OACAC Blog

Friday, February 17, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE HOUSE: Convened at 9 and has just voted, 293-132, to endorse the final, $143 billion version of legislation extending the 2-percentage-point payroll tax cut for 160 million workers through the end of the year, continuing but limiting benefits to the long-time unemployed and forestalling a 27 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements to doctors. The package was opposed by 91 Republicans and 41 Democrats.

THE SENATE: Convened at 10 and will clear the payroll tax cut, jobless aid and “doc fix” package within a few minutes — and an atypically lengthy 12 days before all three were set to expire. The vote is the last piece of business before all of Congress goes on recess for the next week. Look for a much closer vote than in the House, with a handful of conservative Democrats as well as a solid majority of Republicans  voting “no.”

Senators voted this morning against limiting debate on the two-year, $109 billion version of the highway, mass transit and freight rail policy rewrite that Reid is pushing, suggesting plenty of work ahead for senators interested in reviving the bill after the recess. The roll call was 54-42, but 60 votes were required. But senators brushed aside a handful of conservative GOP critics and confirmed Jesse Furman, a federal prosecutor and the younger brother of White House economics adviser Jason Furman, to be a federal judge in New York.

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama takes off from San Francisco at noon (D.C. time) and heads to the mammoth Boeing Everett Factory north of Seattle, where 747s, 767s, 777s, and the new 787 Dreamliner are all built. It’s an obvious location for his 2:30 speech reiterating his views about the importance of manufacturing and exports to “an economy built to last,” which is the only non-fundraising stop of the day. Fresh off an announcement that he raised $29.1 million for his re-election campaign and for the Democratic Party in January, he’s got an event at 5 in the home of Susan and Jeff Brotman (a Costco co-founder) and another at 6:45 in the Westin Bellevue hotel. He’s due back in the family quarters at 1 tomorrow morning.

THE SUPREME COURT: The justices returned from a nearly monthlong recess and held a closed-door conference to deliberate several cases — the first such session since Breyer was robbed of $1,000 by a machete-wielding intruder at his Caribbean vacation home. (Oral arguments resume Tuesday.)

THE OTHER SIDE: When Barbara Boxer and Kirsten Gillibrand took to the Senate floor this morning, their rhetoric was a stark reminder that those who fail to appreciate history are doomed to repeat it. More than two decades after an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee decided it believed Clarence Thomas more than Anita Hill — and at a time when the number of women in Congress has plateaued at 17 percent — the two Democratic senators were able to have a political field day over Darrell Issa’s “just doesn’t get it” moment in the House yesterday.

The two needed to do nothing more than ask “Where are the women?” as they described the giant photo they had brought with them — of the five witnesses, all of them men, who testified as the first panel of experts on birth control before Issa’s House Oversight Committee yesterday. In so doing, the senators underscored how the culture wars can absolutely cut both ways — and are not always be won by the Republicans. The Thomas hearings were responsible for big gains by the Democrats, and especially their women candidates, in 1992 because voters tied antiquated chauvinism and the GOP together. The GOP’s efforts to make Terri Schiavo’s permanent vegetative state into a right-to-life caused totally backfired seven years ago — because the public thought the Republicans had gone way too far and had their eyes off the “real” issues. Those two lessons are on the minds of political operatives on both sides now, who wonder aloud whether the GOP is about to overplay its hand in the Obama birth control mandate, not only because women will rise up against them but also because voters of both genders think this year should be spent talking about the parties’ prescriptions for the economy and not about life in the bedroom.

EYEBALLING AN OVERHAUL: They may deride what they view as his occasionally flippant and all-too-frequent smirk, but House Budget Committee Republicans were delighted with one thing Geithner said yesterday: that the administration will soon offer a plan for a corporate tax overhaul. He said the president has not given up on those aspirations when the grand-bargain and supercommittee talks foundered last year. “We’ll have a chance to talk about this in the coming weeks,” the Treasury secretary said, and he promised  a “broad framework” for ending “dozens and dozens of the special preferences in the corporate tax code today” while preserving “a much narrower, targeted set” of corporate tax provisions aimed at “encouraging investment in the United States.” It’s highly unlikely the administration’s corporate tax plan will resolve partisan differences over tax policy — and certainly not in an election year. But the paper will give both sides something to ponder in anticipation of a significant tax-code overhaul debate next year if the present is re-elected — and a document filled with evidence the Republicans can use to criticize the president during the campaign.

NOT A FACTOR: The cost of living rose less than forecast in January, supporting the view that inflation is among the least of the nation’s election year economic worries. The consumer price index increased 0.2 percent after no change in December, the Labor Department says this morning. The so-called core measure, which excludes more volatile food and energy costs, also increased 0.2 percent, following a 0.1 percent uptick the previous month. (The absence of inflation is one reason for the the Federal Reserve’s decision to keep interest rates low through at least 2014.)

WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD TIMES GONE: It looks like next Wednesday’s debate in Mesa, Ariz., could be the 20th and last of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign. That’s because the debate scheduled  in Atlanta on March 1 was called off by CNN and the Georgia GOP yesterday when Mitt Romney said he wouldn’t be there — and Rick Santorum and Ron Paul quickly dropped out as well. The prospects for all four to show up at the PBS debate being planned for Portland, Ore., on March 19 look to be fading as well. The development could not come at a worse time for Newt Gingrich, consistently the best performer at such events in the past few months, who was hoping to revive his faltering candidacy with a strong showing in his hometown. (He’s spending five of the next 14 days in Georgia, his main Super Tuesday target. He has three campaign offices and a full-time staff of a dozen in the state — the biggest operation he’s set up since South Carolina, which is the one state he’s won so far.)

BIG LEAD: Scott Brown was solidly in front of Elizabeth Warren, 49 percent to 40 percent, in a survey taken this week and released last night by Suffolk University, the premier polling authority in Massachusetts. The margin of error in the poll of 600 voters was 4 points; only 9 percent were undecided. And among the all-important independents, who tend to decide such tossups, the incumbent Republican senator was way ahead, 60 percent to 28 percent. A poll out earlier this week had the race essentially tied — but it was focused on likely voters, while the new survey was of registered voters.

QUOTE OF NOTE: “I took a chance at the Apollo and I’m not going to take a chance again,” Obama said at his San Francisco fundraising dinner last night, where Al Green was the guest entertainer and there was enormous speculation the two might sing a duet. “Now, what is possible is, after reelection, I might go on tour with the good reverend. Be his opening act. But I don’t want to lose any further votes because of my singing voice.” (Still available from his campaign is a ring tone of the president  crooning  “I’m so in love with you” at the New York  fundraiser.)

ANOTHER QUOTE OF NOTE: “I’m not responsible for every comment that a supporter of mine makes,” Rick Santorum said on CBS this morning about his super PAC’s biggest benefactor, Foster Friess, who yesterday touted an aspirin tablet (held by the knees) as a low-cost and effective birth control method. “It was a bad joke, it was a stupid joke, and it is not reflective of me or my record on this issue,” said the presidential aspirant, who does say states should be free to ban contraceptive sales.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: House Republicans Randy Forbes of Virginia (60) and Jim Jordan of Ohio (48).

PUBLISHING SCHEDULE: Because of the Presidents Day congressional recess, there will not be a Daily Briefing next week unless significant news demands it. Regular production will resume Monday, Feb. 27.
— David Hawkings, editor

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Thursday, February 16, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE HOUSE: Convened at 10, will start debating amendments after noon and by sunset will pass a bill designed to expand domestic energy production — with the expected lease revenue dedicated to public works spending.  The measure would resurrect a Bush-era system for leasing public lands in the West for oil-shale extraction while preventing the Obama administration from altering it.

THE SENATE: Convened at 10 for a day of speechmaking and clock-watching on the highway bill, which appears stalled until the next procedural vote tomorrow. (The vote on whether to neutralize Obama’s contraception coverage mandate is off until after next week’s break.)

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama’s first fundraiser of the day is a breakfast at 10 (California time) in the Corona Del Mar home of Jeff and Nancy Stack. The second is three hours later, at the San Francisco Intercontinental Hotel. The third is a cocktail party for two dozen at the Mark Hopkins. The most lavish is a $35,800-a-plate gourmet dinner for 70 guests at the Pacific Heights home of novelist Robert Mailer Anderson. The finale is a concert at the Nob Hill Masonic Center featuring Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Audioslave fame.

HOW ABOUT THAT: The payroll tax package that negotiators and the leadership say they’re confident they finalized late last night will become that rarest of 2012 legislative creatures: an expensive, multifaceted money-policy bill that clears Congress with comfortable and bipartisan majorities. They should know that their optimism was merited by tomorrow evening.

Weary aides were still doing the final detail work this morning — but it was confined to only technical issues and the refining of legislative language. Both the top negotiators, Republican House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp and Democratic Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, said all the policy disagreements had been bridged and predicted the deal would win the signatures of a strong majority of the conference committee members by early afternoon. (Until then, no paperwork detailing the locked-down provisions will be available.) Reid said he expected the House would embrace the package sometime tomorrow — which would mean the GOP would have to work around its self-imposed rules about how long legislative language must sit in the sunshine before a vote. The majority leader said senators looked to be ready to clear the package almost as soon as it arrives. If opponents work to slow-walk the deal, though, he said the Senate would work into the weekend to get it done — suggesting at least the theoretical possibility of a delayed start to the weeklong Presidents Day break.

The biggest last-minute stumbling block was over how to make federal workers contribute $15 billion in the coming decade toward the cost of the deal. The two Maryland Democrats in the room, Sen. Ben Cardin and Rep. Chris Van Hollen, objected strenuously to the idea of requiring all government employees (thousands of whom are their constituents) to put an additional 1.5 percent of their pay toward their retirement accounts. Initially, they pushed instead to hold down the size of the civilian employee COLA for next year. Ultimately, they agreed to raise the money by requiring federal workers hired in the future to contribute more (2.3 percent) to the defined benefit pension plans, while holding existing workers harmless.

And so the main votes against the package will be cast by the same Republican conservatives who have fought against the payroll tax and jobless benefits extensions since the start of last fall — and are galled that their leadership has not stuck by its guns and insisted that the entire $150 billion cost be offset elsewhere in the budget. (Only one-third of it will — from the pension change,  an equivalent $15 billion from auctioning to wireless companies a part of the airwaves  now reserved for TV broadcasters, another $15 billion in cuts to hospitals that rely on Medicare to make up the difference when people don’t pay their bills, and $5 billion from a new preventative health care program.)

In return, the bill would add about $1,000 to the 2012 take-home paychecks of a person making $50,000 — by holding at 4.2 percent (down from 6.2 percent a year ago) the amount taken to support Social Security. It also would stave off, at least until the end of the year, a 27 percent drop in payments to doctors who service Medicare patients. It  would continue 99 weeks of unemployment benefits through May for states hardest hit by joblessness. As many as 79 weeks would be provided through August and up to 73 weeks through December — but only in states where the jobless rate is above 9 percent. In the other three dozen states, the cap would be 63 weeks. States could (but wouldn’t have to) require drug screening of a limited group of people who get unemployment checks — mainly those who lost their last job because of drugs. There is language, pushed hard by GOP conservatives, to punish states that don’t prevent welfare recipients from using their benefit cards at liquor stores, casinos and strip clubs. And the deal may combine the spectrum sale language with a program to tie the nation’s public-safety radios together by allowing them to share one slice of radio frequency.

GUARANTEED SHOWDOWN: A Detroit News poll out today says Rick Santorum is leading Mitt Romney, 34 percent to 30 percent, among likely voters in the Michigan GOP primary — still a statistical tie, given the margin of error, but yet another indication that the Santorum surge is lasting, even in the state where the longtime front-runner was born. The voting is in 12 days. And the four years of tax returns the former Pennsylvania senator released last night should help in bolstering his image as the more lunchbucket of the two — at least in relative terms. While Romney’s returns were filled with eight-digit numbers, Santorum’s showed his income increasing steadily in the years after he lost his Senate seat and became a Washington advocate and consultant — from $660,000 in 2007 to $1.1 million in 2009, before slipping to $923,000 in 2010. He says he paid a combined tax rate of 28 percent over the four years. (Romney, remember, paid 14 percent because many of his earnings came from investments taxed at a lower capital gains rate.)

