On Rep. Gabrielle Giffords‘ (D-AZ) last day in the US House of Representatives, where she has served since 2007, many of her colleagues delivered tributes to the heroic departing Congresswoman from Arizona as they debated passage of HR 3801, which Giffords co-authored. Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI) punctuated the proceedings with a brief, understated, but moving salute to Giffords.

Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was given a heroes farewell when she entered the House chamber to submit her letter of resignation. The entire building erupted in a cacophony of applause for the outgoing Congresswoman, who was stepping down to continue her recovery.

At what point in the Republican primary can we start calling the entire exercise downright Nixonian? Probably at the moment campaigns start sending each other food. Today is the ill-timed 15th anniversary of the House of Representatives giving Newt Gingrich the dubious distinction of being the only Speaker in history to be reprimanded by his colleagues and ordered to pay a $300,000 fine for his ethics violations, and the Romney campaign is celebrating the only way it knows how: birthday cake!

Rep. Ron Paul‘s detractors have raised many concerns about the longtime Congressman, but inconsistency has never been one of them. In fact, in old videos it sometimes appears that the Congressman raised issues that didn’t even exist yet– but would become a central part of his campaign. Take this short House speech from 1984, for example, in which Rep. Paul rails against “computer surveillance”– hardly an issue for most Americans at the time but, in a post-PATRIOT Act world, as important a theme as ever.

With Americans increasingly becoming concerned about the state of income inequality in their country, a new report is showing that the disparity between the average American’s wealth and that of their Congressional representative is, to put it mildly, stark, with the Center for Responsive Politics reporting that nearly half of Congress is worth more than $1 million, and their total wealth increased 11% since 2009.

Three years can be a lifetime in politics, but for one happenstance celebrity from the 2008 campaign, it may have been all the time he needed to marinate a Congressional run. Ohio’s Toledo Blade is reporting that Samuel Wurzelbacher, a contractor’s assistant turned motivational speaker dubbed “Joe the Plumber” during the Presidential campaign, may be plotting a political comeback as a Republican Congressional candidate against incumbent Rep. Marcy Kaptur.

It’s hard out there for a page. Today, House Speaker John Boehner and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a statement announcing that the House of Representatives’ page program would be coming to an end because, essentially, technology has rendered the need for pages obsolete. You may choose to read this as “email had made it so that kids don’t have to trip over their loafers to deliver manila envelops containing games of tic tac toe played between Boehner and Pelosi” or “coldly calculating robots are steadily pushing insufferable, acne-ridden politics nerds down the evolutionary chain until they become extinct.”

Somewhere in the formidable daily pile of snail mail to the White House today, President Obama received an apology from a Republican Congressman– and no, it had nothing to do with the debt ceiling debate. Colorado Rep. Doug Lamborn excused himself in writing today for comments on a Colorado AM radio show where he said he was afraid of associating with the President because he was a “tar baby.” He claims it’s not what it sounds like.

After weeks and weeks of toil, doomsday scenarios and failed bills, the compromise agreed to this weekend between legislative Democrats and Republicans and the White House has finally passed the lower chamber of Congress by a simple majority. It goes on to the Senate tomorrow, where it is also expected to pass. The occasion was marked by a moving return to the House floor: that of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who had been absent since the tragic shooting that almost claimed her life in Tucson.

The Tea Party, the fiscally conservative movement that turned the House of Representatives over to the Republicans last November, has found itself in the eye of the debt crisis storm this week as Tea Party-backed legislators almost sank the House Speaker’s own bill. On last night’s O’Reilly Factor, Tea Party leader David Webb told host Laura Ingraham he was outraged his group was being labeled childish, as, in the debate, “we’re the adults in the room” who Americans listen to.

Rep. Paul Ryan took the House floor today to rail against what he considered “accounting tricks and budget gimmicks” by those attempting to carve out a budget that reduced spending. Among those, he explained, were the supposed “cuts” to defense spending that cut from predicted future spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he argued were not any different than repealing a bill proposing to “cover the moon with yogurt.”

As the August 2nd deadline for America to pay its bills approaches, the possibility of the nation defaulting on its debt looms ever nearer, with Republicans appearing further than ever from compromise. This morning on Imus, House Investigations leader Rep. Darrell Issa explained the frustrations in his party– Democrats appeared unwilling to agree to short-term cuts, and long-term promises, he argued, “are just crap.”

