Deirdre Walsh

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who has opposed new legislation banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks, signaled Thursday she is open to advancing it — if it has the support of her caucus.

"I just don't buy into it, but if members want to do that I'm OK with that," Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press conference.

The speaker said she didn't believe the step was necessary because she trusted her colleagues and that existing laws currently require regular disclosure. "I have great confidence in the integrity of my members," Pelosi said.

Almost 10 years ago, Congress overwhelmingly passed the STOCK Act — requiring members and their spouses to disclose when they buy or sell stocks. The rare bipartisan bill flew through both chambers after a series of national news stories raised questions about whether lawmakers were profiting from their jobs.

John Thune, the No. 2 Senate GOP leader and likely successor to Republican leader Mitch McConnell, has announced he will run for reelection in 2022, putting an end to the speculation about the South Dakota senator's political future.

A year after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, some lawmakers still can't believe that Congress itself came under siege.

"More and more it becomes surreal. You become a combination of angry as well as shocked," Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, told NPR, standing in Statuary Hall, where rioters stormed through on their way to try to disrupt the electoral count on the House floor.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has vowed the Senate will forge ahead on voting rights legislation and will vote on changing the rules of the upper chamber by Jan. 17 if the GOP once again blocks the bill.

"We must adapt. The Senate must evolve, like it has many times before," Schumer wrote in a Dear Colleague letter Monday morning. This message is his strongest to date suggesting that changes to the legislative filibuster are necessary.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has requested that Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary panel and a longtime ally of former President Donald Trump, voluntarily provide information to and sit for an interview with the panel.

President Biden in a Thursday evening statement acknowledged the roadblocks his nearly $2 trillion social spending package faced, saying that it could take weeks before the package was ready for a vote. Still, he said he would continue to push for the bill to get enough Democratic support to pass through the Senate.

Republicans are in strong position to win back control of the House of Representatives in 2022. They are united in their drive to defeat President Biden's agenda and their message to voters that Democratic policies are driving record inflation. But in recent weeks some in the right wing of the party have openly attacked their GOP colleagues, and in some cases even threatened to defeat them in primaries.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., recently admitted that out-of-line rhetoric from his own members is a distraction.

The House of Representatives has approved legislation imposing economic sanctions on China for goods sold to Americans from the forced labor of Muslim Uyghurs.

The Wednesday vote was overwhelming, 428-1.

"This is not a partisan issue. It is a human rights issue. It is a moral issue," Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the sponsor of the bill and a longtime human rights advocate, said on the House floor.

A day before the federal government is scheduled to run out of money, Congress on Thursday approved a short-term spending bill that will keep federal agencies running through Feb. 18, 2022.

The legislation now goes to President Biden, who needs to sign it before the midnight deadline on Friday to avoid any lapse in funding.

Lawmakers return to Washington, D.C., with a familiar end-of-the-year agenda — a pileup of important bills and not a lot of time to act on them.

The most immediate issue is avoiding a partial government shutdown at the end of the week, but they also need to address the nation's borrowing authority and annual defense policy bill.

Democrats in Congress are banking that President Biden's Build Back Better agenda — the largest expansion of the social safety net in decades that includes a wide range of programs to address health care, child care, elder care and climate change — is the ticket to keeping their majorities in the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.

President Biden signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law Monday, enacting a key piece of his domestic spending agenda that will funnel billions to states and local governments to upgrade outdated roads, bridges, transit systems and more.