QUOTE OF NOTE: “My family has had the great privilege of serving Massachusetts before. They taught me that public service is an honor, given in trust, and that trust must be earned each and every day. That’s exactly what I intend to do,” 31-year-old state prosecutor Joe Kennedy III says in a video posted before his formal congressional candidacy announcement today. If he wins the seat from which Barney Frank is retiring, he’ll be the first person from the fifth generation in his family to hold federal office — starting when his great-great grandfather Honey Fitz Fitzgerald was elected to a Boston House seat 118 years ago.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: No current lawmakers, administration officials or other people prominent in Washington life. But Kim John Il would be turning 70 were he still alive, and Sonny Bono would be 77.
— David Hawkings, editor
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Wednesday, February 15, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE HOUSE: Convened at 10 and this afternoon and will begin debating the energy provisions of the GOP highway bill. (The last amendment vote is promised before 7.) The package would expand offshore drilling for oil and gas, permit drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, approve the Keystone XL pipeline and create a shale-oil leasing program — with any resulting federal revenue dedicated to road and bridge projects.

Boehner appears to have the votes to pass this section of his overall package as a stand-alone bill, but he still faces significant opposition — from fellow Republicans and almost all Democrats — to the other two parts, one to limit federal pensions and the other to revamp highway, rail and mass transit policy for the next five years. As a consequence, he announced this morning that debate on those sections would be put off until after next week’s Presidents Day recess. “It’s more important that we do it right than that we do it fast,” he told a GOP caucus meeting, promising to allow lawmakers to air their grievances through a wide-open amendment process .

THE SENATE: Convened at 9:30, will vote at noon to promote of Adalberto Jordan from the federal trial bench in Miami to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and will then spend the rest of the day on its version of the highway bill. But the first contentious amendment vote looks to have nothing to do with public works priorities; instead, it will be on Republican language that would allow any employer (not just religiously affiliated institutions) to opt out of Obama’s contraceptive coverage mandate. After that, attention may turn to proposals to either chide Egypt or cut off its U.S. aid because of its prosecution of Americans working to promote democracy.

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is flying to Milwaukee, where at 1:40 (D.C. time) he’ll urge corporate leaders to make more investments and hire more people in America — from the factory floor at Master Lock, a favorite example of the president’s because it brought 100 manufacturing jobs back from China in response to rising labor and logistical costs in Asia. (Obama carried Wisconsin by 14 points in 2008, but since then a big GOP surge in the state has made his chances this year a tossup.)

Air Force One takes off at 3 for Los Angeles, where tonight the president will appear at the first two events in an eight-fundraiser, three-city West Coast tour — a $250-a-head reception and Foo Fighters concert for 1,000 at the home of soap opera impresario Bradley Bell, followed by a $35,800-a-plate dinner in the mansion for 80 hosted by Bell and the actor Will Ferrell.

HOW IT CAME TO THIS: Negotiators continue to haggle today over the fine print of the legislative package extending the lower Social Security payroll tax through the end of the year, maintaining long-term unemployment insurance and paying doctors who care for Medicare patients at the current rate — but with spending cuts totaling no more than $60 billion and probably closer to $50 billion, which would be less than one-third the overall expense.

A deal was close enough, however, that House members were told to expect a vote on Friday. The last major political obstacle faded there this morning, when Boehner got solid if hardly unanimous support for his not-too-many-offsets capitulation from the most conservative members of his caucus. The Senate is also likely to clear the measure by the end of the week, even though McConnell has been publicly cool to the notion of extending the payroll tax cut without paying for it — and seemed to have been taken by surprise at the House GOP leadership’s about-face.

“We have a good framework, but there are still some important details yet to go,” Chris Van Hollen, one of the House Democratic negotiators, said at mid-morning. “It ain’t over till it’s over, so everyone needs to hold on tight a little while longer.” The conference committee has agreed to set 73 weeks as the maximum extension of jobless insurance in the 14 hardest-hit states (down from 99 weeks now) and 63 weeks in all the others (down from 93 weeks). The Republican efforts to require drug tests or a GED as a condition of getting a benefits check have been scuttled. The offsets would come from broadcast spectrum sales, some new fees on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, cutting Medicare payments to hospitals where too many patients skip out on their bills, trimming a fund to combat chronic diseases and setting some new federal pension limits — which, problematically, overlap with some pay-fors in the House highway bill.

But if the measure goes to Obama by the weekend, it would bring to an end one of the most tortured and protracted fiscal policy standoffs in a year that has been replete with them — and just in time for lawmakers to boast back home (during next week’s recess) that they’d put aside their well-known reputations for bickering, brinkmanship and ideological high-handedness long enough to reach bipartisan consensus on a budget bill with tangible, real world implications — and with fully two weeks to spare. (The payroll tax break — which means $20 a week to someone making $50,000 a year — the jobless aid and the “doc fix” are all set to lapse on Feb. 29.) With polls still showing their collective approval rating flirting with single digits, and the election nine months away, members of Congress were under significant pressure to set aside their dysfunctional ways on the three-part extenders package — which in other years would be barely a footnote but which may stand as one of the year’s most high-profile legislative accomplishments. And Republicans, especially, can take some cold comfort in the notion that any anger from the base about their flip-flop on offsets won’t last as long as the anger they would have stirred up nationwide, had they held firm against a continued tax break for the middle class.

PLUM POSITION: Robert Zoellick told the World Bank’s board this morning that he would not seek a reappointment and would step down June 30, when his five-year term as president ends. (During his tenure the bank says it provided more than $247 billion to help developing countries boost their economic growth and combat poverty.) Zoellick, a former deputy secretary of State and U.S. trade representative, is only 58 and would be a top candidate for several Cabinet posts under any Republican who might win the White House this fall. In the interim, his departure will compel the Obama administration to decide whether the United States will insist on holding on to the job — which has been held by an American since the international lending organization was created 68 years ago. Water-cooler speculation in the global banking world has focused on Hillary Clinton and Larry Summers as the highest-profile Americans who might want the post.

NOW AND LATER: The latest good polling news for Rick Santorum comes from Ohio — which, like Michigan, is an industrial Midwest battleground not only in the Republican primaries but in the fall as well. A Quinnipiac Poll out today shows the ex-Pennsylvania senator ahead there by 7 percentage points — with 36 percent to 29 percent for Mitt Romney. (Newt Gingrich, who had identified Ohio as one of his better Super Tuesday opportunities, is at 20 percent, and Ron Paul is at 9 percent.) In a potential fall matchup, the Q poll shows Obama edging Romney in Ohio by 2 points, Santorum by 6 and Gingrich by 12 — even though his approval rating in the state remains a hair below his-new-national average 47 percent. (The Ohio vote is March 6, a week after Michiagn.)

The less-obvious good news for Santorum comes from Texas, where the Byzantine court battle over congressional redistricting has now forced another postponement of the GOP primary. It was supposed to be part of Super Tuesday. Then it was pushed to April 3. Yesterday that date was scratched as well, with the party instead asking judges in San Antonio to permit a May 22 date. But that, too, will become impractical if the redistricting fight drags on, and under some scenarios the vote could be as late as June 26. Almost certainly someone will have secured a majority of the delegates by then, but if not, the 155 coming from Texas would be an enormous prize. And the bulk of them almost surely go to the most conservative candidate left standing. For now, Gingrich seems to be counting on it — in part because he’s got promises of enthusiastic help from his former rival, Gov. Rick Perry. But if Gingrich is out of the race by late spring, Santorum could claim an enormous prize.

CITY HALL TO CONVENTION HALL: Antonio Villaraigosa was tapped today to be chairman of the Democratic convention starting in Charlotte the day after Labor Day. The position is akin to being master of ceremonies (assuming the convention remains a choreographed Obama love-fest and doesn’t degenerate into party infighting), and so it affords the two-term mayor of Los Angeles three evenings in prime time to raise his profile as a leading spokesman for the entire party, not just the Latino community. Beyond that, it underscores the party’s efforts to generate an especially heavy turnout for Obama among Hispanics in four of the swing states — Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. Usually the chairman’s job goes to a senior member of the congressional leadership, but DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Obama campaign have made clear they want this convention to shake off some of its more old-fashioned traditions.

HASTINGS RULING: Winsome Packer may continue to pursue her sexual harassment suit against the Helsinki Commission, but a federal judge has ruled that Alcee Hastings and a former chief of staff, Fred Turner, may not be held personally liable in the case. Packer worked for the Europe-policy advisory commission in Vienna and claims the Florida Democrat made frequent unwanted sexual advances when he visited as a leader of the commission from 2007 until last year — and that Hastings and Turner retaliated against her after she complained. “This whole thing is ridiculous, bizarre, frivolous, and has wasted — and is still wasting — a whole lot of folks’ time and money,” the congressman said in a statement. “I am glad to see that these bogus allegations have finally been dismissed.” But that’s actually not true. Judge Barbara Rothstein’s ruling yesterday makes clear that Hastings may still be put under oath to describe his version of his encounters with Packer.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: No current lawmakers, but  at least two former Cabinet members: James Schlesinger, Defense secretary for Nixon and Ford and then Carter’s first Energy secretary (83), and John Block, Reagan’s first Agriculture secretary (77). And former House GOP Conference Chairman John Anderson of Illinois, who won 5.7 million 1980 presidential votes (90).
— David Hawkings, editor
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Tuesday, February 14, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE WHITE HOUSE: “You're starting to hear voices talk about how we can go ahead and make this happen in a timely way on behalf of the American people,” Obama said this morning about the new Republican offer to support a payroll tax cut extension without offsets. “But in Washington, you can’t take anything for granted.”

The president has started a 90-minute meeting with Xi Jinping, who is China’s vice president now but is set next year to begin a decade as president — during which both the economic interconnectedness of and the military rivalry between their countries will intensify. While hoping to develop some personal chemistry with Xi, the president (with Biden at his side) is expected to press American concerns about China’s trade-rule violations, intellectual property theft, currency valuation, treatment of political dissidents and approaches to Tibet,  North Korea, Iran and Syria.

Starting at 3, the president will tape interviews designed to promote his budget priorities with TV anchors in Las Vegas, Atlanta, Tampa and Charlotte. He’ll get an update on the military’s posture around the world from Panetta at 4:45.

THE SENATE: Convened at 10 and looks to be held hostage all day by Rand Paul, who is vowing to delay as long as possible both a non-controversial judicial confirmation (Adalberto Jordan for the 11th Circuit) and debate on the highway bill — unless he’s promised a vote on whether to suspend all aid to Egypt until the release of the nongovernmental Americans working there to promote democracy. If Reid does not relent, the Jordan vote could come after midnight.

THE HOUSE: Convenes at noon and starting at 2 will debate three post office naming bills, with votes put off until 6:30 to allow lawmakers a full day of travel.

GIVE AND TAKE: Top Democrats are reacting with skeptical optimism today to the House Republican leadership’s surprise new offer on the Social Security payroll tax.

On the one hand, they are thrilled in their view that Boehner & Co. have blinked, big time, in a debate that has bedeviled both parties since last fall. “This is a major step forward in these negotiations,” Schumer said this morning, just before Obama offered encouraging words of his own. But at the same time, the Democrats are plainly worried that — if they agree to extend the 2-percentage-point reduction in the payroll tax through the end of the year without offsetting the $100 billion cost — they will be seriously jeopardizing their leverage over the other two parts of the package stuck in conference negotiations: an extension of unemployment benefits and a continuation of the current Medicare doctor reimbursement rate. The president, notably, did not embrace the House GOP offer at the hastily arranged photo op a few minutes ago.

The president made clear that preventing a payroll tax increase for 160 million Americans on March 1 (meaning $40 weekly for the typical paycheck) was his top priority in the talks, with the jobless benefits second. (Extending those would cost $30 billion at least for the rest of the year.) But Democratic leaders in Congress are almost as interested in maintaining the current payment system for doctors, which could cost another $30 billion this year, and they worry that they could be stumbling into a negotiating trap on the jobless aid and the “doc fix” if they take “yes” for an answer too quickly on the payroll tax. On the one hand, they see the GOP move as an acknowledgment that it has lost the messaging war on the payroll question — and that GOP conservatives (who started endorsing the leadership’s proposal today) have concluded their political wellbeing on this one trumps their ideological desires. And so, if anything, the Democrats’ tendency will be to press the GOP to accept no additional offsets on the other two big tickets in the package, as well. But if the Republicans hold fast against that idea, and those two provisions expire in 15 days, that would amount to the Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Put another way, Republicans may have taken away the Democrats’ leverage by preemptively agreeing to the payroll tax, but in so doing it looks like they are taking the jobless money and the Medicare fix hostage.

MARCH OF THE AGENCY HEADS: Administration officials began their annual trek to Capitol Hill this morning to offer their obligatory spirited defenses of the Obama budget proposal — and rebut the Republicans who excoriated the document at almost every turn.

