Legislators

The math seems pretty simple. But apparently it's too rigorous for many Republican politicians. To avoid raising taxes and still balance the books in Sacramento, you'd have to virtually shut down state government. Some politicians are in denial. Some are demagoguing. Some are just ducking. Scared. The scared are rather pathetic.

Though Roland Burris had some trouble being admitted to the U.S. Senate, he will not be easily expelled now that he has arrived. It takes a vote of two-thirds of the senators to oust a member, and the last senators to be formally expelled were charged with supporting the rebels during the Civil War. "It's a collegial body that doesn't like to police its members," said Donald A. Ritchie, the Senate's associate historian. "It prefers to leave that to the voters and to the courts."

Walt Minnick, the new Democratic congressman from Idaho, doesn't think much of President Obama's economic recovery plan. "I think it's a horrible idea to try to appropriate large sums of taxpayer dollars to programs that have never been debated or authorized," Minnick wrote recently. Obama staked his presidency on the sprawling legislative package, and the administration fought hard for its passage. But if anyone at the White House was unhappy with Minnick for his opposition, they never let on.

In just the last couple of weeks, he clumsily pronounced a Supreme Court justice to be near death and suggested he could sue a fellow senator and the Republican Party. He's raised almost no money for his reelection bid next year and is in serious danger of losing his once-safe seat to the other party. Party insiders are terrified practically every time he opens his mouth, but he seems determined not to go gently into the night.

California Assemblywoman Diane Harkey accepted $16,600 in political contributions from real estate developers who had received loans from her husband's business, now under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The borrowers later failed to repay loans brokered by her husband's lending company, Point Center Financial Inc. of Aliso Viejo.

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.

Sometimes the most a U.S. congressman can hope for is a little drive-by diplomacy. On Monday, Rep. Donald M. Payne, a Democrat from New Jersey, made a surprise five-hour stopover in this dangerous seaside capital -- against the advice of his family and the State Department. The trip was meant to highlight the progress of Somalia's new transitional government and prove the nation was back on track. It was a rare, if abbreviated, visit by a U.S. government official to the Horn of Africa nation.

Rep. Jane Harman denied Monday that she had contacted the Justice Department to seek leniency for employees of a pro-Israeli lobbying organization under investigation for espionage. The Venice Democrat also said that she has never been told that she was involved in the FBI's probe of former officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.

President Obama's first budget, unveiled with great fanfare two months ago, started out like a plan that Robin Hood would love: He proposed taxing the wealthy to ease the burden on the middle class. But so far, Congress has not rushed to follow his lead. The House and Senate approved a $3.5-trillion federal budget outline Wednesday that embraces, in general terms, Obama's top priorities in healthcare, energy and education.

In a bid to defuse political skirmishing over the Bush administration's interrogation methods, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta urged Congress on Monday not to allow the debate to become a distraction from the security threats facing the country. "We are a nation at war," Panetta said at a Los Angeles forum. "We have to confront that reality every day.