White House Staffing, Congress | featured news

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the panel that John Kerry has led for the past four years, unanimously approved his nomination, and the full Senate was set to vote.

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.

Tim Geithner may soon leave the Treasury Department, but he is helping lead the "fiscal cliff" negotiations.

First Read: The Senate failed to muster the necessary votes to confirm Richard Cordray, President Obama's nominee to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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The Senate approved Donald Verrilli, a seasoned appellate lawyer, to be the federal government's top lawyer before the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan won approval Tuesday of a divided Senate Judiciary Committee, moving her a step closer to becoming President Barack Obama's second appointee on the high court.

Southers, a former FBI agent, has described inconsistencies in his accounts to Congress as "inadvertent" and the result of poor memory of an incident that dates back 20 years. He said in a Nov. 20 letter to key senators obtained by The Post that he had accepted full responsibility long ago for a "grave error in judgment" in accessing confidential criminal records about his then-estranged wife's new boyfriend.