James Lankford

Robert Kennedy, Jr., nominee to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, arrives for his meeting with Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., in the Hart Senate Office Building on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will face questions about his views on vaccines and abortion rights as he meets with senators on Capitol Hill.

Senate Republicans under incoming leader John Thune, seen in the Capitol last month, are planning as much as $85 billion for border security as part of an initial bill for budget reconciliation. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

The two offered little insight into their project, though Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said the two would be keeping a "naughty list" of certain lawmakers.

Lawmakers are rebranding their deficit reduction efforts as a “Department of Government Efficiency,” but many are clueless about the new brand.

'They have been a terrible neighbor'

The Phoenix congressman had to push aside independent Kyrsten Sinema without hurting his chances against Republican Kari Lake.

Senate Republicans are signaling that they are open to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) despite his long-standing support of abortion rights and concerns emanating from anti-abortion voices about his selection. Several leading anti-abortion figures and outfits have expressed concerns about Kennedy. But while Senate [...]

As President-elect Donald Trump digs in on his pick of Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Republican senators are divided over how much information they will demand to move his confirmation — and how much to push back on Trump as he demands that they qui...

President Donald Trump will make sure the people he surrounds himself with are primarily loyal to him, not the country, says Claremore resident Marc Speer.

President-elect Donald Trump congratulated Sen. John Thune on winning election to the role of Senate majority leader, declaring that the lawmaker "will do an outstanding job."

With only a week left until the 2024 general election, U.S. Senator James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) answered questions about voter safety and security after an event in Moore on Tuesday morning.

Republican lawmakers and leaders reacted after Israel unleashed a targeted strike against Iran in response to the Islamic State's attack earlier this month.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump prays during a roundtable discussion with Latino community leaders and voters at Trump National Doral Miami resort on Tuesday.

Walz spoke on "SmartLess" about getting the call to be Harris' running mate: “Within 20 minutes, my life changed."

An Election Day terror plot, allegedly being planned by an Afghan national who came to the U.S. in 2021, is raising new concerns about the numbers brought to the U.S.

The lone Arizona Senate debate between Ruben Gallego and Kari Lake highlighted national partisan divides on the border, abortion policy and more.

Though mass deportation of immigrants in the country illegally has been a central talking point of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, on the national debate stage both the former president and his Republican running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, have offered few details about how it would work.

Harris proposes tougher asylum rules and criminal penalties for repeat illegal border crossers while blaming Trump for tanking a tough, bipartisan immigration bill.

Kamala Harris is aiming to neutralize a political vulnerability and rebut Donald Trump’s core campaign message with a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona.

Senate Republicans blocked Democrats from advancing a resolution aimed at ensuring access to emergency health care, including for abortions, as Democrats keep their messaging centered on reproductive rights ahead of November. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) attempted to pass the resolution, which was introduced last week, via unanimous consent. She argued it was necessary after ProPublica reported a [...]

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Lankford is pictured in the Capitol during votes on July 31. Lankford on Tuesday blocked a resolution expressing a sense of the Senate that every patient should have the right to emergency health care, including abortion, regardless of where they live, saying that “there is no state in America where a woman faces prosecution for having an abortion.”

Sens. Gary Peters, seen here in July, and James Lankford are proposing a public-facing tracker to keep tabs on Senate-confirmed positions.

Scott and other GOP senators are moving to increase Secret Service protections for presidential nominees in the wake of two Trump assassination attempts.

Texas Democrat Rep. Colin Allred has used the border wall in his campaign despite historically opposing it.

Vice President Kamala Harris has rightly been tagged as both a phony and a flip-flopper.

Harris had called the border wall 'un-American'

If she's elected president, Kamala Harris pledges to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the wall along the southern border — a project she once opposed and called "un-American" during the Trump administration.Why it matters: It's the latest example of Harris flip-flopping on her past liberal positions such as supporting Medicare for All and banning fracking — proposals that aides say she now is against. Harris is embracing a more hawkish immigration policy as Donald Trump's campaign spends tens of millions of dollars attacking her about the border.But she still has significant differences with Trump on immigration, opposing his approach to family separation and his plans for mass deportations.Driving the news: In her speech to the Democratic National Convention last week, Harris said she would sign the recent bipartisan border security bill — which Trump had ordered his allies to kill, fearing it would help Democrats in the November elections.That bill, negotiated by senators such as James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), requires hundreds of millions of dollars of unspent funds to be used to continue building a wall on the border. "It requires the Trump border wall," Lankford told Axios. "It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: Here's where it will be built. Here's how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction."Lankford's office estimated the legislation would spend $650 million on a wall. That's a fraction of the $18 billion Trump requested in 2018. The bill, which Murphy described as a "compromise" also included provisions with more money for asylum lawyers and judges for the overloaded immigration system. It also gave the president the authority to shut down the border if more than an average of 5,000 migrants crossed per day.The other side: Harris advisers note that the bipartisan border proposal didn't include any new money to continue building the wall. It just extended the timeline to spend funds that had been appropriated during Trump's last year as president, they say, although the legislation has new restrictions to ensure the money is spent on barriers.Flashback: In declaring her candidacy in her first run for president in 2019, Harris called the wall Trump's "medieval vanity project" that wasn't going to stop transnational gangs from entering the U.S.In February 2020, Harris wrote on Facebook that "Trump's border wall is a complete waste of taxpayer money and won't make us any safer."In April 2017, soon after joining the Senate, Harris said the wall was a "stupid use of money. I will block any funding for it."Between the lines: Lankford said he was surprised with Harris' full embrace of the border bill this year.He told Axios that Harris wasn't involved in the months-long negotiations: "We never saw any vice president staff here...She was a Johnny-come-never." "I know she's talking about it now, but she wasn't talking about it at all before."When the bill was released, Murphy called it an "aggressive" plan but didn't emphasize the money for the wall. "We're creating bold new tools to get control of the border for the first time in a long time," he said in February. "But our bill does not deviate from our nation's core values."President Biden — then the presumed Democratic nominee — lambasted Trump for demanding Republicans kill the compromise, calling it pure politics. "He feels it would be a political win for me, and a political loser for him," Biden said in his State of the Union address.But some Democrats also criticized Biden for embracing conservative and restrictive policies on immigration that were included in the bill. Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat from Harris' home state of California, opposed the bill and said it "fails to provide relief for a single Dreamer, a single farmworker, a single essential worker or long-term resident."Zoom in: Beyond embracing the bipartisan bill, Harris' campaign has portrayed her as an immigration hardliner in ads. One Harris TV ad frames her time as California's attorney general as that of a "border state prosecutor," and includes images of the border wall.In another, Harris' team highlights her support of boosting the number of Border Patrol agents.Most of Trump campaign ads have attacked Harris for the Biden administration's struggle to deal with waves of migrants crossing the border.The bottom line: Like the wall itself, Harris' changes on border policy reflect how Trump has shifted the political debate on immigration during the past decade.

