At the end of last year, just shy of the 11th hour in the fiscal cliff negotiations, President Obama made an offer that included a Republican-backed idea to cut spending by lowering the cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits. The move shocked Congressional Democrats and dismayed Mr. Obama’s liberal base.

 Despite the Obama administration’s best efforts, the lack of affordable housing remains one of America’s most vexing problems.

A $1.5 billion transfusion in the 2009 stimulus bill managed to hold the overall homeless population about even over the last four years, and the number of people in two especially vulnerable groups — the chronically homeless and homeless veterans — has actually dropped.         

AS both his critics and admirers argue, the nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense last week tells us something important about Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy. But so does the man who was nominated alongside Hagel, to far less controversy and attention: John Brennan, now head of the White House’s counterterrorism efforts, and soon to be the director of the C.I.A.      

In the bitter debate that led up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said that some of his fellow Republicans, in their zest for war, lacked the perspective of veterans like him, who have “sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off.”      

Senate Democratic leaders have sent a letter to President Obama pledging their support if he raises the debt ceiling unilaterally in the face of Republican resistance.

Support has been growing among Democrats in Congress for Obama to invoke the 14th Amendment or another legal justification for expanding the nation’s borrowing authority without congressional approval.

In March of 2012, several New York City residents sued the New York Police Department over alleged overreaches of its controversial stop-and-frisk policy.* The plaintiffs argued that the NYPD “has a widespread practice of making unlawful stops on suspicion of trespass” outside certain buildings in the Bronx, and asked the court for relief from the department’s Trespass Affidavit Program (TAP).