House Of Representatives U S

Most Saturdays in the late 1970s, college student Hilda Solis would take her younger sisters to study with her in the library at Cal Poly Pomona. When they pulled away from the family's La Puente home in her aging Volkswagen Beetle, their devoutly Catholic mother would make the sign of the cross. As the little forest green car shuddered and struggled up steep Kellogg Hill en route to the campus, the young passengers wondered whether they would make it. They always did.

The GOP roared past the 39-seat gain needed to retake control of the House in Tuesday's election and appeared headed to a historic rout -- with some projections showing an increase of 60 or more seats, far surpassing the 52-seat swing in 1994's so-called Republican Revolution. The decisive Republican surge raised the possibility of the Democratic Party falling below 200 seats in the 435-seat House for the first time since 1948. As a result, the House promises to become the key battleground for an assault on Obama administration policies, including healthcare, taxes and federal spending.

An admitted penny stock scam artist, wearing a hood to conceal his identity, told a House subcommittee Thursday that penny stocks traded over the counter are often controlled by organized crime. Lorenzo Formato, a former broker and promoter of the inexpensive but highly risky securities known as penny stocks, testified that "organized crime has their hand on the shoulder of someone inside any (over-the-counter) brokerage that's making money."

In the final hours before the House approved the most sweeping healthcare legislation in 40 years, Speaker Nancy Pelosi demonstrated that she had the one indispensable quality required to produce a Democratic victory: a split personality. Pelosi is a San Francisco liberal who launched a series of fruitless efforts to cut off funding for the Iraq war after becoming speaker nearly three years ago. But long before making her home on the Left Coast, Pelosi was the attentive daughter of an old-school East Coast politician who made whatever deals it took to win. That upbringing proved crucial in the healthcare marathon.

James E. Rogan has wedged his 6-foot-1 frame into a phone booth between the men's room and a kitchenette in a House office building. The air stinks of stale cigar smoke and there's no place to sit. But who cares? His 20 minutes in this cramped closet will be rewarded handsomely. On the other end of the line is radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy, broadcasting live to a syndicated audience of hard-right Clinton haters.

It looked like a bank, called itself a bank, and in many respects acted like a bank. In reality, however, it was more of a "cash club" where members of the U.S. House of Representatives could and often did write checks with impunity, regardless of whether they had enough funds to cover them.

President Clinton's job approval rating climbed over the 70% mark Saturday, following his impeachment by the House of Representatives, according to an NBC News poll. In interviews with 510 adults, 72% approved of Clinton's handling of the presidency, while 25% disapproved and the rest were not sure. A similar poll Tuesday found Clinton with a 68% approval rating and a 28% disapproval mark.

In a stunning political turnabout, the House voted Tuesday to end a long-standing ban on new offshore oil drilling as part of an energy bill aimed at rebutting Republican election-year attacks that the Democratic majority wasn't doing enough to try to ease the public's pain at the pump. The measure would let states decide whether to permit energy exploration 50 to 100 miles off their coasts, ending a drilling ban that was put in place for much of the California coastline in 1981 and expanded to much of the rest of the United States in 1985.

Eighty-two Republican members of the House of Representatives are calling for the immediate resignation of the American Bar Assn.'s president for referring to some members of Congress as "reptilian bastards." In a letter to ABA President George Bushnell, a Detroit lawyer, the GOP members called his phrase "a reprehensible and unforgivable insult" to House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and other Republicans.

The House of Representatives impeached President Clinton on Saturday, tarnishing his legacy by making him only the second president in the nation's history ordered to stand trial in the Senate. In approving two articles of impeachment largely along party lines, the Republican-controlled House alleged that Clinton perjured himself before a federal grand jury and obstructed justice as he sought to conceal his extramarital affair with Monica S. Lewinsky, a former White House intern.

With a historic floor vote looming on their healthcare bill, House Democratic leaders worked into the night Friday to round up rank-and-file Democrats who still had not committed to support the legislation despite weeks of cajoling and deal-making. Senior Democrats maintained they would have the 218 votes needed for passage when the House votes, perhaps as early as this evening. "You don't go to the floor unless you're there -- and we're there," said Rep. John B. Larson of Connecticut, the No. 4 Democrat in the House.

House Democrats on Thursday closed in on the votes they need to pass sweeping healthcare legislation, as party leaders introduced a 1,990-page bill designed to guarantee near-universal coverage for the first time in the nation's history. The legislation, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) officially unveiled in a ceremony outside the Capitol, represents a milestone for Democrats and advocacy groups. After more than half a century of pushing to create a government healthcare safety net, Democrats are poised to bring a bill to the House floor next week.

Returning from their summer recess, congressional lawmakers are facing a climatic showdown to the yearlong struggle over healthcare. At issue are scores of competing provisions scattered through half a dozen bills. And no final decisions have been made on any of them. In the House, Democratic leaders are synthesizing the proposals of three committees, but floor debate has not begun. In the Senate, a bill close to the expected House blueprint has been approved by the health committee formerly headed by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.

Capping weeks of negotiations over how to pay for a healthcare overhaul that could top $1 trillion over the next decade, senior House Democrats have settled on a proposal to cover a significant portion of the cost by raising income taxes on the wealthiest Americans. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) said Friday that the plan -- which Democrats expect to present in detail Monday -- could generate as much as $540 billion over 10 years.

Lawmakers on Thursday sharply criticized a federal program that relies on private insurance companies to provide medical care and benefits to civilians injured while working in support of the U.S. military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. Members of a House subcommittee charged that the insurance firms had exploited the taxpayer-supported program to reap enormous profits while shortchanging workers. "We've got to straighten out this mess and we're going to do that," said Rep. Elijah E.

As Washington's anti-bonus zeal intensified Friday, alarm spread across Wall Street that the government's sudden taxation fervor could ensnare thousands of workers and affect every major financial firm. Although the fast-moving legislative campaign was born of frustration with the bonuses paid to workers at ailing American International Group Inc., employees at comparatively healthy investment banks fretted about the steep tax hikes they could face if the legislation became law.

U.S. Rep. Norman Y. Mineta, the San Jose Democrat who spent his childhood behind the barbed wire of an internment camp and went on to see that Japanese Americans were compensated for the indignity, announced Monday that he will resign Oct. 10 after 20 years in Congress.

Gino Morena of San Francisco is the king of the military haircut, a base barber extraordinaire, a man who has built his livelihood around Army Regulation 1-8. "The hair on the top of the head will be neatly groomed," says the Army policy on hair and fingernail standards. "The length and bulk of the hair will not be excessive or present a ragged, unkempt or extreme appearance.

In a story that has circulated around Capitol Hill for years, California's famously fractured delegation gathered for a rare bipartisan meeting and decided to send for pizza -- only to get into a fight over what toppings to order. The tale, true or not, illustrates the difficulty of bringing together Democrats and Republicans from the largest state delegation in the House.

House Republicans have looked to an unlikely place for a fresh face to help lead them out of the political wilderness, tapping Rep. Kevin McCarthy from solidly Democratic California as their chief deputy whip. Officially, the Bakersfield lawmaker -- who has ascended to a party leadership post after only one term in Congress -- will be responsible for helping Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia plot the GOP response to the Democratic majority's legislative agenda.