At long last, frothing Republicans are right: America does face an immigration crisis. Specifically, the rhetoric from frothing Republicans is the crisis. The talk has now devolved all the way to raving bloodthirsty craziness. Or, anyway, good lord it’s exhausting.

In a shocking update, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In Award of the Day-winner Rep. Paul D. Ryan was elected Speaker of the House, the culmination of a decision he is more likely than not going to look back on one day and wonder... Why?

Folks—he’s going for it. After winning Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In Award of the Day” on Wednesday, Paul Ryan has declared his candidacy for Speaker of the House, the Associated Press reports.

Kevin McCarthy, who up until a few hours ago had been the clear frontrunner, has pulled out of the race to replace the retiring John Boehner as Speaker of the House. And now, Congress has descended into hell’s most tearful, mind-numbing pit of fiery chaos. [Updated]

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who recently boasted about how effective the Benghazi select committee was at “dropping” Hillary Clinton’s “numbers,” has pulled himself out of the running for Speaker of the House, the Wall Street Journal reports.

We can apparently credit Pope Francis for at least one good deed on his American tour: He has ended the suffering of an unhappy man. The miserable speakership of John Boehner is over.

John Boehner, the orange in a necktie who had recently emerged as the relative voice of sanity in a budget battle that’s been stalled out by his Republican party’s far right wing, will leave Congress and resign as Speaker of the House in October. The New York Times broke the news, citing aides in Boehner’s office.

One D.C. woman is surely hell-bound after CNN’s livefeed caught audio of her discussing a desire to throw her shoe at Pope Francis’s head before his address to Congress Thursday.

Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has accepted an invitation to testify before the Republican-led committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Libya now ominously referred to as “Benghazi,” the New York Times reports.

Busting the spectre of communism is hard enough without your boys ragging you for still being single. But still, alleged presidential candidate and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) must endure moments like the one today when a colleague’s quip about Graham’s luck with the “hoes” got picked up on a nearby mic.

Technically, three key provisions of the Patriot Act governing what data the NSA can collect and how expired tonight after Rand Paul bested Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell at his own procedural game. Whether the NSA will actually stop while Congress attempts to pass a new bill is apparently another story.

After feds announced indictments against ex-House speaker Dennis Hastert yesterday for illegally funneling $3.5 million to an unnamed person from his past as a high-school wrestling coach, an obvious question lingered: What was the cash for? For covering up male-on-male sexual abuse, naturellement.

Why did Alan Grayson call a reporter a “shitting robot” yesterday? Because that reporter learned the liberal populist hero Florida congressman, worth somewhere south of $100 million, keeps as much as a quarter of his wealth in “hedge funds in the Cayman Islands” where foreign investors can dodge U.S. taxes.

Less than 24 hours after an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia, killing at least seven and injuring 50 more, House Republicans voted to approve a funding cut to Amtrak’s budget by about a fifth.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), one of the wealthiest anti-corporate corporatists in Congress, may possibly run for Marco Rubio’s open Senate seat. Nothing’s certain! Except that Alan Grayson, one of the most obnoxious members of an obnoxious Congress, will make an ass of himself. Just look what he did today.

What could be more fun than sitting with a U.S. Representative at a Taylor Swift show? “Anything,” you say? Well what if I told you it would only cost a few grand?

Staten Island district attorney Daniel Donovan has won a special election for the house seat left open by disgraced congressman Michael Grimm, who pled guilty to felony tax evasion in December, The New York Times reports. Donovan is the same D.A. whose office failed last year to secure an indictment for Daniel…

After three decades in Congress, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid announced today he won't be seeking re-election next year. Reid told the New York Times that he's been contemplating retiring "for months," and that his decision was not motivated by injuries sustained in a bizarre exercise accident earlier this year.

D.C. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton was caught on video this week hitting another car while doing some nonvoting approximation of "parking" before strolling away from the disturbing scene like a boss with her head held high.

America's decades-long growth of economic inequality has plenty of causes. Here's one that doesn't get enough attention.