Ron Elving

Big majorities are more likely to make history, either by passing new laws that really matter or by frustrating a president who has big plans.

When he died of heart failure on New Year's Day, Mario Cuomo had been out of office exactly 20 years. But his impact endured, in part because he articulated his political philosophy so powerfully while at his peak and in part because he never fulfilled the destiny many envisioned for ...

Barring new and jarring developments, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise is going to survive the story that he addressed a conference of white supremacists in 2002.

Unless further evidence emerges of liaisons with the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO, Scalise will take his oath next week for the ...

As he looks toward his seventh year in the White House, President Obama still believes there is time to make his presidency a transformational moment in history.

In an interview recorded shortly before he left for Christmas vacation in Hawaii, the president told NPR's Steve Inskeep that 2014 had ...

Yes, we know the 2008 presidential election is years in the past and will not come around again. The question is, does Sen. Ted Cruz know this?

The question arises because the junior senator from Texas, in hot pursuit of the presidency, has chosen a trail blazed by Barack Obama ...

This just in: At least one Republican in Washington has decided he doesn't want to be president.

OK, that's not exactly what Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio said. He said he wasn't running for president. Obviously, there is a difference. Nothing is more common in politics than a would-be mayor/governor/president ...

Two House committees of jurisdiction have found no wrongdoing in the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya. The House Select Committee created by a House vote...

Even before President Obama actually announced his new deferred deportation policy for millions of people in the country illegally, Republicans were everywhere denouncing it and threatening retaliation.

"If President Obama acts in defiance of the people and imposes his will on the country, Congress will act," said Mitch McConnell, ...

The Simpson-Mazzoli Act was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan 28 years ago this month. Republican presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush later expanded on it.

Maybe this duck won't be so lame after all.

Judging by what we've seen so far, the "zombie Congress" that returned to town this week (the reelected and the not-so-lucky) will do more business in the weeks following the election than it did in many months preceding.

Consider these trains ...

Last week, you may have heard, the Democrats took a historic drubbing in the midterm elections for Congress. They lost their majority in the Senate and saw their numbers in the House fall to their lowest point in nearly seven decades.

Yet they could hardly wait ...

The United States split into red states and blue as we know them just a few presidential elections ago. Some dislike the broad brush.

In 2010, President Obama lost six seats in the Senate and 63 in the House and called it "a shellacking." Four years before that, President George W. Bush lost six seats in the Senate and 30 in the House and called it a "thumpin'. "

We need a ...

Republicans have gained the power to run the Senate. That means, they takeover all the committees, control the agenda on the floor and gain the ability to stop President Obama's appointments.

Forget the contradictory polls and the pundit spin. Look to history as a more reliable guide to what will happen on Election Day.

The world's largest film industry, by the number of movies produced, has barred women from working as makeup artists for nearly six decades. But that may be changing.

The country's Supreme Court said Monday that it wouldn't allow this "constitutionally impermissible discrimination" to go on.

The Indian Express newspaper ...

An updated look at this year's Senate races and why we might not know who has won control of the Senate on Election Day.

Incumbent Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen had maintained a lead over the Republican field throughout the year in the swing state. But Republican Scott Brown, former Massachusetts senator...

The midterm elections are less than a month away, and across the country, governors are in trouble. In both parties, state chief executives are facing tough re-election fights.

Technically, the Supreme Court Monday did not establish a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry. It merely declined an opportunity to rule definitely one way or the other on the question.

But in the not-too-long run, the consequences may well be the same. Because the situation the court created ...