Peter Overby

A former Iowa state senator says he concealed money he took for shifting loyalty from Rep. Michele Bachmann to then-Rep. Ron Paul during the 2012 presidential campaign.

There's always a certain amount of weirdness in the Iowa presidential caucuses, and in the 2012 cycle the peak weirdness might have come ...

A U.S. Senate seat is up for grabs in Iowa, and the GOP has opened 11 field offices statewide. But there's also a new team working the state, the Virginia-based group Americans for Prosperity.

Finally, we now have a detailed IRS account of its attempts to resurrect the long-gone hard drive in Lois Lerner's computer.

But it's not definitive.

Lerner headed the tax-exempt organizations division in 2011, when it was dealing with hundreds of applications from conservative groups. They wanted status as 501(c)(4) ...

A big week in congressional mailing: Members of Congress can't use "franking" to send mass mailings during a blackout that starts 90 days before an election. That deadline is approaching.

Senate Democrats have rolled out this year's model of the DISCLOSE Act. Or, if you want to be more formal: the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act.

It's the third version of DISCLOSE since 2010. Broadly speaking, it would force donor disclosure on the big-money, ...

If Democrats lose control of the Senate this fall, it likely won't be for lack of campaign money. The prominent female candidates in particular have healthy campaign accounts.

A year into congressional scrutiny of the IRS, House Republicans have narrowed their focus to two issues: former CIA official Lois Lerner's lost batch of emails, and the possible poli...

Here's the biggest recurring theme in the IRS controversy — the one about alleged targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Throughout the yearlong investigation, congressional Republicans and Democrats have not only highlighted their own evidence but also taken the same evidence and drawn diametrically opposed conclusions.

The latest example ...

Establishment Republicans and Tea Party conservatives clash over a federal agency that helps finance U.S. firms in foreign trade. The legal authority for the Export-Import Bank expires in September.

IRS commissioner John Koskinen appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee. He tells lawmakers how emails that possibly reveal scrutiny given to Tea Party groups vanished from IRS computers.

With new technology came a new type of Washington scandal: missing emails.

In the latest instance, the vanished emails belonged to Lois Lerner, former head of the exempt organizations division at IRS. She's the official who oversaw the scrutiny of applicants for tax-exempt status as 501(c)(4) social welfare groups — ...

In a newly issued report, a group of 11 theologians goes where the pols and lawyers dare not tread, with a faith-based analysis of money's role in politics. In "Lo$ing Faith In Our Democracy," published by Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, you can guess where it comes down ...

The big numbers are in from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's stunning primary loss to Tea Party candidate David Brat.

First of all, the vote totals: 36,120 votes for Brat; 28,902 for Cantor.

Cash raised: Between the start of 2013 and May 21, 2014, Cantor raised $4.7 million. ...

School food service administrators once supported new healthy food requirements on the nation's school lunch program. But now, they want the rules delayed. And they're getting swept up in politics.

Two professors at Virginia's Randolph-Macon College find themselves in an unexpected position: facing each other in November for a seat in Congress.

Well-heeled outside groups easily outspent Sen. Thad Cochran and challenger Chris McDaniel before the GOP Senate primary in Mississippi. They're going all in on the runoff election later this month.

Many liberal critics of the Supreme Court's campaign finance rulings say a constitutional amendment is needed to limit money's influence in politics. The Senate held a hearing on one proposal.

San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer has already pledged at least $50 million to his superPAC, NextGen Climate, and now the superPAC's leaders are laying out a hardball strategy for the fall campaign.

The goal: tag seven Republican candidates as "science deniers" who are on the wrong side of the increasingly ...

It's been obvious ever since 2010 that Republicans and conservatives were spending a lot more slamming the Affordable Care Act than the Obama administration and Democrats were spending to defend it.

But 15 to 1?

Yes. That's the ratio calculated by Kantar Media's campaign media analysis group — CMAG ...

Tea Party candidates did well in GOP primary elections in 2010 and 2012; this year, not so much. Part of this lack of success is because establishment candidates have generally out-raised them.