Congress

When someone in the Washington area begins to type the president's last name into the search box of Google's home page, the top three terms it suggests as the most popular selections are Obama, Obamacare and . . . Obama phone. Obama phone? A hotline, maybe, to the Oval Office? Hardly. "Obama phone" is the widely used — and misleading — nickname of a 28-year-old federal program known as Lifeline . It provides discounts, averaging $9.25 a month, on phone service for 13.3 million...

WASHINGTON — The leaders of the panel that independently reviewed last year's deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, said Tuesday they were prepared to testify publicly before Congress to counter what they consider unfounded criticism of their work. In a letter to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering said he and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen would answer any questions lawmakers have. Rep....

Jim DeMint is president and Robert Rector is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation . The economist Milton Friedman warned that the United States cannot have open borders and an extensive welfare state. He was right, and his reasoning extends to amnesty for the more than 11 million unlawful immigrants in this country. In addition to being unfair to those who follow the law and encouraging more unlawful immigration in the future, amnesty has a substantial price tag. An exhaustive study by the Heritage...

WASHINGTON — Congress was not told that conservative tea party groups were being inappropriately targeted by the U.S. tax agency, even after the Internal Revenue Service's acting chief had been briefed on the matter. The agency's failure to inform Congress was likely to give Republicans another weapon to use against President Barack Obama, who has been besieged by accusations of government overreach in several mounting scandals just a few months into his second term. The IRS has...

Elizabeth F. Cohen, the author of "Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics," is an associate professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Who deserves to be a U.S. citizen? It's a question President Obama and Congress are trying to answer. But it's also one we've been grappling with since our country's earliest days. The founders had a clear answer: People who immigrated and spent years building lives in this country deserved citizenship.

John Podesta is chairman of the Center for American Progress and a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University. He served as President Bill Clinton's chief of staff from 1998 to 2001. From Attorney General Eric Holder's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, we learned that the Obama administration is "struggling" with how to provide more information on its so-called targeted killing program; that senior officials have "talked about a greater need for transparency" about the program;...

President Obama said Tuesday that he will revive his push to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a first-term campaign promise that a Democratic-led Congress rejected as impractical and potentially unsafe. With a majority of Guantanamo's 166 detainees on a mass hunger strike , Obama said at a White House news conference that the existence of the facility damages the country's image abroad, costs too much money and undermines U.S. counterterrorism efforts by serving as a...

Well, isn't that nice. The American economy suddenly looks like it's reached the end of its string, in the words of The Post's Steven Pearlstein, and Congress is on vacation for four more weeks. As Pearlstein notes in his column, there are limits to what Congress can do: Despite all the blame pointed toward Washington for not repairing the economy, it's traditionally the markets that do most of the fixing. But there is plenty Congress could do — and should do quickly — if it showed up...

Sequestration became a reality to the broad public in airports across the country this week, and on Friday both Congress and the White House caved in to pressure from tens of thousands of airline passengers angered by flight delays. The lawmakers and the Obama administration, creators of the across-the-board funding cuts, found a path around their own creation, approving legislation to end the daily furloughs of 1,500 air traffic controllers that caused long delays at several major airports.

MANOR, Tex. — President Obama swooped into the booming Austin area on Thursday to showcase manufacturing growth and technology innovation as he began a series of visits across the country designed to pressure Congress to pass his economic agenda. Making stops in and around the Texas capital, Obama called anew on lawmakers to act on ideas he laid out in February's State of the Union address to expand the middle class by investing in new jobs and job training. The divided...

After failing to halt Iran's nuclear advances with harsh economic sanctions, a group of U.S. lawmakers and analysts is proposing a more drastic remedy: cutting off Iran entirely from world oil markets. Advocates of the measure say increases in oil and gas production in the Middle East and North America have made it economically feasible to organize the first truly global boycott of Iranian crude. Such an effort, if successful, would sideline the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and could force...

April marked a spike in activity on K Street, with corporations, trade groups and other entities tapping outside lobbyists at a rate not seen since mid-2011. Last month saw 686 new lobbying registrations — reports that lobbyists must file with the Senate when they contact members of Congress on behalf of a new client. The last time the volume of new lobbying registrations even came close to that number was in April 2011, when lobbying firms registered 685 new clients. ...

In 1888, four years before he died, the aging poet Walt Whitman showed a friend an old leather shoulder bag hanging on the wall of his home in Camden, N.J. It had an adjustable strap with a decorative buckle and had seen hard use. He'd gotten it long ago, in the Civil War , Whitman said. He'd sling it over his shoulder on his legendary visits to the hospitals in Washington, to carry food and gifts to wounded and dying soldiers. "A souvenir of those days," he told his friend.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says Congress must give more homeowners the chance to refinance their mortgages to save money. Obama says more than 2 million people are saving about $3,000 a year after restructuring their loans under his administration but that more deserve the same chance. In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama also calls on the Senate to confirm "without delay" his choice of Democratic Rep. Mel Watt to lead the Federal Housing...

President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform law in July 2010, hailing it as an overhaul to prevent the kind of crisis that hit the world economy in 2008 and one of the signature achievements of his first term. Almost three years later, much of the big stuff the law calls for is on hold, under legal and legislative assault, or still working its way through the regulatory intestines. According to a law firm that tracks the legislation, only 38...

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — The Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland has given wrestling's governing body the go-ahead to hold a congress in Moscow despite a suit filed by the organization's former president. FILA president Raphael Martinetti resigned on Feb. 16, just days after the IOC recommended the sport be dropped from the Olympics in 2020. Martinetti later sued FILA in the CAS, asking it to nullify the election of acting president Nenad Lalovic and prevent FILA...

CONGRESS, APPARENTLY, couldn't end the year without showering billions on a handful of interest groups, some of which you probably didn't even know existed. The Post's Brad Plumer points out that the "fiscal cliff" bill that passed Congress on Tuesday contained a bonanza for single-issue lobbyists, extending supports for Puerto Rican rum distillers, Hollywood studios, tribal-lands coal, electric-scooter makers and other corporate interests that Congress will subsidize through the tax code for another year or two. It's...

Regarding the Nov. 17 news story "USDA: No big savings from pizza in schools" : With all our other problems and issues, why is Congress spending time and worrying about whether pizza sauce is a vegetable? No wonder we are losing faith in Congress. Alan S. Kaplan, Rockville

ASUNCION, Paraguay — Paraguay's president-elect Horacio Cartes will be able to control Congress when he begins his five-year mandate in August. Official election results released Friday confirm Cartes won with 45.8 percent of the vote last month, restoring the Colorado party to the power it lost for the first time in 60 years when former Bishop Fernando Lugo won the presidency in 2008. Paraguay's Congress voted Lugo out of office last year, but he won a Senate seat last month. Now...