The $614 billion Pentagon plan, which would mean a 5 percent cut in defense spending, “will maintain our military’s decisive edge and help sustain America’s global leadership,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey told Senate Armed Services. No, replied John McCain, the top panel Republican, it “continues the administration’s habit of putting short-term political considerations over our long-term national security interests.” Senators of both parties also complained that the administration has made no plans to deal with the additional defense cuts that will be mandated if sequestration takes effect next January. Panetta said he hoped that — now that the draconian nature of those across-the-board cuts is clear — Congress will make deep enough cuts on its own to avoid them.

Acting Budget Director Jeffrey Zients defended the president’s priorities and fiscal math at Senate Budget, where Republicans asserted the budget was using deceitful accounting methods to make its claim of $4 trillion in deficit reduction during the next decade. He said the budget was making good on the president’s efforts to cut the deceit in half during his term — but said it’s taking longer than promised because the economic situation is far worse than the administration had anticipated. (The budget calls for total spending next year of $3.8 trillion — just three-tenths of a percent more than this year.) Geithner went before Senate Finance to defend the president’s continued promotion of his tax agenda.

CLOSER THAN EVER: As of this morning there’s a third straight poll that puts Rick Santorum statistically tied with Mitt Romney among Republican voters nationwide. The newest one, from CBS and The New York Times, shows the spread between them is within the margin of sampling error: 30 percent for the surging former Pennsylvania senator and 27 percent for the stagnating former Massachusetts governor. (Ron Paul is at 12 percent and Newt Gingrich is at 10 percent.) The other two surveys taken since Santorum’s big night a week ago show him and Romney within a statistically insignificant 2 points of each other, with Gingrich trailing by either 11 points (Pew Research Center) or 14 (Gallup). But still, the trend is clear that Santorum has become the conservatives’ latest preferred alternative to Romney — his name joining a roster of four other rightward Republicans who have surged into the lead in such national polls: Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Gingrich. All but the former Speaker are gone, of course, and he’s the only one who’s slipped off the top of the pedestal but later returned — a history of resurrection that means it’s still probably too soon to declare it a Romney-versus-Santorum race. (Gingrich himself said yesterday he doesn’t see it that way and scoffed at a National Review op-ed  urging that he drop out.)

It’s also the case that only a modicum of good news tends to propel the fickle waves of not-Mitt momentum — and every time that’s happened so far, Romney has come back with some good news of his own. Which is why Michigan’s primary two weeks from today now looms as such an important contest. As of now, Santorum has a remarkably lopsided lead there, 39 percent to 25 percent, according to a poll out yesterday. If Romney can use his surprising underdog status in his own home state to his advantage in the coming days and leverage his financial and organizational superiority into a big win, then he could go a long way to restoring the narrative of himself as the good-enough conservative and inevitable nominee. If he falters to Santorum in Michigan, his path to Tampa will become downright troubled.

TRAIL TIPS: (1) Republicans in Alabama say the insider trading investigation of Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus by the Office of Congressional Ethics is seriously complicating his effort to win renomination for an 11th term. The quickly emerging consensus is that, unless Bachus can use his $1 million campaign bank account and his establishment organizational muscle to win an outright majority in the first-round of the GOP primary — four weeks from today — he is highly vulnerable to losing an April 24 runoff to the almost-certain runner up on March 13: Scott Beason, a state senator since 2007 (and a state representative for eight years before that) who has significant tea party support. “Going along and getting along has gotten us where we are, and I’m for turning the country around” is the challenger’s message — although he only declared his candidacy a month ago and so far he has raised so little money to broadcast his message that the FEC hasn’t asked for a report.

(2) The California Democratic Party has endorsed Janice Hahn in her campaign for a full term against ethically embattled Laura Richardson in a reconfigured House district south of Los Angeles. The endorsement — made because Hahn won 79 percent support among the district’s delegates to the state convention — will be listed on sample ballots sent to every registered Democrat in the he district before the June primary. (The party made no endorsement in the other California race featuring two Democratic incumbents, Howard Berman and Brad Sherman.) Richardson, who also came to Washington in a special election, back in 2007, has been under the Ethics Committee’s scrutiny almost ever since; questions about her real estate dealings were dropped, but the panel is now looking into a set of allegations that she compelled members of her congressional staff to do political work and personal tasks.

(3) The latest polling in Indiana suggests that Dick Lugar has shaken off the most serious challenge of his Senate career. The survey taken last week (by Lugar’s campaign) showed him ahead of state Treasurer Richard Mourdock 55 percent to 30 percent among likely voters in the May 8 primary. Mourdock began the campaign as one of the highest-profile tea-party-backed challengers to a GOP incumbent anywhere, but he’s never been able to raise the money to match the hype.

(4) The latest poll in Hawaii shows Mazie Hirono with 56 percent support to 36 percent for the man she succeeded in the House six years ago, Ed Case, in the race for the Democratic nomination for the open Senate seat. The primary is Aug. 11. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser survey showed both aspirants winning in the fall by 20 percentage points against Linda Lingle, who Republicans have touted as having a more than decent shot because she remained popular through two terms as governor.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: The only Valentine’s Day congressional birthday belongs to Richie Neal of Massachusetts, the No. 6 Democrat on House Ways and Means (63).
— David Hawkings, editor

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Monday, February 13, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE WHITE HOUSE: “We must transform our budget from one focused on speculating, spending and borrowing to one constructed on the solid foundation of educating, innovating and building,” the presidential budget proposal formally sent to the Capitol this morning declares. Obama was making the same point in a speech at this hour at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale.

The president will be in the East Room at 1:45 to preside over the annual National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal ceremonies. The eclectic group being honored includes actor Al Pacino, pianist André Watts, country musician Mel Tillis, painter Will Barnet, poet Rita Dove and the USO — for “lifting the spirits of America’s troops and their families through the arts.”

THE SENATE: Convenes at 2 and will vote at 5:30 to cut off debate and move toward confirming Adalberto Jordan, who’s been on the federal trial court in Miami for 12 years, as the first Cuban-born judge on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Republicans don’t object to the promotion but are threatening to filibuster many Obama nominees to protest his recently assertive use of recess-appointment power.

Reid is working to smooth the prospects for passing the highway bill, although probably not until after the Presidents Day recess, and gauging whether conference negotiations are so stalled that he needs to try and move another short-term extension of the payroll tax break.

THE HOUSE: Convenes at 1 for a pro forma session.

SAVE IT FOR LATER: Nobody in the capital views the Obama budget as an agenda for congressional action this spring, summer and fall. Instead, it is much closer to a draft platform for the Democratic convention in September — and a briefing book for the lame-duck session in November and December, when almost all the year’s consequential fiscal policy decisions will be made in response to the outcome of the election. That is when the future of the about-to-expire Bush tax cuts will be settled, along with the fate of the across-the-board spending cuts that are about to take effect.

The president’s proposal — all the details of which were made available only at 11 — is in essence a restatement of the “grand bargain” he sought to sell Boehner last summer and the package he then sent to the deficit-reduction supercommittee. It calls for reducing deficits a combined $4 trillion over the next decade — with $1.5 trillion of the gap closed with new revenue and the rest with discretionary-spending restraint and trimming entitlements at the multibillion-dollar margins. The short-term bottom line would be a reduction in the annual deficit from $1.33 trillion this fiscal year (8.5 percent the size of the economy) to $901 billion (5.5 percent of GDP) in budget year 2013, which starts in October.

His revenue plan centers once again on ending the Bush tax cuts in December for families making more than $250,000 a year. It also would eliminate several tax deductions for the wealthy, require million-dollar-earners to pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes (the so-called Buffett rule), impose $61 billion in new taxes on banks to recover costs from the financial bailout and reap $41 bllion from ending some oil, gas and coal company tax breaks.

His spending plan counts on $1 trillion in savings over a decade from abiding by the August debt limit deal’s discretionary spending caps — albeit with decent boosts for transportation infrastructure (high-speed rail, especially) and education, with proposals for modernizing 35,000 schools, hiring thousands of new teachers and creating a  new $8 billion fund to help  community colleges and businesses to train workers in fast-expanding industries. (Such plus-ups would be offset by on-paper savings from the wind-downs in Iraq and Afghanistan, from cutting big-ticket domestic agencies such as EPA and NASA and by freezing many programs at the NIH.) The budget would leave Social Security alone but derive $360 billion in savings from Medicare and Medicaid mainly through reduced payments to health care providers, and $278 billion more from trimming non-health entitlements — mainly farm subsidies and government retirement benefits.

THE UNAVOIDABLE TRUTH: Virtually everything in that summary has been proposed by the president before and stopped by congressional Republicans before. That dynamic won’t change before the election. The GOP majority will push through a budget resolution through the House this spring that will project more assertive deficit reduction mainly through something similar to the Medicare revamp Paul Ryan promoted a year ago. Of course, it will call for retaining the Bush tax rates. In the Senate, the Democratic majority won’t ever put a budget proposal on the floor — neither the president’s nor its own. But McConnell will be able to force a vote that symbolically rejects the president’s package (the result will be along the lines of last year’s 0-97 ballot).

That political positioning will keep Congress occupied into the spring, at which point attention will be focused almost entirely on appropriations — apportioning money to the programs that would feel almost all of the brunt of a sequester at the end of the year, which is emphatically on course so long as the president’s blueprint is stashed on a high shelf at the Capitol. (His budget would make the across-the-board cuts unnecessary, administration officials say.) While the sequester would dictate a $16 billion cut from Medicare starting in January, it would mandate $39 billion in cuts from non-defense appropriations and $55 billion from the military. There is almost no way, politically, for lawmakers to clear legislation before the election that would unshackle themselves from those strictures — and even if they did, Obama says he’d veto it. But there’s only a slightly better chance that before Nov. 6 lawmakers will be capable of agreeing on the tough choices that would take the place of the across-the-board cuts. That is why the seven weeks between Election Day and New Year’s Day look to be among the least pleasant in post-election congressional history.

THE VALUE OF SECRETS: Preliminary negotiations will get started this week on the piece of legislation that has captured the public’s attention so far this year — the so-called Stock Act. The main issue is not whether the final version will put a highlighter over the notion that members of Congress and their aides are subject to the same laws against insider trading as everyone else — meaning they can’t buy or sell securities based on information they learn from behind closed doors at legislative or political strategy meetings. The key question now is whether Congress will require political intelligence consultants to register the same as regular-old lobbyists — which is what a bipartisan majority of 60 senators wants but Cantor did not allow the House to vote on. The financial services industry, which counts on these consultants, is going to fight with all its might against the Senate language — and the outcome will offer a signal as to how well-toned that industry’s muscle has become in the years since the financial meltdown.

IT’S OH SO QUIET: Candidates looking to spin members of the national political press corps will be largely out of luck for the next 11 days; many of them will be taking some rare time off to do laundry, return personal e-mail and get some decent nights’ sleep during the current lull in the Republican presidential campaign — which began after Mitt Romney escaped the weekend with plurality wins in both the CPAC straw poll (38 percent to 31 percent for Rick Santorum) and the Maine Caucuses (by 194 votes over Ron Paul).

The next set piece in the campaign is a debate in Phoenix sponsored by CNN on Feb. 22; six days after that are the winner-take-all primary in Arizona, which Romney seems to have in the bag, and the delegates-awarded-proportionately contest in Michigan, where Santorum is pushing hard with the help of a $3 million fundraising boost since last week’s three-state sweep. “We think this is a two-person race right now,” Santorum asserted on CNN yesterday. And the most recent national tracking poll out from Gallup, on Saturday, showed the former Pennsylvania  in solid second place among GOP voters, with 24 percent to 34 percent for Romney, while Newt Gingrich had slipped back to 17 percent. The former Speaker is counting on solid showings on Super Tuesday (March 6) in his home state of Georgia and Ohio.

TRAIL TIPS: (1) Don Payne is battling colon cancer but nonetheless plans on seeking a 13th term this fall, when he will be 78. The New Jersey Democrat, a former Congressional Black Caucus chairman and a senior member of the Foreign Affairs and Education committees, remains a safe bet for re-election; his Newark-centered district was minimally redrawn for the coming decade. The congressman’s namesake son, who’s president of the Newark City Council, says that his father’s prognosis for a full recovery is solid and that he announced his illness to raise public awareness about prevention and early detection.

(2) The game of political musical chairs started by Florida’s all-but-formally-signed congressional redistricting plan has taken an unusual turn: The state may be getting two additional House seats, but that’s not preventing at least one member-versus-member primary matchup. Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica made clear over the weekend that he would seek his 11th term in the same reconfigured district north of Orlando where fellow Republican Sandy Adams plans to run for her second term. The district is mashup of the two lawmakers’ current constituencies — with 51 percent of the people Adams now represents and 42 percent of Mica’s current district.

