Barack Obama, House Of Representatives | featured news

President Barack Obama said Saturday that Republicans in the House are blocking a bill that would prevent a tax increase on the first $250,000 of income earned by all Americans.

With about three weeks left before the "fiscal cliff" deadline, the task of avoiding the steep tax hikes and spending cuts was down to talks between Republican House Speaker John A. Boehner and President Barack Obama, according to Capitol Hill aides.

A Democratic official says President Barack Obama wants Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz to stay on as party chairwoman....

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday she will run to keep her job as the Democratic leader in the House after a pair of elections that kept the party in the minority there even as Democrats gained seats in the Senate and a second term for President Barack Obama.

Obama and Boehner hinted compromise is possible, in a bid to defuse tensions before talks next week to avert a fiscal crisis.

Flush with re-election vigor, President Barack Obama on Friday will provide his first public comments on the upcoming negotiations with Congress on how to deal with pending tax hikes and spending cuts that create the so-called fiscal cliff facing the economy at the end of the year.

House Speaker John Boehner emerged in the aftermath of Tuesday’s presidential election to strike a conciliatory note, offering to work with President Barack Obama on a grand bargain to avert the impact of the coming fiscal cliff.

Obama told Jennifer Jacobs of the Register, "If the majority of the American people have said, 'This is the direction we need to go,' and the Republicans in Congress say, 'No, we're going to go in the exact opposite direction,' that's probably not going to leave them to keep that (congressional) majority too long."

The White House casts today's House Republican vote to repeal the health care law as a waste of time while Americans are hurting economically. "We do not need to refight the battles of two years ago, three years ago," said White House spokesman Jay Carney. "We need to help the American economy now." The GOP-run House is likely to support repeal of Obama's health law with a vote this afternoon. The repeal proposal would go nowhere in the Democratic-run Senate... Carney said that, by his count, this is the 33rd time that congressional Republicans have voted to repeal or defund health care. He says the GOP is engaged in "a quixotic effort to try and score political points.