President Obama has a very complicated argument to make as he works to sell his plan for higher taxes on top earners.

Calling for higher taxes on anyone in an election year during a fresh economic slowdown is tough. Obama and his campaign may be having some success in stoking resentment at the rich in general and Republican Mitt Romney specifically, but when Democrats talk about raising taxes, voters get anxious. It reinforces the most unpopular part of the blue team’s brand: tax-and-spend liberalism, a label that could prove toxic to Obama’s re-election hopes.

The president has tried to soften the blow in his current push for higher taxes by saying that he wants to give a $2,000 tax break to middle-class families next year.

But there is no tax cut. Rather, Obama is offering the one-year delay of a tax increase on middle-income households from current rates, some more than a decade old.

House lawmakers voted Wednesday to repeal the federal health care overhaul -- the latest in a long line of anti-"ObamaCare" votes, but the first since the Supreme Court upheld the law and defined one of its key provisions as a "tax."

The House has voted more than 30 times to scrap, defund or undercut the law since Obama signed it in March 2010. As with those bills, the repeal bill approved Wednesday on a 244-185 vote faces certain demise in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

But Republicans were looking to get lawmakers back on record on the law in the wake of the high court ruling last month. The ruling upheld most the law as constitutional, but in doing so determined that the controversial penalty on those who do not buy insurance technically qualifies as a "tax" and not a "penalty" as the administration had claimed. That definition fueled GOP criticism of the law, and put some Democrats in a politically tricky position...

Republicans are turning the tables on the Obama campaign, launching an aggressive effort to cast the president as the "outsourcer in chief" in response to Democrats labeling Mitt Romney an "outsourcing pioneer."

The belated counter-attack comes weeks after President Obama's campaign seized on a Washington Post story examining how Romney's former company Bain Capital invested in firms that provided outsourcing services like call centers.

As it happens, the Republican National Committee on Tuesday pointed to a new Post story -- this one examining Obama's "outsourcing" record -- as the GOP unveiled a website that outlines in fine detail how federal dollars under the Obama administration funded foreign projects.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who traveled to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Tuesday for a press conference shortly before Obama arrived to speak at a community college, told Fox News that Republicans are "getting aggressive" with this message...

The federal government ran a $60 billion deficit in June and is already more than $900 billion in the red this fiscal year, but there is some bright news: basic government spending appears to be dropping, the Congressional Budget Office estimated Monday.

CBO said the government has paid out $2.7 trillion so far in fiscal year 2012, about the same level as it had by this point in fiscal year 2011. But when technical adjustments from the 2008 Wall Street bailout are subtracted, spending has actually dropped 2 percent.

That news comes after a year and a half of fierce battles between Republicans on Capitol Hill, who have fought for deeper spending cuts, and President Obama, who has fought for more money for his priorities.

CBO said Medicaid, education and unemployment benefit spending are both down significantly, chiefly because Mr. Obama's stimulus has winded down and its higher spending levels are expiring. Defense spending is also down in 2012...

President Obama, amid charges of class warfare, pushed Monday for a tax hike on families earning more than $250,000 -- and an extension of the Bush-era tax rates for families making less than that.

The president, speaking in the East Room of the White House, said he wants to break through the "stalemate" over taxes in Congress. He argued that sustaining the current tax rates for top earners puts too big a hole in the federal budget, saying "we can't afford to keep that up." Obama called on Congress to extend those rates, for one year, for families earning under $250,000 -- failure to do so, he said, would be a "blow" to families and a "drag" on the economy.

"We don't need more top-down economics," Obama said. "We need policies that grow and strengthen the middle class"...

Four more chances.

That's what President Obama has left to prove he's helped turn the economy around -- with just four more monthly jobs reports remaining before the November election. Those reports could determine whether he gets four more years.

The last three employment snapshots released by the Labor Department have been persistently weak, and marked a distinct slowdown from earlier in the year. In the latest report, the department said employers added a meager 80,000 jobs in June, leaving the unemployment rate unchanged at 8.2 percent. The number of jobs added in June was lower than expected, and rounded out a poor second quarter for 2012.

The average number of monthly jobs created in the first quarter of the year was 226,000 -- by contrast, that average in the second quarter was just 75,000.

With the economy typically polling as the top issue in the 2012 race, Obama is now under heavy pressure to demonstrate a turnaround sometime between July and October.

The Supreme Court may have ruled on Obamacare, but a pro-life law firm that is behind some of the many lawsuits that have been filed against the HHS mandate that requires religious groups to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs say those challenges continue.

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision essentially upholding the Obamacare law that pro-life groups regard as the biggest expansion of abortion and abortion funding since Roe v. Wade. The law also drew strong opposition from the pro-life community not only over abortion but because the legislation also promotes rationing of medical care that could lead to involuntarily denying lifesaving treatment.

Under the enacted law, federal tax-based subsidies will begin in 2014 to subsidize millions of private insurance plans that will cover abortion-on-demand, including some plans (“multi-state plans”) that will be administered by the federal government.

The Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling on Thursday cuts right to the very fabric of the relationship between a once-limited government and a once-free citizen, but the eternal struggle between liberty and tyranny endures. It is a beginning, not an end.

As enormously important as the high court’s Obamacare ruling is - and it’s huge - it’s not the final word. The legal and political dust has not yet settled, and it will take some time for the unpredictable ripples to form the powerful waves of history. Yet, history waits for no man, so we begin by asking: What now?

First, we mourn. We mourn that a nation built on the principle of limited government has grown the largest government in the history of humankind. We mourn that our Supreme Court rewrote Obamacare into Obamatax to allow for the individual mandate. We mourn that once again we read the lips of a president who promised he would not raise our taxes but did so anyway.

Finding rare political accommodation on the cusp of a holiday recess, Congress passed legislation Friday designed to salvage 2.8 million jobs and shield students from a sharp increase in loan interest rates.

The legislation, which also revamps highway and transit programs and shores up the federal flood insurance program, now goes to the White House for President Obama's signatures.

Lawmakers trying to leave town for a weeklong Fourth of July recess had been facing twin deadlines: Federal highway and transit aid programs and the government's authority to levy federal fuel taxes were expiring Saturday. And interest rates on new student loans were set to double on Sunday...

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made the following statement Thursday following the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the constitutionality of the Obama administration's health care law.

"As you might imagine, I disagree with the Supreme Court's decision and I agree with the dissent. What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day if elected president of the United States. And that is I will act to repeal ObamaCare.

Let's make clear that we understand what the court did and did not do. What the court did today was say that ObamaCare does not violate the Constitution. What they did not do was say that ObamaCare is good law or that it's good policy. ObamaCare was bad policy yesterday. It's bad policy today. ObamaCare was bad law yesterday. It's bad law today.

Let me tell you why I say that. ObamaCare raises taxes on the American people by approximately $500 billion.