(3) John Conyers, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and the House’s second-most-senior member, has been endorsed by Obama for a 25th term — which is unusual and noteworthy because Conyers is looking towards a potentially contentious primary, and presidents generally refrain from publicly picking sides in intraparty fights. The four other Democrats running for the Detroit seat are state Sen. Glenn Anderson, state Sen. Bert Johnson, state Rep Shanelle Jackson and lawyer Godfrey Dillard. The state’s redistricting process put the incumbent’s home outside the boundaries of the district where he’s running, though he’s been representing most of the people who live there.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Freshman Democratic Sen. Dick Blumenthal of Connecticut (66).
— David Hawkings, editor

Obama Uses Old Ideas for Sequester <View full article>
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Friday, February 10, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is due in the press briefing room at 12:15 to personally announce the administration’s plan for accommodating religious employers outraged by a proposed requirement that all health plans provide free coverage of birth control.

With Gabby Giffords at his side, Obama is about to sign her bill closing a legal loophole that had aided Mexican drug smugglers equipped with ultralight aircraft. (Reporters will press her afterward about whether she’s endorsing her old Arizona district director, Ron Barber, as only a special election placeholder or also in the November election.) The president’s regular Friday afternoon hotel fundraiser is at 3:30 at the Jefferson.

THE HOUSE: Not in session

THE SENATE: Not in session.

COVERAGE, COVERED: The president’s not going to call it a cave-in or a flip-flop or even a reversal; those labels will be left for women’s groups to embrace, probably more silently than aloud. Instead, Obama will say he’s making an “accommodation” to religious organizations by embracing a new policy in which they will not have to cover the cost of birth control coverage for their employees — the insurance companies will be directly responsible instead.

Under the plan hashed out last night and designed to quell a culture war uproar, regulations carrying out the preventive care enhancements of the 2010 health care overhaul will still have to guarantee free contraception (no co-pays or premiums) to women no matter where they work. But if Roman Catholic and other religious universities and hospitals declare themselves conscientious objectors, the companies that provide their employees’ coverage will be compelled to pick up the tab. The president will assert that the middle ground protects both the rights of women to have comprehensive health coverage and the rights of the church to its religious liberties. Administration officials said that leaders on both sides of the passionate three-week debate had helped forge the new proposed regulation and that they were confident the president had the authority to order insurers to provide the free coverage. The altered rule will take effect a year later than originally planned, in August 2013.

That the president himself was appearing before the cameras to explain the decision is clear evidence that he sees the controversy as casting a potentially big cloud over his re-election campaign, in which he is counting on doing almost as well with Catholics as he did four years ago, when he took 54 percent of their vote. But it's not clear yet whether today’s move will tamp down the angry rhetoric among his Republican rivals.

ALL DAY LONG: Rick Santorum offered a full-throated version of his socially conservative vision to an enthusiastic Conservative Political Action Committee crowd this morning — thereby creating an even more awkward atmosphere for Mitt Romney’s 1 o’clock arrival. “Conservatives and tea party folks: We are not just wings of the Republican Party — we are the Republican Party,” Santorum said.

The day could not come at a better time for the former Pennsylvania senator, who has a genuine shot at pushing Newt Gingrich out of the way, consolidating the culturally and religiously motivated voters in the GOP and becoming the only viable alternative to Romney. And the day could not come at a more challenging time for the former Massachusetts governor, who runs a genuine risk that his businessman’s steady approach to advancing his candidacy — and explaining his virtues — could collapse unless he can market his conservative bona fides better; otherwise, the half-hearted enthusiasm that has sustained his “inevitability” campaign so far could readily devolve into mostly dissatisfaction. (One extra awkward omen for Romney today is that it was at the CPAC gathering four years ago, in the same Marriott Wardman Park ballroom, where he abandoned his first campaign for the presidency.)

“I won among conservatives in New Hampshire. I won solidly among conservatives in Florida, won among conservatives in Nevada, and have the most delegates in this race,” Romney said on Fox last night, “so I wouldn’t say that I haven’t been able to get good support from conservatives” He suggested however, that he could do a better job highlighting some of the more culturally conservative moves on his resume, noting that he “led the charge” to reverse the Massachusetts state Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriage.

Gingrich, meanwhile, will appear at 4:10 and plans to offer an idea-packed speech calling for revamping the EPA into “environmental solutions agency,” overhauling the regulatory regime at the FDA, replacing NASA’s bureaucracy, reining in the federal judiciary’s powers and imposing a flat 15 percent income tax while ending capital gains taxes.

The biggest news of the convention could come tomorrow at 4:30, however. Sarah Palin is sending signals that she’ll use her CPAC concluding speech to announce her endorsement. (The results of the weeklong Maine caucuses, where Ron Paul is predicting a solid showing and maybe a victory, will be announced at about 7:30 that night.)

TIMING IS EVERYTHING: Of course it would be a major story if the Office of Congressional Ethics openly alleges that Spencer Bachus violated federal insider trading laws. But the fact that the office is looking at the Alabama Republican shouldn’t be all that surprising. The office is all about proving its worth as an independent investigative agency, and the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee long ago revealed his “hobby” as a day trader on his annual financial disclosure reports — just the sort of activity that the OCE was created to take a look at proactively, without waiting to receive a complaint as the House Ethics process generally requires. Had the office not opened an investigation after the “60 Minutes” report on insider trading last fall, in which Bachus’ fondness for stock options was a central feature, that would have been at least as big a development for watchdogs to worry about.

Beyond all that, the story about Bachus at the top of the Washington Post’s front page is — ironically — evidence to support the views of the tiny minority of lawmakers willing to label the so-called Stock Act as nothing more than self-serving political silliness. They say the core provision of the legislation passed by both the House and Senate is unnecessary, because there’s already a solid system in place to ferret out self-dealing by senators and congressmen. And that’s sure the way it looks in the Bachus case. He’s filed annual reports for years detailing all his trades; would filing such reports more frequently have drawn him scrutiny earlier? The OCE is looking into the matter; would an underscoring of the law that prevents anyone from trading on privileged information have made the agency act faster? The congressman says he was basing his trades on a layman’s understanding of the news, not on super-secret insights from talking to Ben Bernanke or Hank Paulson; would the Stock Act provide methods for refuting him? The clear argument seems in favor of “no” to all three questions.

ANOTHER WEEK DOWN: The status of the one bill that both parties have labeled “must do” this winter will remain “not close to getting done” until at least next week, which will start 16 days before the current payroll tax, jobless benefit and Medicare doctor payment formulas expire. With both the House and Senate sent home for the weekend, there are no serious talks possible today. And the ill will and frustration around the negotiating table grew considerably yesterday, when a proposal highly touted by Democrats as a genuine offer to step toward the middle ground was met with little more than derisive laughter by Republicans. (The offer was to end unemployment benefits after 93 weeks, down from the 99 weeks currently available in states with the highest jobless rates; the GOP was hoping to hear a number much close to its 59-week negotiating position.) Each side walked away accusing the other of not being serious about getting to a deal — and only being serious about trying to make the other look like the guilty party.

QUOTE OF NOTE: “How come liberals never admit that they’re liberal?” Marco Rubio asked to rousing applause at the CPAC convention yesterday. “They’ve now come up with a new word called ‘progressive,’ which I thought was an insurance company but apparently it’s a label.”

ANOTHER QUOTE OF NOTE: “Stephen Colbert used to be my friend. I even signed the poor baby’s cast when he hurt his hand. But since the day he started his Super PAC, taking secret money from special interests, he’s been out of control, even using his Super PAC money to attack my friend, Newt Gingrich. And if that weren’t enough, I hear he doesn’t even like kittens,” Pelosi deadpans in a video released yesterday that designed as a campaign spot to promote Super PAC transparency legislation. “I support this ad because Americans deserve a better tomorrow today. Join me in stopping Colbert and creating a new politics free of special interests. The first step is passing the Disclose Act.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Today, Walter Jones of North Carolina (69); tomorrow, another occasionally iconoclastic House Republican, Rob Woodall of Georgia (42), and a Democrat, Tammy Baldwin, who’s giving up her House seat to run for the Senate in Wisconsin (50).
— David Hawkings, editor

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Thursday, February 9, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is getting ready to make remarks at 12:15 hailing the $25 billion foreclosure abuse settlement finalized overnight among the states, the Justice Department and five of the nation’s biggest mortgage lenders: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial. Under the deal, $17 billion will go toward reducing by $20,000 the principal that struggling homeowners owe on their notes, $5 billion will go to various state and federal housing programs and the rest will subsidize refinancing by underwater-but-up-to-date-on-their-payments homeowners.

The president will be in the East Room at 2 to announce his decision to free 10 states from many of their obligations under the No Child Left Behind education law. He will welcome Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti to the Oval at 2:45 for talks about the European financial morass, NATO policies and the complexities of the Middle East and North Africa. And he’s got a top-dollar fundraiser at 7 in an undisclosed Washington mansion.

THE HOUSE: Convened at 9 and has gone home for the weekend after voting 417-2 for legislation that would make it easier to expose and punish government officials who buy securities if they don’t stop trading on congressional knowledge — the phrase that forms the convenient acronym in Stock Act. The dissenters were Republicans John Campbell of California and Rob Woodall of Georgia. No proposed amendments were allowed, so the bill is narrower in scope than the package senators embraced last week. (The main difference is that only the Senate bill would require new financial disclosures and lobbyist-style registrations by the burgeoning number of businesses that offer “political intelligence consulting” to Wall Street firms.)

THE SENATE: Convened at 9:30 and at 2 will vote to brush aside dilatory moves and begin officially debating the $109 billion, two-year highway, rail and mass transit policy and projects bill — starting next week. (To get it passed before the Presidents Day recess, Reid will have to cut several preliminary deals with the three chairmen who share jurisdiction.)

PUSHED TO A RESPONSE: Obama is going to have to back down on his contraception coverage mandate well before Boehner and McConnell start forcing a reversal through legislation.

The president’s already going to be in the headlines twice today for politically popular moves, on education and mortgages, and may not want to muddy those messages. But it’s a safe bet that by sometime tomorrow he’ll announce some sort of modification of the new HHS rule. That’s because the politics of the imbroglio are rapidly spinning away from him, with Republicans quickly united and galvanized by what they see as a winning election-year return to the culture wars — and a growing number of centrist Democrats in politically perilous circumstances pressing the White House for a quick about-face on its decision.

The collective and quick calculation is that the government’s preservation of religious freedom is a much more popular idea than a government guarantee of access to free birth control — at least at the all-important center of the national political spectrum, where the independents who decide elections are. Those are the voters who will decide Virginia’s tossup open-seat Senate race — a statistical dead heat in five straight polls, including one this week — which is why former Democratic National Chairman Tim Kaine has come out against the new health care regulations. Same for Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who don’t want their relatively clear shots at re-election sullied by the brouhaha and are urging the president to back down. The four other Catholic Democratic senators up this fall — Claie McCaskill, Maria Cantwell, Bob Menendez and Kirsten Gillibrand — are behind the White House so far but would be thrilled if the issue went away. And all of them are wondering why the president didn’t take the advice of the two most prominent Catholics in the administration at the time the decision was made — Biden and Bill Daley, who both warned emphatically of the political peril.

And yet the polling offers decent evidence that a softening of the HHS rule may be a snap decision that’s beyond what’s politically warranted. While Roman Catholic leaders are lambasting the regulations — which they see as an affront to their rights to run their hospitals, schools and other charities under their own moral rubric — there’s widely circulated polling that shows rank-and-file Catholic voters are solidly supportive of a birth control coverage requirement. And even if the Democrats slip below 50 percent in their support from Catholics at the polls, standing solidly behind the mandate should have no trouble boosting their support among women and younger voters.

DIFFERENT SCALES: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee are the states being released from many of the No Child Left Behind law’s requirements because they’ve come up with viable alternatives for improving their educational systems and methods for evaluate student achievement. The announcement makes good on one of the first pieces of Obama’s “We can’t wait” agenda, in which he’s promising unilateral executive branch actions in the absence of congressional activity — and earning the enmity of many Republicans on the Hill who see him as over-reaching. (There’s almost no chance that Congress will rewrite the elementary and secondary education policy law this year; the Senate HELP panel approved a plan last fall that the White House didn’t like, and negotiations in the House Education and Labor Committee long ago devolved into partisan name-calling.)

No Child requires all students to be proficient, for their grade levels, in reading and math by 2014. Critics say the goal is unrealistic, produces too much “teaching to the test” and means too many schools are punished as failures. The states given waivers will get a break on that mandate in return for providing detailed plans for preparing their children for college and careers, setting new targets for improving student achievement, rewarding high-performing schools and getting help to the under-performers. (New Mexico also asked for a waiver now but was told it had more work to do; 28 other states are also getting waiver applications ready — an obvious sign that dissatisfaction with the law is spreading far and wide.)

