Politics

Marion Barry, the storied four-term mayor and current Washington, D.C., Council member, died early Sunday, just hours after a brief stay at Howard University Hospital, the Washington Post reports, citing a family statement. He was 78. The family did not release the cause of death, but Barry had suffered from many health problems over the…

(Editor’s Note: This article was first published in June of 2014 when Marion Barry released his biography. The 4-term former DC mayor has died at age 78 of an undisclosed illness.) It’s the 1980s and cocaine is being sucked up the nostrils of some of the world’s elite. Mayor Marion Barry is at an exclusive…

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced Friday that Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have sued President Barack Obama’s administration to contest “unilateral actions on the health care law that they say are abuses of the president’s executive authority,” the New York Times reports. At issue is enforcement of two critical facets of the Affordable Care…

President Barack Obama will address the nation Thursday night to shed light on his plans to provide deportation relief to millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and those immigrants who come from the three West African nations most affected by the current Ebola epidemic got some early news. “The Obama administration is…

On Tuesday the Senate voted on the USA Freedom Act, legislation designed to give Americans more privacy from the federal government. The bill was a specific attempt to stop the government from collecting phone records, a process that was revealed last year by Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who released classified documents outlining the…

Is executive-order toughness on immigration reform really worth shutting down our $4 trillion government again in a standoff with Republicans? Sure, the U.S. immigration system itself—a bit rickety under the weight of 11 million undocumented immigrants and ranked ninth (pdf) out of 30 countries by the Immigration Policy Center—could use some fixing. But what else rooted…

This week, Republicans released the names of the representatives who will chair House committees in the upcoming 114th Congress, starting in January. That nearly all of the new chairmen selected are exactly that—men—is not a particularly good look, given that the GOP doesn’t have a great rep when it comes to supporting women’s issues. “Notably,…

With all the postelection buzz about historic firsts and trailblazing black Republicans crashing Congress, you’d think this was the first time conservatives of color would be stepping foot on the floor of the House of Representatives. As a matter of fact, it’s not. Yet as three black Republicans found themselves elected Nov. 4 in a…