Congress, Republican | featured news

The budget battles rocking the capital have exposed a deepening fault line within an already fractured Republican Party: the divide between the GOP's solid Southern base and the rest of the country.

The House and Senate ushered in a new Congress Thursday, re-electing embattled Republican John Boehner as speaker and hailing one of their own who returned a year after being felled by a stroke.

When Texas Rep. Ron Paul retires in a few weeks, he'll follow one of the tried and true paths out of Congress to the paid speakers' circuit. Paul, who delivered babies before getting elected, has signed up with the Greater Talent Network, one of the top agencies that book celebrity speakers.

While Republican leaders in the House of Representatives insist that raising tax rates on the rich is an impossibility, some Republican lawmakers now see it as inevitable to avoiding the "fiscal cliff" of severe tax hikes and spending cuts set to start January 1.

Republicans in the Congress attacked each other on Tuesday over their leadership's "fiscal cliff" offer to Democratic President Barack Obama as a group of governors visited the White House to voice concern about the impact on the states of the year-end tax-and-spending deadline.

The tea-party movement is trying to regroup after taking some licks in this month's elections. Several groups already are setting their sights on 2014 congressional races, in which they plan to promote their preferred candidates and hope to weed out Republicans they consider insufficiently conservative.

Fifty-three percent of Americans said Republicans in Congress would be more to blame if the government could not reach an agreement to avoid the combination of spending cuts and tax hikes set to take effect at the beginning of the year.

Republicans hopeful of taking over the Senate should be measuring the drapes. But a series of blown opportunities two years ago and again this year has cost Republicans dearly in their quest for a Senate majority....

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Wednesday that he is standing by his statement that when a woman becomes pregnant during a rape "that's something God intended." He says some people have twisted the meaning of his comment....

"Gov. Romney disagrees with Richard Mourdock, and Mr. Mourdock’s comments do not reflect Gov. Romney’s views," Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in an email. "We disagree on the policy regarding exceptions for rape and incest but still support him."