THE NEW LINE: Three of the top-ranking members of the Senate majority leadership — Harry Reid, Dick Durbin and Patty Murray — are all veteran appropriators who want to protect the congressional power over the purse from any further weakening in an era of shrinking discretionary budgets, earmark bans and looming sequestration. But they won’t be able to resist for very long the growing bipartisan pressure for the line-item veto proposal the House enthusiastically embraced yesterday. The enormousness of the deficits and the political mandate for lawmakers to look like they’re cutting wasteful spending have combined to push the appropriators off their long-running preeminence in the congressional power structure.

The leadership won’t be compelled to put the House bill on the floor for a clean up-or-down vote. Instead, they will probably acquiesce in the idea that the measure be attached as an amendment to some other likely-to-be-enacted bill. That’s what its two principal Senate sponsors, Tom Carper and John McCain, want to do — confident that they can grow their roster of supporters comfortably beyond the current list of 27 Republicans and 16 Democrats. (Rob Portman, the Ohio senator who ran the White House budget office five years ago, agrees that the handwriting’s on the wall that the line-item veto’s time has returned — after 14 years off the books, and after laborious negotiations to come up with a reliably constitutional procedure.)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Departing Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia (66); Democratic Rep. Jay Inslee of Washington (61); House GOP freshmen Renee Ellmers of North Carolina (48) and Todd Rokita of Indiana (42).
— David Hawkings, editor

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Wednesday, February 8, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE HOUSE: Convened at 10 and this afternoon will cast a rare lopsided and bipartisan vote in favor of a budget bill. The measure would give presidents a form of line-item veto power that its authors are convinced is constitutional — because it would subject his packages of proposed rescissions from appropriations laws to up-or-down congressional votes. (A 1996 line-item veto law was struck down by the Supreme Court two years later because it gave the president unilateral power to excise line items  from statutes.) Obama has endorsed the House bill (which will be amended to shield Corps of Engineers projects from rescissions) and it’s got broad backing from senators, too — but not Reid, a former appropriator, who thinks the bill would yield too much legislative power over the purse and is likely to keep the measure off the floor.

THE SENATE: Not in session. Democrats are holding a daylong political and legislative strategy session at Nationals Park. Republicans are doing the same, but in the Capitol.

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is headed to the baseball stadium at 2, but his pep talk to the senators will be off camera. He’ll be back in the Oval at 4 to talk with Clinton about the world’s lengthening roster of diplomatic hot spots.

GUESS WHO’S BACK: Justifiably emboldened by last night’s extraordinary three-state sweep, Rick Santorum declared today that he would “plant the flag” in Mitt Romney’s ancestral backyard of Michigan and make an all-out bid to win the primary there three weeks from now. With the help of a post-upset fundraising burst (his campaign reported raising $250,000 in a few hours this morning)  he said he was confident he would triumph by portraying himself as an outsider who was a more reliable advocate for blue-collar values of personal opportunity and moral conservatism — and Romney as “a well-oiled weather vane.”

The former Pennsylvania senator’s surge to solid victories in the Colorado caucuses (his biggest upset, by 5 percentage points over Romney) the Minnesota caucuses (by 18 points — over Ron Paul) and the Missouri beauty contest (by 30 points, and without Newt Gingrich on the ballot) was matched in remarkableness by the former Massachusetts governor’s swoon — and just when it seemed he was genuinely on the cusp of making good on his promise of inevitability. Romney had won both Colorado and Minnesota in 2008, and in those states as well as Missouri (which has a big asterisk because it’s non-binding this time), his vote totals were significant drop-offs from four years ago — 20,000 fewer in Colorado, 18,000 fewer in Minnesota and 109,000 fewer in Missouri. The unmistakable takeaway is that he’s less popular in all three than he used to be — especially when he doesn’t put his still-superior organizational operation and bank account to work for him.

Even if he doesn’t win in Michigan, Santorum should have no trouble getting some delegates there. (The other contest on March 28, in Arizona, is winner-take-all, and Romney has a solid organization in place.) And the timing for his burst of momentum is hard to beat, coming as it does just when Obama is being pressured to reconsider new rules on contraception coverage in the face of Roman Catholic objections, the Komen-Planned Parenthood flap has people thinking about abortion rights again, and the California gay marriage question is back on the front page. Santorum probably still won’t end up speaking on a Thursday night in August from the sports arena in Tampa, but he may well end up as the other person in the two-man race that slows Romney’s path to the nomination until Memorial Day.

CANTOR’S TAKE: The version of the Stock Act the House will debate tomorrow is significantly different from the government ethics package the Senate passed last week. The biggest difference is that the bill Cantor unveiled late last night has no provisions requiring the people in the “political intelligence consulting” industry to register like lobbyists. Senators added such language to their version last week, and since then the grumbling from K Street and financial services companies — which use such intelligence reports to shape their trading decisions — has grown intense, in part because the provision was written to define intelligence-gathering in a pretty vague and expansive way.

Unlike the Senate bill, Cantor’s measure would deny government pensions to lawmakers convicted of a felony. It would expand restrictions on how executive branch officials handle negotiations with prospective private-sector employers and make it a crime for those officials to retaliate against companies that don't hire them. It is more specific than the Senate’s about the new disclosures it would require of executive  branch officials — and makes clear that it would apply to about 30,000 administration officials.  And it essentially would prevent lawmakers from participating in initial public offerings — language clearly written to poke at Pelosi, whose husband bought stock in the 2008 Visa IPO while she was Speaker and the House was considering a bill to lower credit card fees. Both bills, however, are the same at the core: They would make clear that lawmakers and aides are subject to prosecution (or ethics committee punishment) if they trade securities based on information about legislative strategies or pending decisions that aren’t available to the public.

The bill is likely to sail through the House tomorrow — because members are eager to do something that sounds like they get the message about why the public holds Congress in such low regard — although Democrats will complain loudly that they were not consulted by Cantor even though the legislation's central piece really was their idea first.

STILL FIGHTING: The other collective mea culpa that Congress may yet turn into enactable legislation this year is a prohibition against earmarks. What “60 Minutes” did to spur on the insider-trading bill, The Washington Post is now doing to put the practice of pet projects back under the spotlight — with its series this week showing that some earmarks look to be for lawmakers’ personal benefit, not just for parochial political aggrandizement. The leaders of the Senate effort to enact a true earmark ban, Pat Toomey and Claire McCaskill, are increasingly confident the newspaper’s stories will pressure their colleagues into voting to add the legislation as an amendment to the highway bill. (They say the binding ban is needed because Senate appropriators’ self-imposed moratorium on earmarks for the coming year is readily circumvented). But even if that happens, the idea seems stuck for the foreseeable future in the House. The leader of the cause there, Jeff Flake, was rebuffed in his request to be allowed to offer an earmark ban as an amendment during tomorrow’s Stock Act debate.

THREE MORE WEEKS: The current payroll tax, jobless aid and Medicare doctor payment formulas all expire three weeks from today, when the fifth public negotiating session between Senate Democrats and House Republicans is planned on the bill that would extend all three through the end of the year. In public, there’s been very little evidence that the two sides are each making moves toward the middle on the fundamental question of how to offset the $160 billion expense — and plenty of evidence that each side is still blaming the other’s bullheadedness for the impasse. That could change a little once Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus unveils what he’s promising will be a genuine overture to Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp on long-term unemployment payments, which the GOP is pushing hard to rein in while setting school requirements for beneficiaries. If the House conferees take the offer, that would mean there’s a decent chance the talks could get off the dime and be done before the Presidents Day recess starts at the end of next week. If not, then Reid will be ready to put another short-term extension before the Senate when the recess is over.

STEVENS REPORT: Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan denied motions today from two unidentified people seeking to keep a permanent seal of secrecy on a 500-page report detailing widespread misconduct in the prosecution of Ted Stevens — who was convicted of corruption in 2008, lost his bid-for reelection as the longest-serving Republican in Senate history a few weeks later and then saw his conviction thrown out the next spring. Instead, the judge ordered the report’s release on March 15.

NOT WEDDED TO IT: It’s clear that the Supreme Court eventually will be asked to be the final arbiter of whether gays and lesbians can get married, at least in California. But it’s not clear the court will agree to settle the question, and it’s way up in the air what the justices would decide if they end up taking the case; they could rule only on narrow and somewhat technical grounds affecting only the reach of referendums in California, or they could issue a sweeping ruling that decides one of the defining civil rights debates of the age — whether same-sex couples may be constitutionally denied the same right to wed as opposite-sex couples. But, until the high court has had its say (or decided not to), the current prohibition will remain on gay marriage in the nation’s biggest state.

The next step is for the backers of Proposition 8 — approved with 52 percent just five months after the state Supreme Court legalized gay marriage — to decide whether to ask the full 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider yesterday’s 2-1 panel ruling against them, or whether to turn right away to the Supreme Court. The latter option would put the case in the calendar for the term starting in the fall, when there’s a high probability all nine of the current justices will still be sitting. Pursuing the interim step would run the risk that the ultimate appeal wouldn’t reach Washington for another year, by which time some retirements and the presidential election result could have tipped the court’s ideological balance to the left or the right.

WHO'S NEXT? Republicans are totally confident they will hold the newly redrawn congressional district that wraps around Charlotte even though Sue Myrick is leaving Congress this fall, when she will turn 71 and complete her ninth term. Myrick yesterday became the 20th House member (and the seventh Republican and the third North Carolinian) to announce a voluntary departure from politics in 2012. A senior member of both the Energy and Commerce and Intelligence panels, she was a reliable vote for the party leadership and a down-the-line conservative alumna of the “Contract With America” takeover class of 1994 — with one notable exception: After surviving breast cancer in the late 1990s, she began working regularly with Democrats to promote more federal spending on research.

Her departure creates an opening that will probably be fought over by a long roster of Republicans, although word is that Myrick is going to endorse Jim Pendergraph, a Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) commissioner. That could complicate the aspirations of state House Speaker Thom Tillis, state Rep. Ruth Samuelson, state Sen. Bob Rucho and Charlotte City Councilman Andy Dulin. So would a decision by former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory to switch from a run for governor to a run for Congress.

DINNER TIME: The publishers of the Daily Briefing are buying the first round (or two or three) before tonight’s 68th Washington Press Club Foundation dinner — which once again kicks off the annual procession of self-congratulatory big ballroom awards banquets where lawmakers, lobbyists and reporters wash their surf and turf down with overly oaked chardonnay. The foundation’s Congressional Dinner is known for inviting a handful of lawmakers to bolster their reputations for being funny — confident that most of them will bomb instead. Taking their chances this year are Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Democratic Rep. Linda Sanchez of California and freshman GOP Rep. Billy Long of Missouri. The boss’ cocktail party at the Mandarin starts at 6:30.

CORRECTION: Yesterday’s edition got off on the wrong foot with the newest House member by misspelling her first name. It’s Suzanne Bonamici.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida (49).
— David Hawkings, editor
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE SENATE: Convened at 10 for opening speeches about a two-year, $109 billion update of highway, rail and transit programs — with a break for the weekly party caucus lunches. The central dispute is, as usual, how to offset the cost of the new spending — in this case, the $12 billion left uncovered by projected gas tax receipts. And the next chapter in that increasingly partisan dispute will play out at a Finance Committee meeting at 3, when Chairman Max Baucus will promote a plan he unveiled this morning in hopes of mollifying ranking Republican Orrin Hatch. How quickly the offset fight is resolved will determine when Reid moves to kick the floor debate into high gear.

THE HOUSE: Convened at 10 and by sundown will pass two Republican bills, one to speed up the process for selling unneeded federal real estate and the other to boost the value of government loans and loan guarantees on the federal balance sheet. Susan Bonamici will be sworn in at about 1 as the newest member of Congress, the 192nd House Democrat and the only woman in the Oregon delegation.

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is using the backdrop of his second State Dining Room science fair to announce that his budget will call for creating an $80 million Education Department grant program for colleges that provide innovative math and science teacher-training programs. He proposed something similar a year ago but it went nowhere in Congress; he hopes to spur lawmakers to give him what he wants by announcing $22 million in commitment from private companies willing to partly match  the federal money.

The president’s other announced events are lunch with Biden and a 4:30 meeting with the vice president and Panetta.

NOT-SO-NEW PRIORITIES: Obama’s decision to countenance fundraising by a super PAC will subject him to intense criticism that he’s become just the sort of politician he’s always railed against — willing to allow electoral necessity to become the mother of blatant hypocrisy. But one of the most obvious flip-flops of his presidency will have a benefit that could readily outweigh the ridicule: His re-election campaign should be able to benefit (without any coordination, of course) from the $100 million or more that Priorities USA Action will have little trouble raising and then spending on the president's behalf.

