Joe Biden

"The View's" Meghan McCain went off on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday morning, blaming her and Republicans for being unable to come to an agreement about a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission.

When working with Republicans, Democrats gave them everything asked including the ability to nominate anyone they wanted and as many as they wanted to the commission. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tried to convince Republicans to vote against the commission, throwing broker Rep. John Katko (R-NY) under the bus. McCarthy then convinced Republicans in the Senate to filibuster the commission.

The US Senate stumbled Wednesday in the first test for a long-sought bipartisan infrastructure package as Republicans blocked the trillion-dollar measure's advancement, but lawmakers suggested a compromise deal was on the horizon.

With Republican senators in the 50-50 chamber uniting to oppose the package moving forward in a key procedural vote, Democrats were well short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and formally begin debate on the plan.

Centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has recently drawn a great deal of criticism from more progressive Democrats for her opposition to ending the filibuster, and a new poll from the progressive think tank Data for Progress finds that two-thirds of Democratic primary voters in her state would favor a primary challenge to Sinema in 2024 if she maintains that position. But the poll raises some questions: how do centrists, conservatives and independents feel about Sinema in Arizona? And how would a more progressive Democrat fare against a Republican candidate in Arizona's 2024 U.S. Senate race?

Sinema, along with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has been adamant in her opposition to ending the filibuster, which requires at least 60 votes for most bills to pass — including voting rights bills such as the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Democrats have a narrow majority in the U.S. Senate, but they don't have 60 votes. Sinema, who was elected to the U.S. Senate when she defeated Republican Martha McSally in 2018, has argued that Democrats will be glad to have the filibuster if Republicans regain the Senate and the White House in the future. And some Democrats have responded that if Sinema and Manchin are opposed to ending the filibuster altogether, they should at least support creating an exception to the filibuster when it comes to voting rights — which Republicans in state legislatures have been attacking with voter suppression bills all over the United States.

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) on Wednesday attacked President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, a college English professor and former school teacher, calling for the latter to be "indicted."

"I think we should indict Jill Biden," said Cawthorn, who keeps company with the QAnon and sedition camps of the House GOP.

Under mounting pressure to stop the spread of medical disinformation, Facebook has announced that it is banning the use of the #VaccinesKill hashtag — fully two years after it banned the same hashtag on Instagram.

But sensing a crackdown, anti-vaccine groups are adapting to evade detection — and according to NBC News' Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny, they are developing their own coded language to discuss anti-vaccine propaganda that moderation cannot detect.

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) threatened to hold a competing inquiry into the Jan. 6 insurrection if House speaker Nancy Pelosi (R-CA) excluded two of his choices for the Democratic-led panel.

Pelosi rejected Reps. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Jim Jordan (R-OH), who each voted against certification of President Joe Biden's election win the day Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the democratic process, and McCarthy described her decision as "abuse of power."

The US Senate holds a key test vote Wednesday on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, with the bipartisan deal at risk of failing at the first hurdle as Democrats and Republicans scramble to salvage a compromise.

Some four weeks after the president stood shoulder to shoulder with senators from both parties at the White House proclaiming a framework agreement had been reached to fix the nation's roads, bridges, ports, water pipes and internet connections, the deal remains under serious threat.

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Gov. Greg Abbott says he will not impose another statewide mask mandate, despite COVID-19 cases being on the rise again.

Mitt Romney's wife asked him not to return to Washington, D.C., for a Jan. 6 vote on certifying presidential election results, after the Utah Republican was warned about potential violence from supporters of former president Donald Trump.

"We are coming to kill you. Just wait a few days," read one message that appeared to be aimed at members of Congress, including Romney, who did not plan to contest President Joe Biden's victory, according to a Tuesday report from the Salt Lake Tribune, based on "I Alone Can Fix It," the new book by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.

On Wednesday, CNN reported that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has been the driving force behind blocking dozens of nominees for diplomatic positions at the State Department — but the reason doesn't have anything to do with the qualifications of those specific nominees.

Rather, he wants to force the Biden administration to change a specific foreign policy related to Russia and Germany.

More than eight months after the acute polling embarrassment in the 2020 U.S. elections – that produced the sharpest discrepancy between the polls and popular vote outcome since 1980 – survey experts examining what went wrong say they have no definitive answers about why polls erred as markedly as they did.

That inconclusive finding reported by a polling industry task force will do little to assuage popular skepticism about election polls which, in one way or another, have misfired in all U.S. presidential races but one since 1996.

In a speech earlier this month, US President Joe Biden slipped a phrase into a major address on infrastructure spending with a bit of a laugh, calling it a "boring speech" but "an important speech."

Boring but important sort of sums up the veteran Democrat's game plan, six months after moving into the White House: focus on substance, not style, to rebuild American prosperity and restore the country to a central role in global politics.