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Two Wisconsin lawmakers from opposing parties are joining former GOP presidential nominee John McCain in pushing to give President Barack Obama line-item veto power. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Middleton, and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, are teaming up with the Arizona senator for what they say is a strategy to hold the line on federal spending and prevent wasteful earmarks. They plan to introduce the bill tomorrow.

Long delayed but not shrunken with time, a nearly $410 billion omnibus spending bill is fast becoming a great bone in the throat for Democrats and the White House, just when each hoped to put the past behind them and move onto President Barack Obama’s new 2010 budget. Minutes after hitting the Senate floor Monday, the bill touched off a fierce, emotional attack from the president’s old rival, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who lectured Obama for failing to do more to stand up against the thousands of spending earmarks in the 1,132 pages. At the same time, Democrats admitted privately...

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan plan to introduce legislation to create a Senate panel to investigate the causes of the financial crisis, McCain’s office said in a statement Monday. If approved, the committee would also make recommendations about how to avoid a similar crisis in the future.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Sen. John McCain has unleashed a withering attack on President Barack Obama's decision to sign a spending bill packed with thousands of pet projects sought by lawmakers. Defeated by Obama last November, McCain accused Obama of going along with business as usual after promising voters he would limit pork-barrel projects and reform the way they are handed out. McCain said, "So much for the promise of change."

During his visit to Mohave County last week, Arizona Sen. John McCain sat down with the Kingman Daily Miner Editorial Board to discuss a number of issues. The senator answered questions about the economic stimulus package, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, education and other issues. The following is Part II of the discussion the board had with the senator on Feb. 19. MINER: My parents live down in Yuma. One of the things they're most worried about is illegal immigration. My dad is fired up by the fact that that became a non-issue when you guys were running for...

Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, and senior Republican panel member John McCain of Arizona introduced legislation that would make it easier to kill weapons programs that spawn runaway development costs, while taking steps to improve competition in the heavily consolidated industry. The legislative salvo was fired a day after the White House announced the selection of Ashton B. Carter, a Harvard University physicist, to run the Pentagon procurement office that oversees the expenditure of about $330 billion a year on goods and services. The bill would give Congress greater leeway to kill programs...

McCain, a lifelong opponent of earmarks, released his list of the top ten porkiest projects in the Omnibus Spending bill the Congress is about to pass. Did he hold a press conference or release a statement to the press? No, instead, he went to the new media–but not Facebook or Youtube. He choose the new rising star in social media, Twitter. He merely made a tweet yesterday that began with “”Tmr I am gonna tweet the TOP TEN PORKIEST PROJECTS in the Omnibus Spending bill the Congress is about to pass”. And his 110,000 followers were instantly alerted, who in...

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By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Andrew Ward at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama pledged to remove combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of entering the White House. John McCain, his opponent, strongly disagreed with the imposition of an artificial timetable, saying he would rather lose the presidency than the war. It is a measure of how much has changed over the past six months that Mr McCain is now one of the chief cheerleaders for Mr ObamaÂ’s plan to withdraw US combat troops from Iraq by August 2010. The former Republican presidential nominee...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican Senator John McCain, who battled Barack Obama hard on the campaign trail on the Iraq war, said on Friday he supports President Obama's plans to remove U.S. combat forces from Iraq over 19 months. "Overall it is a reasonable plan and one that can work and I support it," McCain told Reuters. McCain, as a presidential candidate in the 2008 election, had argued that Obama was naive on national security and criticized his pledge to pull U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months.

Some Democrats Unhappy With Obama Iraq Plan. BY LUIS MARTINEZ In a speech later today at Camp Lejeune, N.C., President Obama will announce an 18- month troop withdrawal plan from Iraq that will result in what aides say will be the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq Aug. 31, 2010. However, even before the plan has been unveiled top Democrats are raising concerns that the president's plan will leave behind a larger force than they had anticipated. Sen. John McCain, however, who had battled Obama over his Iraq plan during the presidential campaign, had indicated that he supports...