Obama is clearly betting that he won’t be doing anything that ticks off the vast majority of voters, who are already disgusted about the dominant role of money in politics but have only the vaguest notion of how it all works. And there’s good evidence to support that view: Polls show that very few of the people who backed him four years ago are even aware that he decided to forgo public financing for the general election — and thereby single-handedly neutered one of the great post-Watergate “good government” efforts. He’s also concluding, presumably, that so long as he maintained his position of “unilateral disarmament” for himself as a way of protesting the Citizens United decision, his party’s congressional fundraising operations would continue to suffer as well. Now there are sure to be House and Senate Democratic super PACs aplenty. And Republican ones, too. Like the early days of the nuclear arms race, it will be years before the notion of mutually assured destruction takes hold and prompts both sides to back away from their commitments to having far more in their arsenal than they could ever hope to use.

MESSAGE CONTROL: David Axelrod, Obama’s top political adviser, made quick work of rationalizing the super PAC decision this morning before turning to a topic that he signaled could do more harm to the president’s second-term chances — the administration’s new regulation requiring church-affiliated employers to cover birth control for their workers within the next year. Roman Catholic leaders are pushing back especially hard, arguing that the rule is a clear-cut First Amendment violation that forces the church to choose between upholding its doctrine and carrying out its commitment to helping others at its schools and hospitals.

Although Axlerod now works for the campaign, he made clear that he’s pushing his colleagues still at the White House to move fast to back away from the absolutist-sounding position and come up with a middle ground. “We have great respect for the work that these institutions do, and we certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedom,” and so the administration is at work finding a new stance that “guarantees women the preventive care they need” but also respects the prerogatives of religious institutions, he said on MSNBC. “This is an important issue. It’s important for millions of women around the country,” he said. “We want to resolve it in an appropriate way and we’re going to do that.”

SANTORUM’S LAST STAND: Under the admittedly convoluted and a bit arbitrary conventions of presidential campaign coverage, Rick Santorum has become the Republican to watch tonight — and he’s in the catbird seat for reasons not entirely of his own choosing. But, ready or not, this will be portrayed as either the day he revived his candidacy, or the day he slipped toward oblivion.

It’s true that he skipped Florida and Nevada in order to focus on these contests in three November bellwether states — caucuses awarding 36 delegates in Colorado and 40 more in Minnesota, plus a non-binding “beauty contest” primary in Missouri. And it’s also true that the decision has resulted in a boomlet of momentum aided by conservatives who are still determined to press for a nominee who’s not Mitt Romney (and who weren’t paid much mind by Newt Gingrich in these three states). But what’s really tuned the spotlight on the former Pennsylvania senator is the Romney campaign itself, which has rolled out a multifaceted set of criticisms of Santorum in recent days while working to prop up the front-runner’s own socially conservative bona fides. So, in order to “win the night,” Santorum is under pressure to actually score an upset victory in the two places he seems to have the best shot, Minnesota (where the first results from the caucuses will be posted at 9 D.C. time) and Missouri (where the polls close at 8 D.C. time). The results from Colorado, where Romney is spending the day, won’t start coming in before 10:30 Eastern.

KIRK MAKES PROGRESS: Mark Kirk’s condition has been upgraded from "fair" to "good," and the Illinois Republican’s doctors say he’s almost well enough to tolerate that next big step in his recovery — the reinstallation of the section of his skull removed after his stroke two weeks ago. His return to the Senate is still many weeks away — almost surely not before the April recess — but if the surgery goes well he will be able to begin the physical therapy that will determine how much of his mobility can be restored.

TRAIL TIPS: (1) Bob Kerrey announced this morning that he won’t run for his old Senate seat, essentially guaranteeing Republicans can count on Nebraska as one of the four seats they need to be assured of a Senate majority next year. “For many reasons I nearly said yes. In the end I choose to remain a private citizen,” said Kerrey, who had described himself as a decided underdog had he chosen to make the race. “To those who urged me to do so, I am sorry, very sorry to have disappointed you. I hope you understand that I have chosen what I believe is best for my family and me.” Kerrey retired in 2000 after two terms as a senator (he was governor before that), moved to New York to become president of the progressive New School and was succeeded by Ben Nelson, who’s now retiring rather than stage an uphill fight for a third term. The May 15 Republican primary field for the seat remains crowded: state Attorney General Jon Bruning, state Treasurer Don Stenberg, state Sen. Deb Fischer and investment adviser Pat Flynn. Gov. Dave Heineman has said no again and again to entreaties from D.C. Republican power players that he run — and he seems settled on not getting in, even with Kerrey out.

(2) Ron Barber, a Gabby Giffords aide injured in the January 2011 shooting rampage, is now almost ready to announce he’s running in the special election to succeed her but would not be a candidate in the redrawn Arizona district in November. The only thing he’s waiting for is Giffords’ up-front endorsement, which for the Democrats has been frustratingly slow in coming. Every day she waits, more momentum could build for Republican Jesse Kelly, the ex-Marine who came within 4,200 votes of defeating Giffords two years ago. The primaries are April 17, and the special election June 12.

(3) Another incumbent-versus-incumbent matchup was launched yesterday in Arizona: Ben Quayle will run for his second tern against fellow freshman Republican Dave Schweikert. Quayle made good on his threats because so much of his old Phoenix district was drawn into the same solidly Republican district that is home to Schweikert — although the former vice president’s son lives in an adjacent district that’s a political tossup. Quayle is viewed as the weaker candidate among establishment Republicans, who say he’s not done much to shed his reputation as a congressman who got to Washington on the family name and hasn’t done much with it since.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: One retiring Democratic senator, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin (77); one House committee chairman, Natural Resources’ Doc Hastings of Washington (71); three House GOP freshmen: Allen West of Florida (51), Michael Grimm of New York (42) and Steve Fincher of Tennessee (39). The first two are both facing tough re-election battles — West because of the state’s redistricting and Grimm because of reports of campaign fundraising improprieties.
— David Hawkings, editor
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Monday, February 6, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama says he has a “very good estimate” of when Iran would have its nuclear bomb ready to go — but little clarity about who in Tehran would have a finger on the button. “Knowing who is making decisions at any given time inside of Iran is tough,” he said in an interview broadcast on NBC’s “Today.” The president said that although he believes diplomacy can still get Iran to suspend its nuclear program, the administration is planning a range of alternative options. He unveiled some later this morning — new U.S. sanctions on the government of Iran, including its Central Bank.

Obama will get the latest from Iran, Syria, Egypt and the rest of the word during his daily intelligence briefing at noon. (He’ll hear an insider report about how the U.S. Embassy in Damascus was closed today, with its last 18 diplomats being brought back to Washington.) He has nothing else on his public schedule beyond a 2:30 meeting with senior advisors.

THE SENATE: Convenes at 2 and will vote at about 5:30 to clear legislation updating the government’s aviation policies and programs and authorizing $15.9 billion in spending during each of the next four years. The vote comes 50 weeks after senators passed their initial version of the bill, and 52 months after the last comprehensive FAA authorization law expired. Obama’s signature is not in doubt.

THE HOUSE: Convenes at noon and starting at 2 will debate three non-controversial measures, one of which would allow a new natural gas pipeline to cross some federal parkland in Brooklyn. If roll calls are required for passage, they’ll be delayed until 6:30.

MORE THAN A FEELING: Mitt Romney cracked an important symbolic ceiling this morning, when Republican officials in Nevada declared he’d won the caucuses with 51.1 percent of the vote — his first outright majority in the first five contests of the 2012 campaign, and his second straight decisive victory. Newt Gingrich survived a balky tally of Saturday’s caucus ballots in the precincts along the Las Vegas Strip to finish second, with 21 percent — but with only 779 more votes than Ron Paul. (Turnout was only 75 percent what it was four years ago, continuing an overall trend in the early GOP contests.)

The final result shows how the alternative story line about Romney — that he has a political glass jaw that would eventually be broken by an energized wave of the most socially and fiscally conservative voters — is starting to be refuted. The GOP electorate appears to be coming around to settling for perceived electability over ideological purity — the prevailing prediction all along.

Previously dubbed the “25 percent man,” Romney will now seek to cement his inevitability by claiming an outright majority in both of the delegate-awarding primaries in decent-sized states (Michigan and Arizona) three weeks from tomorrow. But he won’t do all that decisively well this week. He may top 50 percent in only one contest — in Colorado. But in tomorrow's other caucus, in Minnesota, he and Rick Santorum are statistically tied in recent polling, with Gingrich and Paul each not far behind. Santorum also has a shot in Missouri, but it’s a “beauty contest” primary that awards no delegates, and Romney hasn’t tried too hard there. In Maine, where the caucuses end Saturday, Paul’s organizational effort could push him to a victory. Gingrich made clear yesterday that his latest “back to the future” move will be a return to that old Republican chestnut, the Southern Strategy, which means his next target of opportunity is his home state of Georgia on March 6.

The obvious looming problem for the GOP, then, is that the longer the also-rans keep running, the more potential their attacks have to wound their likely nominee in ways that last until the fall. Signs of that coming true are in the Washington Post-ABC News poll out today: 55 percent of those surveyed who say they’re closely following the campaign disapprove of what the GOP candidates are saying — and more than two-thirds say they like Romney less the more the learn about him. In part as a result, the poll shows Obama winning a head-to-head matchup against the former Massachusetts governor, 51 percent to 45 percent. (To be sure, the poll also suggests Romney is still looking more viable in the fall than Gingrich; the polls says the ex-Speaker would lose by 11 points to the president.)

LEDGER TROUBLE: The worst news of the day for the Republican field, though, is confronting the Paul campaign. The Texas congressman’s reputation as a vigorous advocate for fiscal prudence and hard-edged accounting for every federal dollar spent is being challenged by a evidence that he’s done some double-dipping on his expenses. The top story in Roll Call this morning is that Paul looks to have been paid twice — by the taxpayers and by his network of libertarian political and nonprofit groups — for at least eight flights in the past dozen years, and perhaps for a dozens more where the available records aren’t quite so clear. Paul’s congressional office denies any impropriety but says it’s possible Paul received double reimbursements by accident once in a while.

FORGET ABOUT IT: It’s been known for a couple of weeks that the president’s budget proposal for fiscal 2013 (which starts Oct. 1) would not be sent to Congress today, as the law requires. (It’s promised next Monday.) Now comes word that the federal budgeting timetable — which has notably broken down in so many other ways in recent years — has now been pro-actively tossed out the window by the Democrats who run the Senate. Rather than continue quietly enduring the taunts from the GOP about his caucus’ inability to produce a document in either of the last two years detailing its spending and revenue priorities, Reid went an offensive (of sorts) on Friday afternoon. He promised that the full Senate won’t ever debate a budget resolution this year, either — not before the April 15 statutory deadline, and not afterwards. He asserted such a document was not necessary in light of the top-line spending numbers agreed to in last summer’s default-avoiding debt limit deal. The decision is a slap not only at the regular order but also at Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, who’s retiring this fall after 26 years of trying to pull the country back from the long-term budgetary brink.

GOING SLOWLY, HOWEVER NICELY: The public negotiating resumes tomorrow on the payroll tax, unemployment and “doc fix” package — but there’s still no sign that the return to an emphasis on complying with the civics textbooks and the manners manuals is producing anything resembling a deal. The current extension of the Social Security tax break, jobless benefits and Medicare reimbursement rates lapses in 23 days — and Congress will be in recess for five of them (Presidents Day week). If the leadership is going to rely on a conference committee to get the final deal, they will soon be pressed to unveil their Plan B (yet another short-term extension) for when the talking drags on until the final hour. Reid has already ordered up the drafting of such a bill — its length remains under wraps — because he’s grown impatient that his main agent in the talks, Finance Chairman Max Baucus, doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere close to cutting a deal that the leadership would bless. Republican leaders meanwhile, are benefiting from all the longwindedness in the conference — because it buys them time to bolster the forced unity they’ve imposed on the rank and file to stick with an extension of a tax break and a social program that many of them don’t like.

