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Congress is facing a legislative pileup as it barrels toward the end of the year with a lengthy to-do list. The House and Senate return Monday and are scheduled to be in session for roughly two weeks before the end of 2021, setting up a legislative squeeze that is threatening to drive lawmaking deeper into the holiday season. Democrats, facing increasingly sharp headwinds... have to juggle their party's political ambitions with must-pass bills that threaten to eat up shrinking floor time.

The Biden administration asked Congress on Tuesday for at least $24 billion in disaster relief and urged swift passage of a short-term funding bill as a government shutdown looms at the end of September. White House Office of Management and Budget Acting Director Shalanda Young requested "urgent" spending in a blog post to respond to natural disasters and the relocation of Afghans who partnered with the US during the war in Afghanistan. Specifically, the administration is asking Congress for $14 billion for natural disasters that occurred before Hurricane Ida, $6.4 billion for the Afghan relocation, and it anticipates another $10...

Follows recent tweet by President Trump urging Senate to stay in session through the summerThe clamor for Congress to scrap its summer vacation is growing louder, with more than a dozen Senate Republicans officially petitioning Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday to keep the chamber in session on nights, weekends and even through their normal August break to make headway on President Trump’s agenda. Partly born of frustration with Democrats and partly worried that voters will see a lack of progress from an all-Republican Washington, the senators said voters preparing for the November elections deserve to know that the Republican...

WASHINGTON -- After the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in March froze the interview process for Afghans who had supported U.S. forces due to a lack of visas, a bipartisan effort secured 2,500 more visas in the compromise spending bill up for consideration this week. The special immigrant visa (SIV) program was established in 2008 to allow Afghans who had helped the coalition as interpreters to find safe haven in the U.S. The visa criteria were later expanded to Afghans who provided "at least one year of faithful and valuable service" in support of U.S. government operations. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.),...

Donald Trump has asked Republicans who control Congress to delay action on a 2017 budget until he gets into office. House Speaker Paul Ryan has apparently agreed, but Senate Republicans have other ideas.Speaker Paul D. Ryan said on Thursday that the House would go along with the incoming administration's request and pass a stopgap spending bill that would keep the government running at current spending levels until March. But Republican leaders in the Senate did not immediately sign on to the plan, reflecting their desire to get contentious spending battles out of the way this year. […]The way the budget...

The hard choice Democrats have given Republicans has paid off for the big-spenders again. Refusing to work together to cut spending, Democrats demanded that Republicans compromise with them to increase spending, or shut down the government. As a result, Congress rammed through a 1,000-page, trillion-dollar omnibus spending bill that lumped 9 different appropriations bills in a single package at the very last minute rather than debating, amending, and voting on these bills in a transparent manner. Spend more and pass this bill, the Democrats said, or force the government to close its doors. They said the same thing this past...

Senate Democrats abruptly pulled down an omnibus spending bill after senior Republicans – caught with their hands in the cookie jar — deserted the measure in an effort to square themselves with tea party activists and conservatives in the party. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made the announcement and signaled he would substitute a short-term spending resolution for the much more detailed year-long $1.1 trillion plus measure which many in the GOP had been quietly rooting for just weeks ago. With Washington facing a funding cutoff Saturday night, the result is a genuine fiscal crisis — at once serious and...

Ever since his inauguration, President Obama has said that he "inherited" the federal budget deficit from his predecessor. But immediately upon taking office, Obama signed two new bills, the $787B stimulus and the $410B omnibus, that together about equal the $1.2T deficit he "inherited." Now that the fiscal year has ended, we see that the feds ran a $1.58T deficit for FY 2009, the all-time record and the first deficit over a trillion bucks. This deficit is 3.4 times the $459B deficit of 2008, and 10 times the $160B deficit of 2007, which began when Republicans were still in control...