“House Speaker” on The Daily Caller

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is expected to seek a new base tax rate for the wealthy to ensure that millionaires pay at least at the same percentage as middle income taxpayers. (more)

Congress gave itself a three-week reprieve on a government shutdown, then spent the first 10 days on vacation. Now, lawmakers return with the shutdown deadline once again looming, and a deal seemingly as far away as ever. (more)

Reporting from Washington — (more)

The morning after the House failed to extend key provisions of the Patriot Act when more than two dozen Republicans defected, the blame game was in full swing. (more)

Activist group Judicial Watch is appealing a decision by the Air Force to withhold documents related to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s use of military airplanes. (more)

Just hours before President Obama delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday, the House passed a resolution to roll back spending to 2008 (read: Pre-Obama) levels, setting a bar that Washington will take pains to reach and sending a sharp message to the visiting president. (more)

House Speaker John Boehner is enjoying a significant rise in popularity, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll. Boehner’s favorability rating currently stands at 42 percent, up 8 percentage points from Gallup’s November poll taken immediately after the 2010 midterm elections. Boehner’s unfavorable rating is down to only 22 percent, a 9-point improvement from November’s poll. The USA Today/Gallup numbers are in line with recent CNN/Opinion Research and ABC News/Washington Post polls. (more)

— “It is unlikely that House Republicans will take the vote to repeal the health care law, shrug their shoulders when it doesn’t reach the Senate, and move on,” writes The Daily Caller’s Chris Moody. “We aren’t going to just check the box off and say that we had one vote and we’re going to move on to other topics,” Rep. Michele Bachmann said Tuesday. Rep. Steve King echoed Bachmann’s sentiments, saying, “This is going to be a debate that goes on not just today and tomorrow and next week. It’s going to go on for the next year or two. It’s probably going to go on until we elect a president that will sign a final repeal of Obamacare. So this is an ongoing debate.” The GOP will fight, just like the Spartans fought at Thermopylae, until they are all dead of old age/exasperation, or until Americans return both the legislative branch and the executive branch to the second worst party in the country. In the meantime, House Republicans will build their own health care bill, starting with the key accomplishment of Obamacare: “A measure to restrict insurance companies from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions.” (more)

1.) We will all die of old age before anyone cuts spending — After a largely symbolic repeal of Obamacare, what will Republicans do next to cut spending? Absolutely nothing, apparently. “Entitlement reform will only be done on a bipartisan basis. So we’re waiting for signals from the president as to whether or not that’s a discussion he’s willing to have,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, in a Thursday press conference. “The president must embrace it.” The Daily Caller’s Jon Ward writes, “House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican, acted on Tuesday as if Obama was the one who was just elected based on promises to cut government spending” and that “House Speaker John Boehner, Ohio Republican, had no answer Thursday for NBC’s Brian Williams when asked to name ‘a program right now that we could do without.’” Head, desk. (more)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made clear Thursday that as long as he’s in charge, no effort to repeal the health care law will see the light of day beyond the House, but Senate Democrats said they are open to changing parts of the law over the next year. (more)

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio brushed off a preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office that said repealing the Democrats’ health care law would add about $230 billion to the federal deficit over the next ten years. (more)

1.) Has the Great Walking Back of Promises (TM) begun? — House Speaker John Boehner has been in possession of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s bejeweled gavel for less than 24 hours and already his party is modifying its promise to cut $100 billion in spending before the fiscal year is over. “A few House Republican aides admitted to TheDC that the party had slipped up in failing to correct the $100 billion figure – first thrown out in the ‘Pledge to America’ document released in late September – before this week,” writes Jon Ward. The more important goal, say Republicans like Rep. Paul Ryan, is to reduce spending to a level last seen in 2008, an apparent golden age of fiscal restraint. Also, says Ryan, the fiscal year began three months ago, which means “[w]e are halfway through the fiscal year right now,” and cutting $100 billion from the budget would be almost as difficult as figuring out how many months are in a year. Why did Republicans not walk back this promise on, say, September 23, 2010, the day after the Pledge was announced? Because Congress critters are terrified that the Tea Partiers will drizzle their coagulated blood on the Tree of Liberty. And metaphorically speaking, you know they will do it, too. (more)

Rep. Joe Barton, Texas Republican, is making his final pitch to head a crucial congressional energy panel as the man truest to conservative principles, offering colleagues a detailed battle plan to take on the Obama administration on the president’s health care law and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) pending global warming regulations. (more)

WASHINGTON — Negotiators worked on a deal Thursday that would extend expiring tax cuts for everyone even as House Democrats moved toward a vote to show their commitment to letting taxes on the wealthy go up. (more)

House Republican leaders appear to be headed for a clash with some of the chamber’s newly elected members on a vote early next year to increase the amount the government can borrow. (more)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed Republican-funded attacks for her low approval ratings Wednesday, moments after Democrats re-elected her to head the party as minority leader in next year’s Congress. (more)

President Obama today joined top Congressional Democrats in urging Congress to pass a small piece of immigration legislation known as the DREAM Act before it adjourns for the year. The measure would give hundreds of thousands of young, undocumented immigrants a conditional path to legal residency. (more)

Dwight Schrute would be jealous. (more)

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the incoming chairman of the House Budget Committee, shed some light Tuesday morning on the relationship between outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rank-and-file members of the Republican caucus, a relationship that seems minimal at best. (more)

In BoehnerLand, the constellation of loyalists and associates surrounding the soon-to-be House speaker, Rep. Greg Walden has become the indispensable jack-of-all-trades. (more)