NOT BACKING DOWN: A coalition of Detroit’s African-American preachers called today for Pete Hoekstra to apologize for his Super Bowl campaign ad in which a young Asian woman uses stereotypical broken English to describe Debbie Stabenow’s economic views. But the Republican former congressman went on the radio this morning and called his ad a “home run” that is only “insensitive” to the spending philosophy of his Senate opponent and Obama. “Clearly China is one of many countries benefiting from our irresponsible spending. To highlight that is absolutely appropriate,” he said. The 30-second ad debuted across Michigan during last night’s game and is scheduled to run statewide for the next two weeks on cable TV shows aimed at GOP voters. “Debbie spends so much American money. You borrow more and more from us. Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good. We take your jobs. Thank you, Debbie Spenditnow,” says the actor , who’s posed on a bicycle amid rice paddies. The ad concludes with Hoekstra on camera saying, “this race is between Debbie Spenditnow and Pete Spenditnot.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: No current lawmakers share a birthday with Ronald Reagan (Feb. 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004).
— David Hawkings, editor

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January 20, 2012
Funding Update from Carl Rosenkranz, OACAC Executive Director

Federal Budget for Fiscal Year 2012 (October 1, 2011-September 30, 2012):
The final Continuing Resolution (CR) through September 30, 2012 was signed into law on December 23, 2011.  The President’s proposed Budget Request for the 2012-2013 Federal Fiscal Year will be released on February 6, 2012.

COMMUNITY SERVICES BLOCK GRANT (CSBG):
Yesterday it was announced that, based on the final 2012 CR, Missouri’s CSBG program will be funded at $18,656,835 which is slightly less than the 2011 level. Community Action Agencies will be requested next week to look at revising their budgets and work plans. OACAC had planned its budget and work plan this year on the State required 50% level of CSBG 2010 funds (required because that level represented the President’s 2012 budget proposal for CSBG; a 50% cut that was never enacted). OACAC was also going to use agency CSBG reserves to fund the Neighborhood Centers Program when the 50% CSBG funds were spent.  Now, with the additional CSBG funds, OACAC will be able to utilize 2012 CSBG funds and a smaller amount of reserves to fully fund the Neighborhood Centers Program through September 30, 2012.

LOW INCOME HOME ENERGY ASSISTANCE PROGRAM (LIHEAP):
LIHEAP is funded at a 25% cut from 2011 ($3.7B vs. $4.7B), Missouri is operating the LIHEAP Program (Energy Crisis Intervention or ECIP) on 2011 Carryover funds that were received too late in Fiscal Year 2011 (OCT.-SEPT,) to be used in that time period. Missouri had already received $51,173,346 in Fiscal Year 2012 funds and yesterday it was announced that Missouri will receive an additional $17,057,782 which means that Missouri’s FY2012 Full Year Allocation is $68,231,128 of the $3.4B released to states. Missouri now will need to decide what to do with all the new money. Most likely, some of the money will be utilized this year as additional ECIP money and some will be utilized in fiscal year 2013 (October 1, 2012 - September 30, 2013). There is a possibility that some LIHEAP money may be transferred to the Weatherization Program as explained in the next report.

WEATHERIZATION:
The funding for this program is based on several sources and is complicated to explain. The State Department of Natural Resources Division of Energy (DNR/DE) had a meeting in Jefferson City last Thursday for subgrantees to explain the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Weatherization funds closeout status.  Originally, ARRA Weatherization, which began in June 2009, was scheduled to end on March 31, 2012.  ARRA has now been extended in Missouri through December 31, 2012 to allow the Weatherization Subgrantees to finish the program. The state will look at expenditures for the 18 Subgrantees (16 Community Action Agencies, the city of Kansas City and the Urban League in St. Louis) to determine if it is possible to reallocate money so that all Subgrantees will have money during the extension period.  This process may take up to three months. 
There are also several ARRA close out questions regarding equipment, supplies and time frames that still need to be answered by the funding source.

DNR/DE is also planning to talk to the Department of Social Services (DSS) Family Support Division (FSD) about the possibility of transferring some LIHEAP money to the Weatherization Program this year which is allowed by law (see LIHEAP report above for available funds). Only six states, including Missouri, do not transfer LIHEAP funds to Weatherization.

On the national level, the regular Weatherization Program that has existed for a long time before ARRA, is funded through the Department of Energy (DOE). 2012 funding for the DOE Weatherization Program has been reduced from $171M to $68M, of which only $65M is available for states. This figure is based in part on the fact that some states, including Missouri, did have unspent ARRA funds when the decision was made to reduce the regular appropriation and did not take into account where states would be with ARRA funds by March 31, 2012. This means that Missouri may not receive any new 2012 regular DOE Weatherization funds.

Based on OACAC projections regarding available DOE ARRA Weatherization Funds (June 2009-December 2012) and DOE regular Weatherization Funds (July 1, 2011-June 30, 2012), we had decided to eliminate 27 positions as of January 19, 2012 (auditors and crew members) with more reductions possible depending upon the availability of LIHEAP funds. We have now gone to a waiting list for prospective applicants.

This is the down side of economic stimulus funding. In 2009, federal DOE ARRA Weatherization money was appropriated to Missouri.  The state DNR/DE then contracted with Weatherization Program Subgrantees on a scale much larger than before and jobs were created to meet the increased demand for providing Weatherization services to the eligible population. Now as the ARRA money ends and the private sector is not in a position to absorb the jobs, jobs are ended and the Weatherization Program will be reduced in size.

Story by Emily Woods, KY3 - OACAC terminates jobs as federal stimulus funds run out.

 

 

Friday, January 20, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is precisely three-quarters of the way through his term, and he’s marking the third anniversary of his inauguration with a light workday: He met with the secretary of State this morning and has a senior staff meeting at 5. His only other public event is a 2:45 re-election fundraiser in the Jefferson Hotel.

THE HOUSE: Not in session; next convenes at 2 on Monday. (Republicans are still in Baltimore for their annual bonding and strategic planning retreat.)

THE SENATE: Convenes at 2 for a pro forma session.

MORE BETA TESTING: The drive for legislation to combat online piracy suffered a probably fatal blow this morning, when Reid called off next week’s Senate test vote on the measure in the face of a crushing rejection.

The majority leader asserted he was not giving up on the bill, only trying to buy time for work on a new version that would strike a different “balance between protecting Americans’ intellectual property and maintaining openness and innovation on the Internet.” But while he asserted a deal that would satisfy both Hollywood and Silicon Valley was still within reach, his move was an undeniable signal that prospects have all but evaporated for the legislation — and less than a week after it looked to be one of the few big policy measures with a good chance of sustaining broad bipartisan support and getting all the way through Congress this year.

What changed the dynamic, literally overnight, was the blackout of websites led by Wikipedia, Google and other online powerhouses on Wednesday — which galvanized an enormous reservoir of anxiety and opposition from Americans living their lives largely online. (The backlash’s enormity and ferocity stunned a Congress that is generally adept at seeing a bill’s supporters and opponents arrayed in predictable rows, and months in advance.) The opponents sent more than 7 million emails that day alone attacking the legislation as effectively sanctioning government censorship of what they watch, hear and read — and strangling online entrepreneurship along the way. The two Judiciary chairmen pushing the measure, liberal Democrat Pat Leahy in the Senate and conservative Republican Lamar Smith in the House, say such fears are in no way warranted; instead, they say, their aim is only to give the Justice Department some new legal powers to work with copyright holders on shutting down the offshore websites that make money not only by stealing or counterfeiting American pop culture but also peddling bogus brand-name clothing and faux pharmaceuticals.

Congressional leaders initially assumed they retained sufficient support to push the bill through quickly and essentially sidestep the critics. But within a day, at least eight of the measure’s 40 original sponsors – Democrat Ben Cardin and Republicans Kelly Ayotte, Orrin Hatch, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, Roy Blunt, Scott Brown and John Boozman — had publicly repudiated the measure, promoting McConnell to press Reid last night to try to buy the negotiators some time by delaying the initial vote.

Leahy asserted this morning that he would try to make the most of the extra time, but he could hardly hide his displeasure or his expectation that the legislative drive had stalled for the year. “The day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem,” he said. Smith issued his own statement saying that he would put his committee’s deliberations on his bill on ice until a consensus emerges on a new legislative approach — essentially signaling he would leave it to the Senate to come up with a viable plan.

GAME ON: Expectations are solidifying that Newt Gingrich will win South Carolina —  and thereby become, at the last possible moment, the single consensus Republican presidential alternative to Mitt Romney.

The state’s most prominent GOP and tea party kingmaker, Sen. Jim DeMint, said this morning that tomorrow’s contest is now “clearly a two-man race.” And if the Speaker’s continued surge in the tracking polls ends up heralding his first primary victory, he would certainly be able to raise the money and assemble the organization needed to sustain a primary and caucus battle lasting well beyond Florida on Jan. 31. (For starters, you can bet an entire Super-PAC’s worth of cash that Gingrich will remind people, a thousand times over, that since the GOP began staging a presidential primary in South Carolina in 1980, every single winner has gone one to secure the nomination.) “This really could go on for a while,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus predicted this morning.

Gingrich’s amazing return to the top of the pack was heralded last night, when he emphatically gambled — and with resounding success, at least in the hall — that the only thing the state’s evangelically conservative electorate likes less than an “open marriage” advocate is the “elite media ” asking him about it. His vituperative attacks on both ABC (for putting Marianne Gingrich on the air) and CNN (for making her allegations the opening question) are dominating today’s coverage, reaffirming his standing as the most consistently high-performing stage presence in American politics — and effectively boxing out “landslide” Rick Santorum, who seems unable to get any traction despite his new, if asterisk-encrusted, lead in Iowa and his own really solid (if not quite “grandiose”) debate performance.

Romney, meanwhile, put a new label on his own candidacy last night when he offered yet another new and different answer to the drumbeat of questions about releasing his tax returns: “Maybe.” He absolutely remains the probable nominee, but he’s not the inevitable one anymore — no matter how many high-profile, possible running-mate endorsements he uncorks each day. (Today’s came from Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia.)

THE PARTICULARS: Polls will be open from 7 to 7 tomorrow. Although there’s no Democratic contest and any of the state’s 2.7 million registered voters may participate (there’s no party registration), the consensus is that turnout will be below 19 percent – or about 500,000, more than four years ago but fewer than in 2000. The statewide winner gets 11 convention delegates, and 2 delegates go to the winner in each of the seven (one more than in the last decade) congressional districts.

THEY’RE SO CUTE TOGETHER: It’s more than clear by now that all the optimistic talk after Gabby Giffords was shot a year ago — about how the tragedy would herald a period of renewed bipartisan collegiality and civility at the Capitol — was naive in the extreme. But at least one gesture from that period will be repeated next week: Many (but probably not most) of the senators and House members attending the State of the Union will sit with a lawmaker from the other party. The members can’t stand the nickname for this little gesture of goodwill — “date night” — but it’s hard to argue that the symbolism creates just another moment to remember how much life in Congress is like life in high school.

The Senate pairings announced so far include Lisa Murkowski and Mark Udall, Dick Shelby and Mary Landrieu, Mark Kirk and Joe Manchin, Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, Pat Toomey and Bob Casey, Kay Bailey Hutchison and Barbara Mikulski, Olympia Snowe and Mark Begich, Kelly Ayotte and Jack Reed, Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson, and Pat Roberts and Claire McCaskill. House combinations include Michael Grimm and Loretta Sanchez, John Shimkus and Tim Bishop, Tom Marino and Hank Johnson, Bob Latta  and Joe Donnelly,  Louie Gohmert and Carolyn Maloney, Michael McCaul and Doris Matsui, Steve Fincher and Jim Cooper, Dave Reichert and Ron Kind, Pat Meehan and Jackie Speier, Reid Ribble and Kurt Schrader, Brett Guthrie and John Yarmuth, Steve Womack and Mike Ross, Jack Kingston and John Barrow, and  Frederica Wilson and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Today, House Democrats Shelly Berkley of Nevada (61) and Bill Owens of New York (63); on Sunday, House Republicans Steve Chabot of Ohio (59) and Rick Crawford of Arkansas (46).
— David Hawkings, editor

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Thursday, January 19, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is arriving in Orlando, his latest incursion into a bellwether state just ahead of his Republican presidential challengers. (The Jan. 31 primary in Florida, the third-biggest electoral vote prize at 29, is the next contest after South Carolina.) At Walt Disney World at 12:35, he will unveil plans for boosting the travel and tourism industry by, among other things, speeding up visa processing — especially at consulates in China and Brazil — and creating a fast-track airport screening system for “low-risk” overseas visitors. None of his proposals requires legislation, predictably, because the presidential year is going to be all about advancing a “we can’t wait” agenda for changing policy on his own, without the divided Congress.

Air Force One will be wheels-up at 2:15 for an intense evening of fundraising in New York: One cocktail party for $5,000 donors and another one for $15,000 givers at the exclusive Upper East Side restaurant Daniel, a $35,800-a-seat dinner in the Brooklyn home of director Spike Lee and then a $100-ticket bash at the Apollo Theater featuring performances by Al Green and India Arie. The president’s due back home soon after midnight.

