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Two Democratic senators want to claw back some of the Republican tax law, to create jobs for people who have been unemployed for a long period of time. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) introduced the Long-Term Unemployment Act__ on Thursday. The bill would create a federal program designed to generate jobs for people who have been out of work for at least six months. The bill complements — and could eventually merge with — Wyden’s ELEVATE Act, which they say also aims to eliminate barriers to the labor market. The senators’ plan would subsidize a job...

Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, announced on Wednesday that he is placing a hold on Treasury Department nominees, arguing that the department has not sufficiently responded to his requests for information about its handling of Democrats' request for President Trump's tax returns. “Congress has a constitutional obligation to conduct oversight of the executive branch, so I am placing a hold on Treasury Department nominees," Wyden said in a statement, which came two weeks after he had threatened to place the hold.

WASHINGTON—The top Democrat on the Senate’s tax-writing committee wants to tax long-term investments like other types of income, raising rates and requiring the wealthiest people to pay taxes on their unrealized gains each year. The plan from Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon is the latest proposal from Democrats in Congress and on the presidential-campaign trail to boost taxes on the wealthy in a bid to address what they view as the problems of economic inequality and provide a funding stream to pay for new programs. While the specific proposal has little chance to become law anytime soon, such ideas could...

Democrat Senator Ron Wydon (D-OR) ripped CNN contributor and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Wednesday for continuing to lie about his famous lie to the American public. In March 2013 Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went before the US Senate and lied about government spying. Senator Ron Wydon asked Clapper if the NSA collects any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? Director Clapper replied, “No, sir … not wittingly.” This was a lie. Clapper was never condemned or punished for lying under oath to the US Senate. This more...

Some lawmakers would like to see the Justice Department prosecute former spy chief James Clapper for inaccurate testimony to Congress about domestic surveillance before it's too late. Privacy-conscious critics say looming five-year statutes of limitation for perjury and making false statements — establishing a March 12 deadline for charges — make an urgent case for action, and that nonprosecution would set a dangerous precedent that impedes oversight and executive-branch accountability. Clapper, director of national intelligence from 2010 to 2017, testified during a March 2013 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that the NSA was "not wittingly” collecting “any type of data at...

Some lawmakers would like to see the Justice Department prosecute former spy chief James Clapper for inaccurate testimony to Congress about domestic surveillance before it's too late. Privacy-conscious critics say looming five-year statutes of limitation for perjury and making false statements — establishing a March 12 deadline for charges — make an urgent case for action, and that nonprosecution would set a dangerous precedent that impedes oversight and executive-branch accountability. Clapper, director of national intelligence from 2010 to 2017, testified during a March 2013 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that the NSA was "not wittingly” collecting “any type of data at...

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) today seized on headlines about rich parents cheating their children into elite universities, declaring his intent to eliminate an old tax break that lets donors contribute to colleges while their kids are being considered for admission. Wyden announced that he'll introduce a bill in the U.S. Senate to "end the tax break for donations made to schools before or during the enrollment of children of the donor's family." His spokesman Henry Stern tells WW this will be the first time Wyden has introduced such a bill. "Middle-class families don't have access to this back door...

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) on Wednesday slammed former National Intelligence Director James Clapper for claiming he did not purposely lie to Congress when asked about an NSA mass surveillance program in March 2013, saying he sent the longtime intelligence official the question ahead of the hearing. “James Clapper needs to stop making excuses for lying to the American people about mass surveillance. To be clear: I sent him the question in advance. I asked him to correct the record afterward. He chose to let the lie stand,” the Oregon Democrat responded to Clapper’s excuse in a tweet.

The Senate is set to escalate a long simmering fight over President Trump's judicial nominees. Republicans are poised to confirm a pick for the influential circuit courts next week without the support of either of the nominee's home-state senators—a first for the Trump era. Eric Miller is the first appeals judge to get a vote on the Senate floor this year, and the 31st of Trump’s presidency. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) set up an initial vote on his Ninth Circuit nomination for Monday evening. “The judicial train is running in the committee and it will soon hit the floor,”...

A Republican and a Democratic senator have called on the Federal Reserve and the publisher of a foreign policy magazine to provide more details on 2015 meetings involving senior U.S. financial officials, a Russian central bank official, and Russian spy Maria Butina. Now, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley R-Iowa, and the top Democrat on that panel, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., want more information. The meetings involved Butina, now-former Russian Central Bank Deputy Governor Alexander Torshin, former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer, and former Treasury Undersecretary for International Affairs Nathan Sheets. They were reportedly arranged by the Center for...

