By Rand Paul
Obama acts as though we no longer have a Constitution

Mark Sanford's plea for forgiveness succeeded with South Carolina voters on Tuesday, and now his Republican colleagues will have to decide whether they, too, can forgive him.

With Republican candidate Mark Sanford surging ahead in Tuesday's special congressional election in South Carolina, the party is increasingly hopeful it can avoid an embarrassing defeat in a district that analysts said it should have been able to hold easily.

After giving Mark Sanford the cold shoulder for months, the Republican establishment slowly is warming to the former governor's campaign for South Carolina's open House seat, with several key Republicans weighing in with endorsements in recent days.

Ron Paul, the former representative for Texas, endorsed former S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford for his congressional race.

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford said Wednesday he visited his ex-wife's home while she was out of town because he didn't want his 14-year-old son to watch the Super Bowl alone — a visit that she says violated their divorce settlement.

"America: Taking it back starts now" heralds the newly reinvented National Republican Congressional Committee website, which jolted to life Saturday and is an aggressive poke at a bullying Democratic presence that now commands much voter attention online.

When the history of crony capitalism is written, Elon Musk will deserve a chapter to himself. Mr. Musk began his career as a risk-taker and entrepreneur, co-founding the innovative online-payment system PayPal. His latest ventures depend on taxpayers, K Street lobbyists and campaign contributions.

Republicans retained control of the House in Tuesday's elections, according to television network projections that showed Democrats falling short of the 25 seats they needed to win to take back the chamber.

With Election Day a little more than a month away, both parties are performing painful triage operations in the battle to control the House, pulling resources from candidates with no chance of winning — or at least too small to be worth the effort — in order to concentrate money on more promising races.

New York state's congressional elections are testing the staying power of Republicans who rode a tea party wave to a House majority two years ago — as well as the resilience of Democrats striving to regain control.

A top attorney for President Obama's campaign and the Democratic National Committee predicted Wednesday that new voter-identification laws passed in a number of states will have a minimal impact on turnout in the fall elections, saying that Democrats have made "significant progress" in blunting their effects and that he thinks the country will likely avoid electoral "Armageddon."

Democrats expect to chip away at House Republicans' 49-seat majority in November, but GOP leaders insisted Monday that they've seized the advantage for the second election cycle in a row and will pocket four to eight more seats.

D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton told a local radio station recently that city contractor Jeffrey E. Thompson, the central figure in a deepening campaign scandal involving D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray, didn't bundle any campaign cash for her.

Despite the return by President Obama and the Democratic Party of a tainted $10,000 donation from D.C. fundraiser Jeffrey E. Thompson, dozens of other federal and local campaign committees, Democrat and Republican alike, continue to hold on to tens of thousands of dollars they have received from the contractor now at the center of Mayor Vincent C. Gray's deepening fundraising scandal, records show.

Far from ending the debate over President Obama's health care law, last month's Supreme Court ruling has only stoked the partisan battle over the issue, with both parties taking to the airwaves and the Internet to try to frame the landmark decision ahead of November's elections.