Chris Stewart, a Republican from Utah, was recently appointed Chair of the House subcommittee on Science.

This means that Congressman Stewart now has dominion over the EPA, climate change research, and “all activities related to climate.”

The more the sequester is handled in a piecemeal fashion, the less urgent it becomes to find a complete solution. It starts making more sense for individual legislators to push for narrow fixes to particular sequester-related problems than to try joining a push for a sweeping solution for the whole thing.

Last week, Senator Rand Paul (R-TX) forced a long overdue conversation in Washington about checks and balances on executive power. Yet few observers recognize the ultimate importance of his actions, or why the Senate’s confirmation of the new CIA director remained premature.

President Obama called for a modest raise in the federal minimum wage to $9 in his State of the Union Address, and several Democratic legislators have upped his bid with a proposed increase to $10.10.

But an insidious effort to lower the wage floor is already underway much closer to the ground—in the state legislatures where right-wing lobbyists have been greasing the skids for years for an onslaught of anti-worker policies.

Comprehensive immigration reform, along with the fiscal cliff and sequester, has recently dominated Washington. But observers have overlooked how calls for stronger immigration enforcement could undermine the rights of not only immigrants, but also US citizens.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who sent three letters to CIA director nominee John Brennan requesting an answer on “whether the president has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a US citizen on US soil,” finally received an answer from Attorney General Eric Holder. The answer indicates the administration of President Barack Obama does, in fact, believe it has the power to assassinate US citizens on US soil with lethal force.

Last Friday President Obama signed the sequester order officially launching America’s latest austerity program. Austerity has yet to produce jobs or growth in any country it has been tried in. In fact, austerity is becoming one of the few certainties within economic policy making – the certainty of losing growth if the policy is adopted. And now we get to learn the lesson everyone else now knows the hard way.
But even in the “across the board” cutting program it seems the poor are going to get the worst of it.

The fault line visible in yesterday’s 5-4 decision was not between a conservative majority and a liberal minority, but rather between a deferentialist insurgent majority and an independent moderate minority. Put another way, the majority’s decision would be predictable in a country like China, or the former Soviet Union, where courts are expected to defer to an imperial executive branch.

There was a time when America was different.

Four days away from massive austerity that would result in cuts to the United States government, the Pentagon is suggesting the cuts would make it harder to fight cyber threats.

This coming Wednesday the House Judiciary Committee plans to hold a hearing on “Drones and the War On Terror: When Can the U.S. Target Alleged American Terrorists Overseas?”