President Trump will take executive action invoking emergency powers to help secure the nation's southern border and sign the bill coming out of Congress that only provides limited funding for a border barrier. A figure of eight billion dollars in spending on a barrier...... From Syria a local media report that Russian military police in the area of the Kurdish city of Manbij are operating joint patrols with the Turkish military..... It was called a conference on "peace and security in the Middle East". Some 60 nations represented at the conference in Warsaw this but only two nations with high...

More Senate skullduggery, Trump’s role in this, straight lines, and the Bundy case again Senate chicanery Last month I wrote of the skullduggery applied by both political parties in trying to pass a 680-page federal lands package in the waning moments of the last Congress. Up stepped our hero, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) who just wanted to add two words to the legislation. Alaska and Wyoming are by statute exempt from the Antiquities Act that has been so abused by recent Presidents. Senator Lee wanted to add “and Utah” to that statute. The leadership said no to his amendment,...

I feel sacrilegious for invoking such numinous phrases, but it’s hard to think of a better personal metaphor for the Strand, New York City’s iconic bookstore located in Greenwich Village. Visiting the store is its own pilgrimage for any starved bibliophile. In a world of Amazon shipping and the $.01 paperback, Strand is an oasis, offering a rarified shopping experience that slakes our need for spontaneity through the adventitious wandering of stacks. The atmosphere begs for browsing books, both old and new. It’s anonymous and crowded, like a self-contained city. And, as everything else in our harried age, it’s in...

Sen. Ron Wyden said Thursday that it appears Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh lied to Congress in 2006 when he testified about when he learned of a post-9/11 surveillance program. The Oregon Democrat said in an emailed statement to the Washington Examiner that documents published by the New York Times appear to contradict Kavanaugh’s testimony. “Yes, the documents made public this week strongly suggest Brett Kavanaugh was involved in discussions about the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping programs, and that he misled the American people in his 2006 testimony,” Wyden said.

In a dramatic move Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell withdrew the nomination of President Donald Trump’s pick for the Ninth Circuit, Ryan Bounds, after reports surfaced that his nomination didn’t have enough votes for confirmation. Bounds, an assistant U.S. attorney in Oregon for the last eight years, was the Trump administration’s first nominee to the Ninth Circuit, named in September to replace Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain, for whom Bounds clerked. O’Scannlain took senior status at the end of 2016. Both of Bounds’ home-state senators, Democrats Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, opposed his nomination. They withheld their blue slips for Bounds,...

The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them. In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them....

A bipartisan pair of senators are calling on the Justice Department to investigate whether Russian intelligence services posed as an Islamic extremist hacker group that sought to harass U.S. military families. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) wrote a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday asking him to investigate whether a hacking group called the “Cyber Caliphate” launched an intimidation campaign against members of military families in 2015. “If substantiated, the claims about APT28 posing as the Cyber Caliphate could be the first public evidence that influence operations have specifically targeted American military families,” Wyden and...

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., pledged Monday to continue blocking President Trump's nominees to the Treasury Department in a bid to get documents related to Trump's dealings with Russia.....The Oregon Democrat and ranking member on the Finance Committee committed to holding up nominees.. On Monday, Wyden said he has placed a hold on Patelunas in order to gain documents from the Treasury relating to Trump's financial ties with Russia, and said conducting oversight is a "constitutional duty, not a resistance tactic." Since early in Trump's tenure, Wyden has sought to use nominations as leverage over Treasury to get the documents he...

For the first time, the U.S. government has publicly acknowledged the existence in Washington of what appear to be rogue devices that foreign spies and criminals could be using to track individual cellphones and intercept calls and messages. The use of what are known as cellphone-site simulators by foreign powers has long been a concern, but American intelligence and law enforcement agencies -- which use such eavesdropping equipment themselves -- have been silent on the issue until now. In a March 26 letter to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledged that last year it identified...

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security detected potential surveillance activity near “sensitive facilities” in Washington, including the White House, according to a study conducted last year.Officials disclosed the activity, associated with devices commonly known as “Stingrays,” in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), which was first reported by The Washington Post this week. The revelation boosts long-held suspicions that foreign actors are using the technology to conduct spying in the nation’s capital. Christopher Krebs, the acting head of the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), Homeland Security’s cybersecurity unit, explained in the May 22 letter that the department...