WASHINGTON — Doctors and advocates say efforts to ban gender-affirming care and the often inaccurate language lawmakers use to do it exploits most Americans’ relative unfamiliarity with transgender people to push a political agenda.

Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene appears outside the Capitol on June 14. She has introduced a measure that would make it a felony for doctors to provide gender-affirming care to minors.

Kamala Harris led Democrats in 2018 in a call for appropriators to reject all funding for additional Border Patrol agents and all funding for border wall construction.

"The legacy is acknowledging the contributions of a lot of African Americans and what they have done to achieve that," said Lester Shaw, who spent 15 years reviving the space.

Some Republicans aren’t quite ready for that.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is reaffirming his support for how the Biden-Harris administration has handled the border.

A furious Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of rage in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday after an ABC News correspondent called him out for racial "slurs." Trump's post-midnight Truth Social post railed against ABC News' George Stephanopoulos over a contentious interview with a Florida Republican who tried to defend the former president questioning of Vice President Kamala Harris' race. "I watched three weeks ago as George Slopadopolus interviewed Crooked Joe Biden, doing everything possible to keep him in the race after his terrible Presidential Debate performance," Trump wrote about 12:20 a.m. ET. "Liddle’ George, of ABC FAKE NEWS, was so solicitous and nice, asking easy questions and doing whatever was necessary to make Sleepy, the WORST President in the history of our Country (Kamabla is the WORST V.P.), look alert and sharp."It didn’t work, but he tried!"Trump has amped up his anti-media rhetoric in recent days after he responded to tough questions at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week with responses commentators condemned as racist and likened to a train wreck. ABC News has become a particular point of frustration for Trump after correspondent Rachel Scott asked him to justify remarks that Black lawmakers born in this country should "go back where they came from" and describing Black prosecutors as "rabid" and "animals."On Monday, Trump appeared on the live stream of influencer Adin Ross, who famously got a friend arrested in Romania after he urged him to flee on his live stream, and insulted Scott again. "I didn't know who she was, but she was nasty," Trump said. ALSO READ: Don’t be fooled: Project 2025 is already happeningTrump didn't rail against Scott on Tuesday, but he appeared furious that Stephanopoulos challenged Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) in an interview Monday to justify his remarks on Harris' race. "You just did it again!" Stephanopoulos told Donalds when he tried to argue Harris' Indian lineage validated Trump's comments. "Every single answer you gave, you repeated the slur." In the earlier hours, Trump echoed the insults he hurled at Scott the day before."I watched Slopadopolus viciously attack Congressman Byron Donalds, a future star in the Republican Party, with nasty and totally inappropriate questions, the exact opposite of the treatment given to Crooked Joe. The good news is that Byron swatted him away like a fly, not to be heard from again!"In a follow up post, Trump called Harris a coward, an insult she and a growing number of Truth Social users have hurled against him after he backed away from an ABC News debate slated for next month. Trump now insists Harris, with whom he dubbed yet another nickname, must debate him on Fox News."Kamabla Harris is afraid," Trump wrote. "Will be easier to defeat on the Debate Stage than Crooked Joe Biden, just watch!"

'You are not going to answer the question'

Kari Lake's first general election ad tying Ruben Gallego to Kamala Harris shares a preview of what Republican attacks will look like ahead of November as they come to terms with the Democrats' ticket change.

WASHINGTON—The Senate Ethics Committee will launch a review into ethics violations of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), committee leaders said on July 22, less than a week after Mr. Menendez was convicted on charges including bribery, corruption, and acting as a foreign agent. “Earlier today, the Committee notified Senator Menendez through his counsel that members voted [...]

Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., speaks to reporters in the Senate subway after a vote in January.

The Senate on Wednesday kicked off consideration of its long-stalled spending “minibus” to provide fiscal 2024 funding for transportation, housing, agriculture, military construction and veterans programs with amendment votes. By late afternoon the Senate adopted 27 amendments, including two touching on culture war issues that politically vulnerable Democrats joined with Republicans to support. Provisions now […] The post Senate adopts gun provision among amendments to spending bill appeared first on Roll Call.