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A proposal to give the IRS access to all financial transactions above $600 is raising concerns among congressional Republicans about government overreach. Democrats are pushing for regulations within President Biden’s $3.5 trillion, 10-year social welfare bill that would require banks to report annually on the “inflows and outflows” of personal and business accounts. The reporting requirement would cover any transaction above $600 or bank accounts with deposits totaling that sum. Some Democrats are also pushing for rules to cover mobile money transfer systems such as PayPal and Venmo. Critics say the low reporting threshold would essentially give the IRS unfettered access to how ordinary Americans spend their money. Some Republican lawmakers say the expansion of federal powers would amount...

The Senate narrowly passed a short-term debt ceiling hike on Thursday, averting a default on U.S. debts until at least December when lawmakers will face a showdown on the topic again.  In a 50-to-48 vote, legislation raising the debt ceiling by $430 billion, enough to ensure the federal government can pay its bills until at least Dec. 3, cleared the Senate. It now heads to the House where Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, is expected to take it up next week.  “This is a temporary but necessary and important fix,” said Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat. “I appreciate that at the end of the day, we were able to raise the debt limit without a convoluted and unnecessary [party-line] process that until today the Republican leader claimed was the o...

President Biden’s stalled $3.5 trillion social welfare bill, the subject of intense and prolonged negotiations between moderate and liberal Democrats over possible cuts, is loaded with liberal goodies that would expand the entitlement state. Sen. Joe Manchin III and other moderates are increasingly frustrated with the White House and far-left Democrats over their reluctance to significantly cut the size and scope of the package. Mr. Manchin, West Virginia Democrat, argues that liberals have been too ambitious in crafting the package, filling it with policies and programs out of the political mainstream. “I don’t believe that we should turn our society into an entitlement society,” Mr. Manchin said. “I think we should still be a compassionate, rewarding society.” Dubbed “human infrastructur...

ANALYSIS/OPINION: However much you hate Washington, you do not hate it enough. The contempt for human life is obvious on every street corner. Yet every building here is a monument to orgiastic opulence — unbridled celebrations of money and power. This place puts any third-world, shantytown dictatorship to shame. And every square inch of the place is run entirely by Democrats and has been for more than half a century. True story: The District of Columbia this week issued immediate changes to how the city clears homeless encampments.  The sudden move comes after a homeless man was hospitalized on Monday after a front-end loader clearing his encampment under a bridge scooped up his tent — with him inside. Even by Washington’s standards — where droning a family of charity workers in Afgha...

President Trump made “relentless” efforts to get the Justice Department to dig into reports of election malfeasance in the wake of the 2020 vote, but the department’s leaders said he did not pressure them into crossing any lines, according to two Senate reports released Thursday. In late December and early January, Mr. Trump and his team were sending over myriad claims and rumors of fraud to acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, the Senate Judiciary Committee reports state. Mr. Trump also pondered whether to back a plan to have the Justice Department send letters telling states to revoke their Electoral College results and install new slates of electors, according to the committee’s investigation. But after a tense Jan. 3 meeting with top department leaders and White House staff, where th...

No pharmaceutical company is eager to broadcast the role that abortion-derived fetal cell lines played in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, and that reportedly includes Pfizer. Project Veritas released a video Wednesday in which Melissa Strickler, Pfizer manufacturing quality auditor, produced what she identified as internal emails that showed top officials discussing how to downplay in corporate communications the role of embryonic cell lines in the COVID-19 vaccine program. “If they’re being this deceptive about it, I don’t feel comfortable being silent,” said Ms. Strickler in the video interview with Project Veritas President James O’Keefe. That vaccine-makers such as Pfizer and Moderna employed embryonic cell lines in their COVID-19 research may not be widely known outside medic...

Vaccines are the focus of the global fight against COVID-19, but a flurry of therapeutic breakthroughs and fights over limited supplies of antibody drugs are returning treatments back to the spotlight. Merck said this month that it would ask the Food and Drug Administration to authorize a course of pills that cut in half the risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 in clinical trials. Days later, AstraZeneca said it would seek emergency approval of a groundbreaking antibody drug that helps at-risk people avoid illness before they are exposed to the coronavirus. The drugs add to a battery of treatments taken off the shelf or newly developed and deployed since the start of the pandemic. They include a common steroid that reels in wild immune responses to “monoclonal antibodies” that he...

A federal judge on Wednesday blocked a Texas law that made it unlawful to receive or perform an abortion after a fetal heartbeat was detected. Judge Robert Pitman, an appointee of former President Obama, sided with the Biden administration’s Justice Department, which sued the state, arguing Texas’ law ran afoul of constitutional rights of women. The move blocks the law, known as Senate Bill 8, from being enforced while litigation continues. During oral arguments on Friday, the Justice Department told the court that Texas’ law unlawfully supersedes women’s constitutional rights. “The United States is substantially likely to succeed on the merits of its claims. It is substantially likely that S.B. 8 violates the Fourteenth Amendment,” the judge wrote. The victory for pro-choice forces may be...

Democrats accepted an offer from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday for a short-term suspension of the debt ceiling, delaying a showdown over the nation’s borrowing limit until December. The Kentucky Republican specified that his proposal was contingent on a Democratic agreement that long-term action to raise the debt ceiling would be achieved unilaterally via budget reconciliation. The process allows specific spending and tax measures to avert the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold and pass with a simple majority. “This will moot Democrats’ excuses about the time crunch they created and give the unified Democratic government more than enough time to pass stand-alone debt limit legislation through reconciliation,” Mr. McConnell said. Senate Democrats said they support t...

The number of U.S. nuclear warheads declined over the past seven years and currently includes 3,750 nuclear warheads, both weapons deployed on missiles and bombers and many others kept in storage, according to Energy and State Department fact sheets made public this week. The number of warheads in the strategic weapons arsenal is down from 4,717 as of September 2014. The latest fact sheets hailed the declassification of the stockpile as a necessary transparency measure aimed at promoting the weapons nonproliferation. The Trump administration declined to make public the number of warheads in order to protect efforts to deter nuclear-armed adversaries. According to the latest disclosures, as of September 2020, the number of U.S. warheads was 3,750, down from around 31,255 in 1968 and 22,217 ...