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has called on President Barack Obama to veto federal spending bills approved by the U.S. House of Representatives. McCain and other fiscal conservatives, such as Phoenix-area Congressmen John Shadegg and Jeff Flake, fault the spending bills as too large with unnecessary pet projects. ”The bill approved by the House that will be brought before the full Senate is 1,123 pages, accompanied by a 1,844-page statement of managers – for a whopping 2,967 pages of legislation – and contains over 9,000 unnecessary and wasteful earmarks. This bill represents status quo Washington at its worst,” said McCain...

It seems that White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, Sen. John McCain (R), and Sen. Russ Feingold (D) are on the same page. The issue: All three want a presidential line-item veto to curb earmarks and spending. A line-item veto gives the president the power to veto particular items of a bill without having to veto it in its entirety. During the Clinton administration, Congress gave the power to Clinton, but it was later revoked in 1998 when the Supreme Court ruled that the measure overreached presidential powers. Today, at the daily White House press conference, one of us asked...

Mike Huckabee says John McCain missed a chance last fall to offer a conservative alternative to the $700 billion financial rescue plan. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee took shots at former presidential primary rival John McCain on Thursday, blaming McCain's actions during the economic meltdown last fall for his general election loss to Barack Obama. When McCain suspended his campaign last September and flew back to Washington to deal with the financial crisis, he "meekly" joined Obama and voted for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, Huckabee said. McCain should have offered a "true, authentic conservative choice rather than a...

Before an audience of conservatives on Thursday, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., took aim at the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, and former President Bush for supporting the government's purchase last October of $700 billion in bad mortgages and debt held by struggling U.S. financial institutions. He even hinted that McCain, R-Ariz., might have won the White House last year had he staked out a position in opposition to the bailout. Congressional Republicans, last fall, offered a better, less expensive plan to rescue Wall Street and fix the economy, Huckabee said. But the Bush White House and Sen....

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles on Wednesday indicted a Jordanian businessman with connections to the Florida Republican Party on charges of funneling illegal contributions to three former presidential candidates and Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida. The indictment of the businessman, Ala’a al-Ali, 37, shines a spotlight on the role of a business associate who the complaint asserts helped collect the donations. The associate, Harry Sargeant III, is a major Republican fund-raiser who owns an oil company with government contracts in Iraq and who recently resigned as finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Mr. Sargeant raised more than...

Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, tried unsuccessfully Wednesday afternoon to kill legislation to give the District full voting rights in Congress. Mr. McCain called for a constitutional point of order to question the legality of giving the District voting rights. The vote failed 36-62. Under the legislation proposed in Congress this year, the Democratic-leaning District would get a House member with full voting rights, and Republican-leaning Utah would get a fourth House seat. Supporters think the bill finally has good chance of being passed, after a decades-long effort, because of Democratic gains in Congress in the November elections and because...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Sen. John McCain said Wednesday that security gains in Iraq could be lost if the new administration pulls troops out too quickly, but he didn't dismiss the feasibility of President Barack Obama's 19-month timetable. The administration was finishing details this week on a plan that would withdraw most of the nation's 142,000 troops in Iraq by August 2010. The proposal would leave as many as 50,000 troops behind to advise and train Iraqi security forces and to protect U.S. interests. McCain, who lost the presidency to Obama last year, suggested that the timeline — three months...

Republican Sen. John McCain rates President Barack Obama's first speech to Congress as "excellent." "There were areas that obviously I have questions about and disagreements with, but I think the theme of his speech and his delivery were excellent," the president's rival in last year's election said, following Tuesday night's speech. "I think he carefully balanced the enormity of the size of the challenges and difficulties that America faces and, at the same time, I think he gave Americans assurance and confidence that we can get through this," McCain said. The Arizona Republican said, however, that he has concerns. "I...