Congress, President | featured news

Federal agents arrested a Mississippi man suspected of sending letters that showed evidence of ricin in initial testing to President Obama and a Republican senator, according to two officials.

Wednesday morning, President Barack Obama became the first Democratic president ever to propose cutting Social Security. Democrats spend so much time defending the president, it is easy to forget that even the most beloved presidents make mistakes and missteps. His new budget, which proposes a new method of calculating inflation increases in Social Security payments, is a doozy.

In an embarrassing setback for President Barack Obama, a federal appeals court panel ruled Friday that he violated the Constitution in making certain recess appointments and moved to curtail a chief executive's ability in the future to circumvent the Senate in such scenarios.

Second presidential terms are never easy - even for George Washington. More often, they're fraught with peril, frequently marred by scandal, failure, hubris, and burnout, and souring relations with Congress. President Barack Obama acknowledges the dangers of overreach but vows to steer cautiously. The odds are against him.

...In his first full-scale news conference since March, Obama said he was willing to compromise with Republicans to forge a deal on the nation's debt and taxes to avoid the "fiscal cliff," a combination of budget cuts and tax increases that will kick in next year if such an agreement is not reached.

It was once President Barack Obama's "war of necessity." Now, it's America's forgotten war. The Afghan conflict generates barely a whisper on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. It's not a hot topic at the office water cooler or in the halls of Congress - even though more than 80,000 American troops are still fighting here and dying at a rate of one a day.

Barack Obama is calling on Congress to extend a payroll tax cut for the remainder of the year as a deadline nears for Congress to act or see taxes go up for millions of working Americans.

The Republican-led House is trying Wednesday to give President Barack Obama the line-item veto, a constitutionally questionable power over the purse that has been sought by both Republican and Democratic presidents.

President Barack Obama sent Congress today a package of small business measures he said would expand tax relief and unlock capital to boost the economy and create jobs.

President Barack Obama is using a new report on the income gap between the richest Americans and everyone else to continue pushing for passage of his stalled $447 billion jobs bill.