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President says he won’t abide by spending bill he signedWhen the president of the United States signs a bill into law, it’s expected that he will abide by it. That’s not the case with President Obama, who has a sudden interest in novel legalistic interpretations getting him off the hook from laws he doesn’t like. On Friday, the president signed the $1 trillion omnibus spending bill, which funds the government for the remaining nine months of the fiscal year. Afterward, he released a statement saying he won’t abide by the law because the Justice Department had advised that certain provisions...

Anyone remember this from 2008? [VIDEO AT SITE] Q: When Congress offers you a bill, do you promise not to use presidential signage [sic] to get your way? OBAMA: Yes. [Applause] Let me just explain for those who are unfamiliar with this issue. You know, we’ve got a government designed by the founders so that there’d be checks and balances. You don’t want a President that’s too powerful or a Congress that’s too powerful or courts that are too powerful. Everybody’s got their own role. Congress’ job is to pass legislation. The President can veto it, or he can...

Freshman Tea Party Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) is incensed that Republicans caved in the payroll-tax debate, and is putting the blame squarely on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “I don’t think there’s a revolt with respect to Speaker Boehner,” Gowdy said Thursday night on Fox’s "Your World With Neil Cavuto." "I think the license tag of the truck that just ran over us has Kentucky license tags. For the life of me, I cannot understand when the Senate is going to find something they care enough about to stand on policy and principle.”Last week, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a...

In session for a whopping 1 minute, 28 seconds, the Senate today passed by unanimous consent the updated, slightly tweaked version of the two-month payroll tax cut extension. Hailing this as a “new day,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., celebrated and then appointed, as the compromise called for, his designees for the conference committee to negotiate a year-long payroll tax deal. The appointees are: Sens. Max Baucus, D-Mont.; Ben Cardin, D-Md.; Jack Reed, D-R.I.; and Bob Casey, D-Pa. ,,,,, Reid left with departing messages to Republicans: His message to the Republican leader in the Senate should really be interpreted...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama has signed a $1 trillion-plus 2012 spending bill that sets the day-to-day budgets of 10 Cabinet agencies. The Senate approved the bill last Saturday in a flurry of year-end activity that was overshadowed by an ensuing confrontation over extending a payroll tax cut.

Senate just passed the two month extention of the "tax cut" House about to meet...to pass it under a UC (unanimous consent) motion. If any ONE Republican shows up and objects..it can't pass.

House speaker John Boehner is set to sign an offer from Obama to accelerate negotiations. Republicans in the House of Representatives have capitulated in the showdown over the payroll tax, handing Barack Obama an important victory going into election year. Under pressure from other senior Republicans for blocking a bill that would extend tax cuts to millions of Americans, the House speaker, John Boehner, is backing away from his insistence that any deal must cover a full year. A deal agreed by Republicans and Democrats in the Senate on Saturday covers two months, to allow further negotiations in January. It...

Sen. John McCain, D-Ariz., lit into President Barack Obama today for failing to produce an agreement on extending the payroll tax cut, The Hill reports. The Senate passed a compromise two-month extension Saturday, but the House rejected it Tuesday amid objections from conservatives who want a one-year extension. Obama needs to exhibit leadership to break the stalemate, McCain told CNN. The president has merely told the House to pass the Senate bill. "Previous presidents I've served under ... would be calling them [members of Congress] over to the White House, looking them in the eye and telling them, 'We need...

Officials from the policy-neutral National Payroll Reporting Consortium, Inc. have expressed concern to members of Congress that the two-month payroll tax holiday passed by the Senate and supported by President Obama cannot be implemented properly. Pete Isberg, president of the NPRC today wrote to the key leaders of the relevant committees of the House and Senate, telling them that “insufficient lead time” to implement the complicated change mandated by the legislation means the two-month payroll tax holiday “could create substantial problems, confusion and costs affecting a significant percentage of U.S. employers and employees.”