Oregon Congressman David Wu is facing an accusation from a teenage woman of engaging her in an “unwanted sexual encounter” last November. The teen was described by Fox News as a “daughter of a longtime Wu friend and campaign donor,” who had refrained from accusing him previously because she believed she did not have sufficient evidence.

Among the most shocking concessions to many Democrats that President Obama proposed during this week’s budget talks was the idea that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “on the table.” The idea, given that Republicans have obstinately refused to negotiate on many points of the budget talks, struck Rachel Maddow on the program tonight as useless, only servicing to “aggrevate and alienate” the Democratic base.

Now that the dust has settled on the scandal that pushed Anthony Weiner out of office, New York Democrats have made their choice for the Congressman to replace him: NY Assemblyman and former NYC City Councilman David Weprin. Weprin will be running against a yet-to-be-chosen Republican from the NY-9 seat, and would hold it until the end of 2012.

With the debate on raising the national debt ceiling fast becoming the most important debate currently on the House floor, candidates to become members of said House may be feeling the pressure to run on a platform that highlights their refusal to allow the debt to grow any further. But highlighting a take on policy and plain fearmongering are two different things, and it’s pretty clear in what category Nevada Republican House candidate Mark Amodei‘s “Chinese nightmare” ad falls.

Speaker John Boehner may never get used to the fact that he is a very important person whose ideas people listen to nowadays. The Speaker of the House choked up a little delivering a commencement address to the graduating class at Catholic University today, as he told the students to keep with them always “humility, patience, and faith”– and, of course, “always a few tears from me.”

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the “No Funding For Abortion Act” (also known as H.R. 3) which you may recall tried to redefine “forcible rape.” That was dead in the water (mostly because statutory rape and incest would not necessarily fall under those categories), so that language was taken out. (And then, it wasn’t.) Instead of trying to limit the kinds of victims of rape, they are now also aiming to limit who can provide the coverage, namely Medicaid. So, no public funding of abortion. For victims of statutory rape. Oh, and also, private health insurers who cover abortions may cause the companies who use them for their employees to lose their tax credits. (By the way, 87 percent of private health insurers cover abortions.)

While last night’s anticlimactic government non-shutdown peeved more than a few in Congress and around Capitol Hill, Sen. Charles Schumer may have come up with the most comically derogatory metaphor for the other side: House Republicans, he griped yesterday, are a “flea, wagging a tail, wagging a dog.”

Who needs Jon Stewart for ironically detached and comedic commentary on political absurdities? With The Daily Show on break, Rep. Anthony Weiner (a former summer house share buddy of the Comedy Central fake newsman) took to the House floor and fearlessly ripped the House GOP for their vote to defund NPR. And who did Weiner choose to play the victims? None other than Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers the hosts of NPR’s weekend show Car Talk.

Political rhetoric on the floor of the House of Representatives took a surprisingly personal turn last night when Jackie Speier (D-CA) shared that she had lost a baby after having gone through an abortion procedure when she was 17 weeks pregnant. Her impassioned revelation was in response to a graphic description of an abortion procedure that had just been read aloud by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ).

Bill O’Reilly is really starting to get concerned about this John Boehner fellow’s emotional stability. Talking to guest Chris Wallace about his upcoming interview with the Speaker of the House, O’Reilly expresses something in between wonder and worry as to Boehner’s propensity to cry when discussing, well, a lot of things, and even wondered whether he could be an effective leader while maintaining his emotional openness.

Could the new era of civility come crashing down as a result of one embarrassing rejection? House Majority Leader Eric Cantor invited Former Speaker of the House and current House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to sit with him for tonight’s State of the Union Address, but Pelosi has made it clear she already has other plans.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann always knows how to deliver an eye-catching sound bite and today on the floor of the House of Representatives she did not disappoint by declaring that “Obamacare as we know it is the crown jewel of socialism – it is socialized medicine.” Bachmann also attempted to argue that taking steps towards repeal is not merely a symbolic act.

Newly-appointed Chairman of the Reform and Oversight Committee Darrell Issa has been causing commotion about using his subpoena power to investigate corruption in the White House, calling the Obama administration “one of the most corrupt administrations in history” and promising a deluge of investigations. Challenged on the use of the word “corruption” by CNN’s John King, the Congressman went after the entire network and, namely, their understanding of the word.