Orion Donovan Smith

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked an effort by Democrats, joined by two GOP senators, to stop President Donald Trump from launching additional military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs.

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Energy is canceling more than $7.5 billion in grants nationwide, including funding for research at Washington State University, an electrical grid project in Spokane and a billion-dollar effort to turn the Northwest into a hub of the hydrogen energy industry.

WASHINGTON – As a government shutdown began on Wednesday, Republicans could make a straightforward argument to blame the other party: Democrats are refusing to pass a bill that would simply keep funding the government at current levels until lawmakers can finish writing bipartisan spending bills.

WASHINGTON – Congressional Democrats and Republicans from the Northwest blamed each other Tuesday for an imminent government shutdown, as the Senate failed to pass a short-term spending bill amid a fight over health care costs.

WASHINGTON – Congress headed into the weekend with a government shutdown all but certain to begin on Wednesday, as Democrats demand Republican majorities in the House and Senate act to keep health insurance costs from rising while the White House dismissed that condition as “radical left insanity.”

WASHINGTON – A Republican and a Democrat from Washington state met with Premier Li Qiang and other Chinese officials in Beijing on Sunday and Monday, the first delegation of House lawmakers to visit China since 2019.

WASHINGTON – Sen. Maria Cantwell and small business owners from the Northwest spoke in front of the Supreme Court on Thursday to highlight how President Donald Trump’s signature trade policy has hurt their companies, as the justices set a date to hear arguments in November on the president’s authority to impose sweeping import taxes.

WASHINGTON – The former director and chief medical officer of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Sen. Patty Murray during a hearing of the Senate Health Committee on Wednesday that they are both concerned about recent actions by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that could make it harder for Americans to get vaccines.

WASHINGTON – Wednesday is Constitution Day, which commemorates the signing of the United States’ founding document by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.

WASHINGTON – Michael Tehan had dedicated his 43-year career in the federal government to preserving salmon and steelhead in the Pacific Northwest, but soon after the fish biologist decided to retire in February, he got a phone call that made it clear his work wasn’t over.

WASHINGTON – The mood at the U.S. Capitol was grim and tense on Thursday, as lawmakers marked the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks a day after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah.

DAYTON – If the hospital in this historic southeast Washington town has to close, Acadia Murphey thinks the town will “probably die along with it.”

WASHINGTON – As Congress returned to the Capitol on Tuesday from its summer break with less than a month avert a government shutdown, the biggest impediment to funding the government may be lawmakers’ lack of confidence in each other – and in their own authority to direct federal spending.

WASHINGTON – Rep. Michael Baumgartner returned home to Spokane on Monday from a weeklong visit to Israel, his fifth trip to the country and his first as a member of Congress.

LEWISTON – It’s been more than half a century since Idaho voters sent anyone other than a Republican to the U.S. Senate. Now, a former Democratic state lawmaker is launching an independent bid to unseat an incumbent GOP senator in 2026, hoping that Idahoans share his frustration with both parties.

President Donald Trump’s announcement Monday that he will take control of Washington, D.C.’s police department and deploy the National Guard in the nation’s capital – and his suggestion that he could take similar actions in other Democratically controlled jurisdictions – has stirred questions about what the move means for cities across the country.

WASHINGTON – Sen. Patty Murray waited three decades to become the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, one of the most sought-after roles in Congress and one that gives undeniable benefits to the Washington state voters who first sent her to D.C. in 1992.

WASHINGTON – A wheat grower from Spokane County visited the Capitol this week to drum up support for glyphosate, a widely used weed killer that was targeted in a May report commissioned by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

WASHINGTON – Three Republicans who represent the Inland Northwest in the House said they want the Trump administration to release more information about deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as the chamber began its summer break on Wednesday, a day earlier than scheduled, amid controversy over the so-called “Epstein files.”

Since the four Lower Snake River dams were completed, the economic benefits they provide have been in tension with their impact on the salmon and steelhead that hatch above the dams and must return there from the ocean to spawn before they die. After the Biden administration and Northwest Democrats took tentative steps toward the potential of breaching the dams in hopes of restoring dwindling salmon runs, President Donald Trump's return to the White House seems to have foreclosed that possibility – at least for now.

WASHINGTON – Northwest public radio and television stations were bracing for the fallout after an overnight vote by House Republicans to rescind about $9 billion in funding Congress had already approved for foreign aid programs and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports public radio and TV stations across the country.

WASHINGTON – Just about every time Rep. Dan Newhouse posts on Facebook, the comments start pouring in with the same question from his constituents across central Washington.