Obama will announce this afternoon his re-nomination of Richard Cordray to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the AP is reporting. Cordray’s nomination was blocked by Senate Republicans in his first terms over their objections to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau itself, so Obama recess-appointed him to the post a year ago.
Reid and McConnell on verge of agreement for dramatically scaled back filibuster deal.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on his exchange with Hillary Clinton today: “I think she just decided before she was going to describe emotionally the four dead Americans, the heroes, and use that as her trump card to get out of the questions.”
Watch the exchange here.
Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) snaps at Secretary of State HIllary Clinton during the Benghazi hearings: “You let the consulate become a death trap.”
Fox News ponders whether it’s OK to compare people to Nazis during the gun debate.
After Democratic maneuvering to squeeze House Republicans, a temporary debt ceiling increase passed the House 285-144
The House is about to vote on its debt limit bill, just a few minutes after Senate Democratic leaders held a press conference to rub salt in Republican wounds.
The thrust was more or less: “We’d like to thank Speaker Boehner for his extraordinary leadership in totally caving to us, and congratulate President Obama on his enormous victory over Republicans, and we look forward to passing the House bill right away.”
Mildly speaking, that won’t help the GOP’s whip count. Read More
For a time this morning in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Benghazi, it looked like the coming and going of the November elections had taken most of the steam out of Republican senators and their conspiracy theories about Benghazi. Neither their hearts nor their spines seemed that into it. Easier to concoct these theories in the studios of Fox News than to try to score political points in the same room as an equal like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
But then Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY) had their turns. They went after Clinton hard. You can watch the keys parts of her exchange with Johnson here and with Paul here.
Paul went as far as saying that had he been president he would have fired Clinton, while rattling off a few examples of State Department expenditures that he considers wasteful and frivolous. Read More