RICHMOND, Va. -- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday he would tell his caucus to get "noisy" if he were trying to game out the dispute on a payroll tax cut with President Obama. Asked about the standoff by a voter, the Republican presidential candidate also called the senators "arrogant" over their refusal to negotiate. “I would have all of my members on talk radio back home demanding the senators come back. And I could say 'How can the senators arrogantly go home." Gingrich, who has previously said he doesn't know what John Boehner is going through because President...

Just across from National Journal. Our dumb national nightmare is over. House Republicans on Thursday crumpled under the weight of White House and public pressure and have agreed to pass a two-month extension of the 2 percent payroll-tax cut, Republican and Democratic sources told National Journal…The House will pass the two-month extension with a technical correction to the language designed to minimize difficulties businesses might experience implementing the short-term, two-month tax cut extension. In exchange, Reid agreed to appoint several Senate Democrats to start negotiating with the House on a full-year payroll-tax holiday extension, which is right in line with...

I have been listening to a lot of debate on the radio about the payroll deduction cut. I just recently heard the Won on the radio going on about how some guy will miss his pizza night. Why can't Boehner and McConnel, instead, come out and say, "We'll cut the income tax rates by 2 percent and reinstate the payroll tax rate so Social Security can remain funded and K.Z. can still have his pizza night with his daughters. Better yet, we'll cut the income tax rate 4% and they can have pizza night twice a week." Why do they...

“It’s not helping,” a veteran Senate Republican strategist said of the House GOP fight against the Senate package. “Senate Republicans are tired of paying the price for the lack of legislative thoughtfulness in the House.” The political operative said incumbents such as Sens. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) could pay the price.

Congressional aides say House GOP to accept short-term payroll tax cut extension Just Headlines

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- House Republicans have agreed to pass a two-month extension of the 2% payroll-tax cut, National Journal reported Thursday, citing Republican and Democratic sources. House Republican leaders insisted earlier Thursday on passing a one-year extension, while President Barack Obama urged them to agree to a two-month deal. Without action by Congress, the payroll tax reverts to 6.2% on Jan. 1 from its current 4.2% rate

Most homebuyers will pay an increased fee to finance their mortgage as part of a U.S. Senate compromise approved today to continue a 2 percentage point cut in payroll taxes and extend unemployment benefits until February. In a last-minute compromise reached Friday night, the Senate agreed to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits but only for two months and to pay the estimated $30 billion to $40 billion cost by increasing the fees on new mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The increase is expected to cost a new homebuyer about $17 a month for a...

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, phoned President Obama this morning and asked him to send members of his economic team to the Capitol to end the political stalemate and negotiate a path toward a one-year extension of the payroll tax credit. The president declined the offer. “With Sen. Reid having declined to call his members back to Washington this week to join the House in negotiating a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut, the speaker proposed that the president send members of his economic policy team up to Congress to

The standoff over preserving a tax break continued as House Speaker John Boehner showed little sign of reversing course despite sustained criticism from his own party and President Obama. Boehner assembled his top negotiators for a second day at an otherwise empty Capitol, but their position is being overpowered by the risk of a looming tax hike on Jan. 1. Obama planned to showcase stories of workers who will lose $40 a paycheck later Thursday at the White House.  “We’re fighting to do the right thing,” said Boehner, who wants to launch formal negotiations with Democrats to resolve differing approaches...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has just offered a way out for House Republicans, who are badly losing the public relations war over the payroll tax cut. He's calling on Speaker of the House John Boehner to give in and pass a bill to extend the payroll tax cut — implicitly the bill that passed the Senate by an 89-10 margin on Saturday. As a compromise, he also calls on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to appoint negotiators on a year-long extension of the payroll tax cut — which Reid has already pledged to do once the House passed...

Ed Henry of Fox News has been tweeting about the rumors: President basically told Boehner, if you pass two-month extension Democrats will move forward on talks over one-year deal … This is big morning in this story: now have the outline of a deal; if Boehner passes two-month extend, Reid appoints conferees on 1-yr deal Update: It’s being widely reported that Boehner tried to get Obama to reopen negotiations, but ended up with a refusal: “The speaker explained his concern that flaws in the Senate-passed bill will be unworkable for many small business job creators,” an aide to the Ohio...