Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will testify next week before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on President Obama's foreign policy budget proposals for 2013.

Committee Chairman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) is likely to press Clinton on the administration's foreign policy priorities for Latin America, as the congresswoman said earlier this month she was disappointed in proposed changes for next year.

Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) sent a letter Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta on Wednesday in which he called on the Pentagon to drop a ban on women serving in combat positions. 

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) performed four free cataract surgeries on uninsured Kentuckians on Tuesday, an act that that the former full-time eye surgeon said helps keep in him practice but also helps him remain a "citizen politician" who doesn't stay in Washington full time.

"It's nice for people who don't have insurance to get their cataracts done, and it does help me to stay in practice," Paul said, as reported by the KY Post. "I've told people I believe we need more citizen politicians who do come home. Unfortunately, many doctors get up there and get too far away from it."

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on Wednesday defended his vote against the STOCK Act in the Senate, pointing out that the bill consumed a week of the Senate's time and does little more than reaffirm that it is illegal for members of Congress to engage in illegal insider trading schemes. 

"This bill was more about a broadly disliked Congress trying to improve their approval rating than it was about anything substantive, and it wasted a week of time and taxpayer money to do nothing but codify a law that is already on the books," wrote Burr in a letter posted in the Greenville, N.C., Daily Reflector on Wednesday. 

The House next week will begin work on legislation that supporters say would re-establish a system under which the state of California would be free to manage the distribution of water within the state and related environmental issues, and override what supporters say is undue interference by the Obama administration.

The San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act, H.R. 1837, was introduced last year by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and other Republicans representing the San Joaquin Valley. According to Nunes, the bill is primarily aimed at restoring the flow of water to farms, residents and businesses that have been reduced by federal requirements under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The Houston-area rapper says he's running because "I believe we can do better."

The Democratic primary fight between two incumbents for Ohio's newly reconfigured 9th district took a nasty turn on Tuesday when Rep. Dennis Kucinich accused Rep. Marcy Kaptur's campaign of stealing his campaign signs.  

Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) last week proposed legislation that would broaden the State Department's current system of offering rewards for information leading to the arrest of terrorists or drug offenders so that it also covers information that helps lead to the arrest of people involved in global organized crime.

"Expanding this program to include global organized crime responds to the growing evidence that terrorists and insurgents are increasingly turning to criminal networks for funding and support, a topic my subcommittee has explored," said Royce, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade.

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.) on Monday welcomed the current signs of economic recovery but said they could not be linked to President Obama's 2009 $862 billion stimulus package, as some Democrats are claiming.