Senate

Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) suggested over the weekend that the withdrawal from Afghanistan could accelerate if the Afghan army's performance improves in coming months.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) plans to introduce legislation to honor U.S. war dogs that have demonstrated courageous behavior on the battlefields of Iraq and Afganistan, The Federal News Radio reported on Tuesday.  

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is urging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to put forward a detailed plan for dealing with an influx of millions of tons of possibly radioactive debris from the March tsunami in Japan, which is expected to hit the U.S. West Coast in 2013. 

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) this week announced he has returned $500,000 to the U.S. Treasury, an amount that was allocated to his office but was unspent as part of Paul's effort to trim federal spending.

"I ran to stop the reckless spending," Paul said. "And I ran to end the damaging process of elected officials acting as errand boys, competing to see who could bring back the biggest check and the most amount of pork.

Freshman Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) wrote a letter to President Obama and congressional leadership on Tuesday requesting they once again support "date night" style seating at this year's State of the Union address, and further into all committee hearings this year. 

The Obama administration's Justice Department released a 23-page opinion on Thursday that said the president is free to make recess appointments to his administration whenever the Senate is not available to provide "advice and consent," and that occasional pro forma sessions are therefore not hurdles to a recess appointment.

Justice's memo is, in effect, an answer to House and Senate Republicans who have argued over the past week that Obama's four recess appointments violated the Constitution because neither chamber can go into recess unless both agree. The House has purposefully prevented recesses since last year in order to prevent recess appointments.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Thursday told a Kentucky audience that after the results of the New Hampshire primary there remain just two viable candidates for the GOP nomination — his father, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, and the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) rallied crowds in opposition to the Protect Internet Providers Act (PIPA) at the world's largest computer show in Las Vegas on Wednesday, arguing that new regulations created by the pending legislation would severely damage small online businesses.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), responding to attacks from his Republican opponent for the 2012 elections on Tuesday, defending votes he cast for some of President Obama's least popular policies.

Tester conceded, for example, that Obama's 2010 healthcare reform law was not perfect, but said there was real need among Montanans for at least some of its provisions.

"There are far, far, far too many folks out there who didn't have access to health care because they couldn't afford insurance," Tester said in the interview with the Helena Independent Record on Tuesday. "No, we haven't seen that [health care] cost curve bent downward yet, but the law is not fully implemented yet."

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oka.), on Wednesday penned an op-ed in an Oklahoma newspaper in which he described President Obama's recently announced defense strategy as a "recipe for disaster."