including paying $16 each for muffins, $76 per person for lunch and more than $8 for a cup of coffee, according to an audit released Tuesday by the department's Office of Inspector General.
Two top Republican lawmakers say Arizona prosecutors "stifled" attempts by agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to interdict weapons purchased by "straw buyers" in that state that later were "walked" to drug smugglers in Mexico, and may have covered up the fact that two of those weapons were found at the scene of the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Kenneth E. Melson, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who was caught this year in a firestorm over the "Fast and Furious" undercover gun investigation, was reassigned Tuesday and will be replaced by U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones of Minnesota.
Two Republican lawmakers investigating a controversial Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives weapons operation known as "Fast and Furious" have asked the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration to explain what role their agents played in the investigation.
