Yuval Rosenberg

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered a temporary but significant win for President Trump on Friday, allowing construction on the White House ballroom to proceed while the legal challenges to the project play out. As Trump races to replace the demolished East Wing of the White House with a 90,000-square-foot ballroom atop a military and medical complex, Roberts entered an administrative stay that will give the Supreme Court more time to consider whether lower courts were right in ordering a halt to some of the construction.

House lawmakers are back today after a five-week summer break — but they're not sticking around the Capitol for long. The House is scheduled to be out again next week for Labor Day, and many Republicans are reportedly already eager to cut short a session that's currently scheduled to run until October 1 so they can head home and campaign for the November midterms.

The House on Tuesday easily passed a bill to prevent a potential government shutdown just weeks before the November elections.

The share of Americans who believe corruption is widespread throughout the government has climbed to a record high of 89%, according to a poll released by Gallup on Wednesday. The result is up 10 percentage points from just last year and is well above both the 59% who said corruption is widespread back in 2006 and the more recent poll readings between 70% and 75%.

The Trump administration proposed a new rule Thursday that would revoke the tax exempt status of any private school that the Internal Revenue Service deems to discriminate on the basis of “race, color, or national or ethnic origin” — a dramatic escalation of the president's clash with the American educational system and his push to combat policies promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

House Republican leaders announced today that they are canceling the last two weeks of sessions planned for this month, meaning that House lawmakers are now scheduled to be in Washington, D.C., for just four more days before the November elections — and will have worked in the capital for a grand total of

U.S. employers added a robust 162,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department said Friday, far surpassing economists' consensus expectations. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%.

Gas prices are now the highest they have ever been at this time of year, averaging $4.15 a gallon — the first time the national average has topped $4 a gallon on Labor Day. And as Americans pay more at the pump, the higher energy prices resulting from the war with Iran have now cost U.S. households more than $100 billion, according to a

President Trump's surprise pledge Wednesday night to pay a $5,000 “dividend” to every American if and only if Republicans maintain control of both chambers of Congress in November's elections may be a cunning bit of populist politics, an outlandish vote-buying scheme of questionable legality or a practical impossibility. It could be all three. Or maybe it's just a sign of Trump's utter desperation as the midterms approach and his approval ratings hover at historic lows.

As inflation continues to run hotter than the Federal Reserve's 2% annual target rate, Social Security beneficiaries are poised to see the highest cost-of-living adjustment in years, according to new projections.