Ralph Abraham

The 2014 farm bill expired Sunday, ending dozens of programs and putting others in a holding pattern until four key lawmakers either produce a replacement bill or seek some form of extension of the now defunct law.

The four principal negotiators working on a 2018 farm bill say they hope to resolve differences between House and Senate farm bills and have a conference report ready in October for a vote in the lame-duck session in November or December.

President Donald Trump made history Tuesday in Singapore as the first American president to meet face-to-face with a leader of North Korea since the Kim dynasty sprouted on the peninsula roughly seven decades ago.

At the heart of negotiations was the “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula in exchange for “security guarantees” for the North’s mercurial leader, Kim Jong Un.

From tributes to senators to hours of testimony from a tech giant, spring has been a visual mixed bag in Congress.

Lawmakers like these oversized and sometimes garish visual aids because they help them get their point across. The Twitter handle @FloorCharts posts some of the daily highlights, and we’re doing a monthly roundup of the best of the best.

Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy says he is weighing a challenge to the state’s incumbent Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards.

Kennedy told WWL that he had not made a final decision while also calling Edwards ineffective.

Updated Oct. 31 at 12:35 p.m. | In the wake of the Oct. 1 Las Vegas shooting — the deadliest in U.S. history — lawmakers from both parties were quick to call for a review of the bump stock attachments found on 12 of the rifles in the gunman's hotel room.

Most lawmakers have signaled they support more strictly regulating the devices. But GOP and Democratic leaders diverge on whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) already has the authority under current gun laws to regulate them.

An arrest warrant has been issued for former Louisiana Rep. Vance McAllister after he failed to appear in court for a debt collection hearing.

Earlier this year, banks and creditors began to collect debts McAllister owed. Among some of the banks and creditors McAllister was sued by were Wells Fargo, American Express, IberiaBank, Origin Bank and Richland State Bank, the Ouachita Citizen reported.

Rep. Phil Roe’s band that he formed in medical school more than 40 years ago got back together Monday.

The Tennessee Republican and three of his friends — Jim Arthur, Steve Barnes and Tom Eades — formed the bluegrass band The Pony Express when Roe was in medical school at the University of Tennessee in the 1970s.

Today is National POW/MIA Recognition Day, which honors missing service members and their families.

Currently in Congress, there are two lawmakers who endured time as prisoners of war during the Vietnam War: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas.

Louisiana Rep. Ralph Abraham took “affront” to Virginia Rep. Tom Garrett bringing up Louisiana when assigning blame for the weekend’s white supremacist march that ended in violence and killed three people.

In an interview with Fox News, Garrett blamed outsiders for the demonstration and violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying the march was made up of “people from Arkansas, Colorado, and Louisiana, and New York who all came to a bucolic town where Thomas Jefferson sat when he wrote the words ‘All men are created equal,’” plus “a small handful of local radical lunatics.”