Politics Put On Hold As Nation Surveys Oklahoma Tornado Damage

Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks talk with Judy Woodruff about the recent scandals rocking Washington and the Obama administration, what we can observe about how the government operates and how it affects the trust of the American people, plus the legacy of Watergate 40 years on.

President Obama summoned Pentagon leaders to the White House Thursday to discuss what Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey declared a crisis: sexual assaults in the military. At the center of the debate: should military commanders be stripped of their sole authority to decide whether complaints of sexual assault go forward?

The former acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Steven Miller, will take his place in the hot seat Friday morning when the House Ways and Means Committee holds the first hearing on the tax collection agency's targeting of conservative groups.

The Watergate scandal began with a burglary in June 1972 and ended with a president's resignation in August 1974.

It was scandal week in Washington, but because of an accident of scheduling, I had the opportunity to view it through an altered lens.

Forty years ago, in the summer of 1973, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer led public television's gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings -- co-anchoring all 250 hours of the proceedings, and launching the beginnings of what the PBS NewsHour is today.

While lawmakers in Washington continue work on overhauling American immigration policy, Ray Suarez reports from Colorado, where members of the Evangelical Christian community are advocating passage of immigration reform to respond to demographic shifts in membership.

On May 17, 1973, Sen. Sam Ervin gavelled in the hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, better known as the Senate Watergate Committee. The impending result was unfathomable -- the downfall and resignation of President Nixon. Four decades later, we look back at some of the people involved.

President Barack Obama said Thursday that the U.S. and Turkey will keep ramping up pressure to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, with his country's civil war having "wracked the region." Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke today in a news conference from the White House Rose Garden.

To catch you up on the last 24 hours: President Barack Obama canned the man at the helm of the IRS, released emails between intelligence analysts and State Department officials following the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and asked a Senate Democrat to reintroduce a bill to help reporters protect the identity of their sources.