Capitol Corner

The Tea Party movement is a fragmented movement of anti big government protesters named after the Boston Tea Party, a 1773 protest by citizens in Boston, Massachusetts against the British government, and an historic event that served as a precursor to the American Revolution in 1776. Indeed, some of today’s tea party members compare [...]

People often ask what is government relations? The short answer is that it is an educational process mixed in with a liberal amount of advocacy. Simply put, it is an essential component of any business that is subject to government regulations.
At its core, government relations is an educational process: educating business and industry leaders about [...]

Last week the press, both in the US and internationally, devoted a significant amount of coverage to President Obama’s bipartisan health summit.
So what is a summit? A summit is generally understood to be a meeting of heads of state, i.e. heads of governments. However, it can also be used to describe a meeting of leaders [...]

According to press accounts, the United States Congress is in a state of irreconcilable conflict due to differences among the two major political parties. Ironically, the ongoing healthcare reform debate, which has been dragging on for nearly a year, could lead to “reconciliation”.
Let me explain. President Obama released the text of a new proposal for [...]

In last week’s post on holds I mentioned that a senator was blocking action in the Senate by placing a hold on 70 presidential nominees. The reason he placed this blanket hold was to secure government funding of projects in his home state.
Such projects are commonly referred to as pork or pork-barrel spending in the [...]

As we’ve previously written, many lawyers are familiar with the use of the term holding to describe a court’s ruling. However, lawyers and public policy professionals in the US use hold in another, very specific context. As the news has reported in recent days, one senator can hold up action on any and all items [...]

We’ve previously discussed filibusters in this series and this naturally leads to the question of how to end a filibuster in the US Senate.
To refresh then, there is a tradition of open and unlimited debate in the Senate and Senators have the right of extended debate, which allows any Senator to speak on any matter [...]

This week, President Obama announced that he will push a controversial new rule that would force banks to choose between being a commercial institution or an investment bank. The plan is named the Volcker Rule after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has pushed to prohibit commercial banks from engaging in so-called proprietary trading, [...]

There is a lot of attention being focused on the health care reform debate in America at the moment and many commentators do not understand why a bill has not yet been enacted into law. After all, President Obama has a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate as well. So the [...]

SOX is a popular name for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which is the U.S. government’s legislative response to corporate and accounting scandals such as Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia. SOX establishes new and  enhanced standards for all public company boards and management as well as public accounting firms ranging from corporate board responsibilities to criminal [...]