by jpitney | Feb 8, 2025 | Congress, Elections, House of Representatives, Transparency, Volunteering
Don Wolfensberger at The Hill: Former Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas) and House Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-Texas) were great party leaders in their time. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) probably comes closest to their caliber of leadership in...
by jpitney | Feb 6, 2025 | Claremont McKenna College, Journalism, Journalists
We’re delighted to announce that Michael Wilner is joining the Los Angeles Times as its Washington Bureau chief. Wilner has spent more than 12 years covering Washington, D.C. He joins The Times from McClatchy, where he was chief Washington correspondent through the...
by jpitney | Feb 5, 2025 | Congress, Elections, House of Representatives, Transparency, Volunteering
At the Niskanen Center, Soren Dayton, Josiah Watney offer a history of the House Rules Committee. The conclusion: From the 1930s to the 1960s, there were a series of fights over economics and Civil Rights. To accomplish their policy and political goals,...
by jpitney | Feb 4, 2025 | Congress, Elections, Transparency, Violence
Andrew Solender at Axios: Threats against members of Congress skyrocketed in 2024, marking a return to levels not seen since the year after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to new Capitol Police data. Why it matters: The data suggests that the...
by jpitney | Feb 3, 2025 | Economic Policy, Trade
Lindsay Wise at WSJ: The precise impact will depend on how long the tariffs stay in place and if other countries retaliate. The Tax Policy Center, a think tank, estimates the average household’s after-tax income will fall 1%, or $930, in 2026 because of the...
by jpitney | Feb 2, 2025 | Economic Policy, Trade
Wall Street Journal: The U.S. doesn’t produce enough lumber to meet domestic demand and thus imports about a third of the softwood used in home construction, mostly from Canada. Environmental policies restrict logging on public land in the American Northwest. Timber...
by jpitney | Feb 1, 2025 | Bipartisanship, Economic Policy, Photojournalism, Trade, Uncategorized
Phil Gramm and Larry Summers: In an extraordinary act of unity, 1,028 American professional economists in the spring of 1930 signed a letter urging Congress to reject and President Herbert Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Yet that June, Congress passed it...
by jpitney | Jan 31, 2025 | Congress, Elections, House of Representatives, Transparency, Volunteering
Don Wolfensberger at The Hill: The House seems to have a special penchant for birthing select committees to complement the work of its 20-plus standing committees. In the last Congress, for instance, it created select committees or subcommittees on the strategic...
by jpitney | Jan 30, 2025 | Congress, Dreier, Elections, House of Representatives, Transparency, Volunteering
At Roll Call, Jackie Wang interviews Rep.Vince Fong: Q: How has Congress changed since you were first a staffer? A: The people make this place go, and if you look at who was there at the time, it was members like Jim McCrery, Wally Herger, David Dreier, Dan...
by jpitney | Jan 30, 2025 | Trade
Scott Lincicome at Cato: As I wrote late last year, the US automotive industry is a great example of the complexities of 21st-century manufacturing and the benefits of globalization: [I]t’s widely acknowledged by automotive industry experts that freer trade and...
