Republicans assume full control of Congress on Tuesday for the first time in eight years in a day of pomp, circumstance and raw politics.

Year-end holidays beckoning, House Republicans struggled Tuesday to coalesce behind a plan that avoids a government shutdown next week and simultaneously challenges President Barack Obama’s decision to spare millions of immigrants from deportation.

In a broad test of his executive powers, President Barack Obama said Wednesday he will sidestep Congress and unveil administrative actions on immigration — measures that could spare from deportation as many as 5 million people illegally in the U.S. and set up one the most pitched partisan confrontations of his presidency.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday that President Barack Obama should take executive action as quickly as possible to remake the nation’s immigration system.

Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell joined House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio on Thursday at the pinnacle of the congressional and Republican power structures in Washington — two establishment deal-cutters, each on occasion frustrated by the other’s inability to rein in their party’s most zealous ideologues.

A government investigation Wednesday criticized a bizarre Secret Service assignment that pulled agents from their duty near the White House and sent them to the rural Maryland home of a headquarters employee embroiled in a personal dispute with a neighbor.

A ban on travel from West Africa might seem like a simple and smart response to the frightening Ebola outbreak there. It’s become a central demand of Republicans on Capitol Hill and some Democrats, and is popular with the public. But health experts are nearly unanimous in saying it’s a bad idea that could backfire.

Two years after a prostitution scandal rocked the Secret Service, a Republican congressman renewed allegations Thursday about possible involvement by a White House volunteer and said he smelled efforts to cover it up.