Sean McMinn

Wednesday was a day for Republicans to rest easy. After winning the Georgia and South Carolina special elections Tuesday, the party avoided losing any congressional seats vacated by members who entered President Donald Trump’s administration.

But it’s not all good news for the GOP (or bad news for Democrats). In each of the four races where Republicans were defending seats — Kansas’ 4th, Montana’s at large seat, South Carolina’s 5th and Georgia’s 6th — Democrats did better than they had in any of those districts’ congressional elections since at least 2010.

BY SEAN MCMINN AND RYAN KELLY

Bipartisan love may be on display in Washington, but farther down the coast, a vicious political battle is underway for Georgia’s 6th District.

The man suspected of wounding five people at a GOP congressional baseball team practice Wednesday morning had called on voters to remove all Republicans from Congress and further criticized the party and its members in a series of letters to an Illinois newspaper and on Facebook.

After the shooting, the Belleville News-Democrat — the suspect's hometown paper — posted nine letters written by James T. Hodgkinson during the leadup to the 2012 general election. Roll Call has reproduced three of them here — all of them are available on the newspaper's website. Highlighted are Hodgkinson's words toward Republicans.

BY SEAN MCMINN AND RYAN KELLY

Republicans did not shy away from surfacing the issue of the president’s potential obstruction of justice during former FBI Director James B. Comey's appearance on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

BY SEAN MCMINN and KATE ACKLEY

With a unified Republican government in Washington, lobbyists hoped that 2017 would offer a long-awaited opportunity to push big proposals through Congress — but records do not indicate any large uptick in clients during the early months of the Trump administration.

Updated as of 5:14 p.m. on Thursday, May 11

It’s been 48 hours since the news broke that President Donald Trump had fired FBI Director James B. Comey and while his replacement and other next steps remain unclear, one trend is gaining clarity — many GOP lawmakers are not excited about the president's move.

Senate Democrats, once happy to rail against what they called obstructionist Republicans in the chamber, flipped positions with their friends across the aisle when it came to partisanship in the 114th Congress.

A new report from the Lugar Center and Georgetown University shows that most senators — almost two-thirds of the chamber — acted more bipartisan when it came to cosponsorships on bills during the most recent Congress, compared to the Congress before.

Fueled by a swelling fervor against President Donald Trump, Democrats are putting up tougher-than-expected fights against special election opponents in Republican strongholds — something that’s happened fairly regularly in recent history.

Since Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, there have been seven House special elections before or during the first 100 days of a president’s term. In each of them, the district stuck with the same party its voters chose during the previous year’s general election. But only once did the winning candidate in the special election get a higher percentage of the vote than their party’s candidate in the preceding November election.

As empty nesters know, getting a freshman prepared for college can be expensive.

The same goes for a freshman in Congress.

As House Republicans rolled out their plan to replace the Affordable Care Act this week, some members of the conference found themselves stuck between their constituents and their colleagues.

Eleven House Republicans, who will be expected by party leadership and the White House to support their party’s replacement plan, represent districts where at least 6 percent of their constituents are enrolled in government insurance exchanges set up by the 2010 health care law, according to a CQ Roll Call analysis of Kaiser Family Health Foundation and Census Bureau data. 

Updated on Feb. 21, 5:18 p.m. | Despite increased reports of liberal demonstrators disrupting Republican town halls, more lawmakers than usual are planning to meet with their constituents, including Republicans, according to CQ Roll Call data.

Democrats, especially, seem happier than usual to open themselves up this year.

The White House has spent the last few days defending President Donald Trump’s executive order that temporarily halted the entry of nationals from seven primarily Muslim countries and suspended the intake of all refugees. Roll Call examined how many people this could affect, and how lawmakers are responding. 

Updated on Jan. 24 at 6:15 p.m. | President Donald Trump issued his first executive orders Friday and Tuesday.

Executive orders date back to George Washington’s presidency. They’ve been used to bypass Congress when the president believes he has constitutional authority to take action on his own.

Attendees at presidential inaugurations can, generally, expect a speech fit for the weather.

Looking at midday temperature data for the past 52 years — stretching back to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s inaugural address after his election in 1964 — incoming presidents have tended to give shorter speeches when it’s colder outside.

Much has been said about how Vice President-elect Mike Pence, with his 12 years as a congressman, could be incoming President Donald Trump’s bridge to Congress. But Trump has his own ties to the Hill, in the form of nearly two decades worth of political contributions to sitting members of the House and Senate on both sides of the aisle.

Trump has donated to the campaigns of 44 current members of Congress, according to a Roll Call review of Federal Election Commission electronic records that are available since 1997. Nineteen of those members are in the Senate, and 25 are in the House.

Back the right horse, and you may get to ride one in the president’s parade. 

Twenty-four of the 34 local groups chosen to perform at Donald Trump’s inaugural parade later this month come from counties the president-elect won, a Roll Call analysis found.

After the election in 2008, it took President Barack Obama 45 days to name his choices to fill the Cabinet-level positions in his administration.

Today marks the same length of time for President-elect Donald Trump since his election. He still has two official Cabinet positions — Agriculture secretary and Veterans Affairs secretary — to fill, and two vacancies remaining among the seven Cabinet-level positions.

House lawmakers spent millions of dollars on nonpolitical, constituent communications — on the taxpayers’ dime — in the weeks before a “blackout” deadline before November’s elections, according to a Roll Call analysis of receipts recently published by the chamber’s chief administrative officer.

Members of Congress can send this type of mail, a perk known as “franking” that dates back to the Colonial era, by using their signatures instead of stamps. It’s meant to communicate information about a lawmakers’ legislative duties and constituent services, according to the Committee on House Administration.