Meet the filibuster's cousin: The hold
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The Senate is by design a cumbersome place to do business. Any one of the 100 senators can gum up the works, and they often do &#151; without uttering a word.
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The hotly contested race to fill  Florida's open U.S. Senate seat has been dominated by someone  who is not running, an imprisoned former professor awaiting  trial on charges of raising funds for Palestinian suicide  bombers.
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The US House of Representatives will remain firmly in the hands of George W. Bush's Republican party according to ballot-counting, but control of the Senate was too close to call in US congressional elections Tuesday.
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Whoever wrote a legislative provision to give more members of Congress access to income tax records should be tracked down and held to account, a Democratic senator said Monday.
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Advocates of a bill promoting openness in government are fuming that a Republican senator is blocking a vote.
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The controversial ambassador is in political limbo with a Senate committee vote deadlocked.
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One might expect Republican senators to cheer the prospect of a colleague becoming the party's presidential nominee.
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When Sen. Barack Obama slipped into Sen. Robert Byrd's Capitol office one day last year, he was seeking counsel from an elder who had been in the Senate since before Obama was born.
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An Ohio candidate in a long-shot bid to unseat a 16-term House veteran has an unusual approach in deciding how to spend his campaign. He asks Web surfers: Should he sleep in? Prepare for his debate? Campaign door to door?
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When senators from opposing parties call each other "friend" and pat each other as they talk, there's a fighting chance they're angling to wring each other's neck.
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Bucking opposition in the Senate, President Bush on Wednesday nominated five people for the U.S. Court of Appeals, including one whom Democrats have threatened to block with a filibuster.
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As the Senate prepares to tinker with the nationâs patent laws this spring, itâs worth recalling the law of unintended consequences.
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With the conservative maverick on the brink of a nomination, colleagues grapple with the prospect.
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A Republican filibuster in the Senate today shot down a bipartisan effort to restore the right of terrorism suspects to contest their detentions and treatment in federal courts, underscoring the Democratic-led Congress's difficulty with terrorism issues.
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Usually, senators and their staffs pore over the past legal writings and scholarly pronouncements of nominees for attorney general to glean clues as to the person's abilities and inclinations. But one possible nominee might give the lawmakers a whole new body of work to explore.
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Opposed by a popular former governor and beset by nepotism charges, freshman Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is the Republican most in danger of losing her seat in the U.S. Senate, one she inherited from her father.
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.