Lead appropriators from both sides of the aisle are sitting down to chat. Polite chatter in the hallways of Congress has replaced boisterous accusations. Could this mean months of drama over issues like defense and non-defense spending are getting hammered out?
CQ Roll Call's Jennifer Shutt and David Lerman layout where things stand.
It doesn’t matter if you went to Morehouse, or if you were an undercover CIA officer or even a police officer yourself. If you are a Black man, odds are your interactions with the police are more dangerous and memorable than for others. CQ Roll Call’s Clyde McGrady interviewed three members of Congress who reflected on what it was like for them and what was different for them in their encounters with law enforcement.
Published July 8, 2020
Voter nullification, authoritarianism and the end of democracy -- that’s what Rep. James E. Clyburn says are the very real consequences of not passing legislation to protect voting rights. The South Carolina Democrat emphasized that voter suppression is not just an issue of access to the ballot box, but includes who gets to overturn elections.
“I want you to call it what it is. Use the word. Nullification,” said Clyburn, “It is voter nullification.”
There are currently two bills on the issue, the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, before Congress. Senate Democrats are meeting to hash out a revised bill that could be released next week.
Mary C. Curtis sits down with the House majority whip to discuss voting rights, and to understand what are the very high stakes and what can be done with dwindling time on the clock.
The House voted 220-213 Friday morning to send the Senate the $2.2 trillion reconciliation package — capping off overnight drama when GOP leader Kevin McCarthy stalled passage while speaking for more than eight hours.
CQ Roll Call's Jennifer Shutt and David Lerman break down the politics and economics of the bill and highlight what comes next in the Senate.
Brent Roske is a political animal, but it wasn’t supposed to be that way.
A veteran Hollywood creative type, his series “Chasing the Hill,” about a fictional congressional campaign, was supposed to get politics out of his system. It just lit the fire though, and he went on to run for Congress himself, move to Iowa, start a political talk show, “Roske on Politics,” and get involved in political strategy.
And now, with several competitive races in the Hawkeye State in 2020, he’s doing what he does best: getting politicians to open up in the public sphere.
We don’t need hindsight to see that 2020 is a year unlike any other in recent memory. The coronavirus pandemic has touched every fiber of our lives and woven itself inextricably into the fold of presidential politics, including the national conventions blanketing the airwaves this week and next.
Usually, the Republican and Democratic parties live up to their collective nouns and really get down at these weeklong rallies, but that’s a no-go with a pandemic raging. Instead of convening in person, the conventions are going virtual. It’s yet another wholly unconventional move made this year that still somehow feels inevitable and even downright sensible.
The conventions haven’t served their original purpose — actually picking a presidential candidate — since 1952. Both parties shifted to letting primaries and caucuses select their electoral champions — a move begun during the Progressive Era that accelerated in 1968 following the chaos that unfurled outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago when several nights of protests led to a clash between police and demonstrators. The last time there was even a specter of doubt about who’d be the nominee was in 1980, when Ted Kennedy made a late push to replace President Jimmy Carter on the Democratic ticket. So perhaps it makes sense to finally drop the pretenses and hold an eight-hour infomercial over four nights.
In a way, it’s a callback to an earlier time — campaigns used to regularly buy up prime-time, hourlong blocks on the networks to make televised appeals to the electorate. The pandemic has brought the parties full circle.
To talk about this year’s decidedly different DNC, we spoke with Julia Terruso, 2020 presidential campaign reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. We also talked about the state of the race in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state for the Biden campaign.
The struggle to ensure people have access to the ballot box is one that G.K. Butterfield and his family have been involved in dating back to the early 20th century.
The North Carolina Democrat’s history in Wilson, N.C., is indelibly shaped by his immigrant father and his decades-long advocacy on behalf of Black suffrage in a place notoriously resistant to it.
It extends through Butterfield’s own place in the civil rights era, and continues to the present day with his own legislative priorities, particularly a voting rights bill the House has passed that awaits action in the Senate.