THE HOUSE: Not in session. (Almost all the Republicans are at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront for their annual start-of-the-year retreat, paid for by the business and trade associations that underwrite the Congressional Institute.)

THE SENATE: Not in session.

ALL EYES ON NEWT: Rick Perry ended his presidential campaign this morning and endorsed Newt Gingrich — providing a crucial closing kick of momentum (and about 5 percent of the vote) to the former Speaker two days before the South Carolina primary. “Newt is a conservative visionary who can transform our country,” Perry said in Charleston. “Newt is not perfect, but who among us is?” he added, saying Gingrich has “the courage to tell those Washington interests to take a hike if that’s what’s in the best interest of our country.”
But Gingrich’s prospects for staying in the hunt for the long term may well rest on a pair of back-to-back prime-time TV broadcasts tonight. The first (which starts on Fox at 8) is the final debate before Saturday’s voting in the state, where the ex-Speaker’s poll numbers are surging into striking distance from Mitt Romney. Another characteristically strong on-stage performance, and another balky performance by the front-runner like the one he turned in on Monday, has the potential to propel Gingrich toward a vitally important win. But that’s assuming the second half of the double feature (on ABC at 10) turns out to be a total bust: an extensive interview in which the candidate’s second wife, Marianne Gingrich, will do her best to try to ruin her ex-husband’s career.

Whatever revelations she offers beyond what’s on the record — Gingrich started romancing her long before divorcing his first wife, and kept her in the dark long after starting his affair while Speaker with his current wife, Callista, who was then a House Agriculture Committee staffer — will provide an intense test for Gingrich’s career-long trouble with self-discipline. So far, his plan is to ignore what’s said on “Nightline” and let surrogates (led by his daughters from his first marriage, Kathy Lubbers and Jackie Cushman) do the trash-talking for him in the hours before thousands of evangelical Christian South Carolinians make their decisions  at the polls.

NOT HIS BEST DAY: Left on the sidelines, at last for a few hours, is Romney, who had hoped today’s news would be dominated by the latest installment in his I’m-the-inevitable-one tour: an endorsement from another paragon of the Republican establishment — Rob Portman, the freshman Ohio senator, supercommittee member, Bush-era budget chief and trade czar, and everybody’s choice for a spot on any Romney running-mate short list.

Instead, the endorsement is but an afterthought in a campaign news rundown behind Perry, Marianne Gingrich and the not-so-surprising, ultimately unimportant but still really headache-inducing news out of Iowa: Romney didn’t win the caucuses by 8 votes, after all — at least, not officially. Meaning he’s so far 1-for-2, not 2-for-2, in the early balloting — and could yet be 1-for-3 by the weekend. Recounting and coming up with the certified results resulted in Rick Santorum with 34 votes more than Romney — although paperwork from eight of the state’s 1,774 precincts is missing and probably will be forever, which is why the state party is not ever going to declare an “official” winner, and why the Romney campaign is now saying he’s willing to call it a tie.

The three South Carolina polls out today (all taken with Perry still in the hunt) all show essentially the same thing: Romney slipping but still ahead by about 10 points.

‘NO’ IS NOT THE END: Few things in a year of predictable political posturing were as easy to forecast as Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline yesterday. He said that if Congress forced his hand and made him make a quick decision, the decision would be “no.” And that’s just what happened. But it’s just as easy now to predict that the two sides in the fierce fight will harp on the standoff all year, with each camp trying to force a final decision in its favor and neither side expecting that will happen before the election.

Republicans, who have seized on the 1,700-mile oil pipeline from Canada to Texas as their favorite engine of job creation, are already searching for legislative avenues to compel the administration to reverse field. In the meantime, they’ll settle for some good television: House Energy and Commerce is working to arrange a hearing next week where Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be pressed hard to defend her department’s recommendation that the $7 billion pipeline plan be stopped. (The issue belongs to State because it’s a Canadian company, Calgary-based TransCanada Corp., that wants to do the construction.)

Democrats, for their part, say they are confident the standoff will work well for them because it provides something tangible to boast to their base in the environmental community. (The plan calls for the pipe to snake across the ecologically fragile Sandhills of Nebraska.) They’ve concluded that the boost they get from their green constituents far outweighs the heartburn they’re causing with members of some labor unions, who were salivating over TransCanada’s talk about creating as many as 20,000 construction jobs in the next two years. (The administration says the project would bring no more than 6,000 jobs.)

THE OTHER MITCH: Mitch Daniels will deliver the televised response to Obama’s State of the Union next Tuesday night — offering him one more high-profile turn on the national stage before his governorship of Indiana ends in a year, and one final opportunity for wistful Republicans to wonder what might have been, had he run for president this time. Boehner and McConnell announced the choice this morning. Daniels will be only the third governor tapped to respond to a Democratic State of the Union in the past two decades; the others were Virginia’s Bob McDonnell two years ago and New Jersey’s Christie Whitman in 1995. All the others have been members of Congress, including House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan a year ago.

HOW TALL IS $15 MILLION? The National Park Service now has all the money it says it needs ($15 million) to return the Washington Monument to the condition it was in before the August earthquake. That’s because the half provided by Congress last month was matched this morning by billionaire Bethesda businessman and history buff David Rubenstein, a co-founder of The Carlyle Group private equity behemoth. The Park Service hopes to have a contractor begin work on the 555-foot obelisk by the end of next August, and it will be a year after that before the delicate masonry work is done and a million visitors a year can start streaming in again. It’s not clear whether the work will require  a reconstruction of the scaffolding that was used during the restoration of 1999-2001. The work will not include repairing water damage since the quake or making reinforcements to prevent damage in future temblors. And still to come is a long-range plan for revamping the monument grounds and creating a new visitor center; the winner of a design competition is to be named in May.

HINCHEY’S GIFT: Maurice Hinchey is insisting to everyone who asks, and who doesn’t ask, that he’s cancer-free and healthy enough to run for and win an 11th term representing upstate New York in the House. The veteran Appropriations Committee member says he’s announcing his retirement this afternoon because, at 73, it’s simply time to retire — and to cut his old Democratic buddies in Albany a huge break. That’s because now the Legislature will be able to carve up his sprawling Poughkeepsie-to-Binghamton-to-Ithaca district and be halfway toward meeting their reapportionment obligation, which is to do away with two of the state’s 29 House districts. And the other half of the task is almost as easy: Soon enough a new map will be out that disappears the Brooklyn-Queens district that Bob Turner claimed for the Republicans after last summer’s Anthony Weiner melodrama. The Democratic state Assembly sacrifices one district upstate, and the GOP state Senate gives up one in the city.  It could hardly be any easier.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Kilili Sablan, the independent-turned-Democrat who’s the first congressional delegate ever sent from the Northern Mariana Islands (57).
— David Hawkings, editor
###

Wednesday, January 18, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE HOUSE: Convened at 10 and before 5 will vote decisively against raising the debt limit by another $1.2 trillion — knowing full well that the gesture has no possible default consequences because the Senate has no plans to go along. Republicans will vote almost en bloc to block Obama’s latest borrowing request — including most of the 174 who voted for the debt ceiling deal in August. But being against it now after being for it this summer will do little to assuage fiscal conservative lobbying groups and tea party constituents back home.

THE SENATE: Not in session this week.

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama’s day is highlighted by a pair of schmoozefests. At 3 he’ll formally accept the credentials of the newly arrived ambassadors from Argentina, Austria, Azerbaijan, Britain, Ecuador, Iceland, Iraq, Italy, Lesotho, Mali, Micronesia, Morocco, Niger, Pakistan and the Vatican. At 5:30 he’s hosting an East Room cocktail party for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

STILL RUNNING: Congressional leaders seem a bit shell-shocked by today’s sweeping Web-wide demonstration against bills to crack down on Internet piracy and counterfeiting, which produced the new year’s first flood of angry emails and calls to lawmaker offices. But top Republicans and Democrats in both the Senate and House asserted they were unbowed by the protests and would press forward with their measures.

The debate is the most intense and consequential clash yet between the titans of the new media age and the lions of the 20th century entertainment industry. Hollywood’s army of well-heeled lobbyists is beseeching Congress to write legislation allowing the Justice Department to block non-U.S. websites that illegally copy and then stream the music, movies and TV programs copyrighted by News Corp., Time Warner, Comcast and so on. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist and the rest of Silicon Valley are hoping today’s protests (Wikipedia is shut down until midnight, most prominently) will enlist their hundreds of millions of daily users to stop such legislation, which they say would strangle innovation, give old media too much power and turn the Justice Department into the biggest of big brother censorship offices.

The Senate is set to wade in Tuesday, with a vote just before the State of the Union on whether to even begin formal debate on its piracy bill — which is known by the acronym PIPA, for Protect Intellectual Property Act. Reid says the vote will go ahead as planned — even if the tenuous 60-vote majority Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy thinks he’s assembled has totally fallen apart under all the point-and-click grass-roots pressure. (One of the Republicans on his list, the politically imperiled Scott Brown, signaled overnight that he’s gotten cold feet.) And so it already looks as though Leahy’s best chance to keep the measure alive — at least long enough to get its due on the Senate floor — is to water it down sufficiently in the coming days so that he can at least get it through the starting gate. One provision that he’s probably going to jettison (assuming doing so doesn’t make his GOP backers furious) would allow the Hollywood companies to sue Silicon Valley companies when their sites embrace pirated moves and other programming. Another would give the government the power to block certain Web searches.

In the House, meanwhile, Chairman Lamar Smith says he still plans for his Judiciary Committee to pick up next month where it left off in December on his own version of the piracy bill — known as SOPA, for Stop Online Piracy Act. The markup has bogged down in a roiling and cross-partisan debate between Smith’s forces (who are on Hollywood’s side) and the forces of Darrell Issa, who is trying to water down the bill at the behest of the technology companies. The Obama administration, meanwhile, sent a signal through three mid-level officials over the weekend that it’s looking for a go-slow approach in hopes that some middle-ground compromise can be divined.

MONEY MATTERS: When John McCain couldn’t remember how many houses he owned, it was little more than a one-day kerfuffle four years ago — because the story line of that year’s Republican presidential candidate wasn’t about his being undeniably super-rich and clueless about the political awkwardness his wealth brought to his campaign. But that’s absolutely a core part of the Mitt Romney story line for 2012. Even if he survives this week’s self-imposed South Carolina stall out and goes on to win the nomination, Romney will face a fall of ridicule from Obama, late night comedians and maybe millions of voters if it turns out that he really does pay an effective federal tax rate of 15 percent. And the country is guaranteed to see, again and again, a TV spot that plays Romney’s declaration that his speaking fee income is “not very much” and then shows, in giant red type, the actual figure of $374,000 — an amount that makes him nearly a 1 percenter even before all his capital gains are figured.

The most immediate beneficiary of all this is Newt Gingrich, who now has a good chance of closing his South Carolina gap with Romney to a handful of points — not only because of Romney’s unforced errors, but also because of his semi-endorsement last night from Sara Palin: “If I had to vote in South Carolina, in order to keep this thing going, I’d vote for Newt and I would want this to continue.”

OFFICIALLY UNOFFICIAL: Jeff Zients will never be more than the “acting” head of the OMB. The deputy director is going to stay in that bureaucratic limbo for a year — he also had the acting title for four months in 2010, after Peter Orszag left but before Jack Lew was confirmed — and his name will never be sent to the Senate as the formal nominee to run the agency. And then, if Obama is re-elected, Zients will return to his life as a prominent Washington businessman and somebody with more budgetary chops will be put up for the second term. (The budget proposal for fiscal 2013, which will be unveiled Feb. 6, is almost on the presses already and will be the final document of this presidential term.) The leading candidates remain White House congressional lobbyist Rob Nabors, National Economic Council head Gene Sperling, his domestic policy deputy Jason Furman, Urban Institute President Bob Reischauer and former Young & Rubicam CEO Ann Fudge.

The return of Zients, who’s got the No. 3 job now, is a clear sign that Obama didn’t want to risk a confirmation fight by proposing OMB’s true No. 2, Heather Higginbottom, who had trouble getting through the Senate last summer because of her lack of budget experience.

NOT WHAT HE EXPECTED: Darrell Issa probably assumed his House Oversight Committee had a politically easy mark in its sights when it launched its investigation of Countrywide, the once No. 1 American home loan lender that’s become so vilified for its role in the  subprime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the housing market. But this week, the inquiry seems to be turning more against House Republicans than anyone else. Subpoenaed documents turned over to the panel by Bank of America, Countrywide’s new owner, show that three members of the caucus received the lending VIP treatment (meaning below-market rates) from the “Friends of Angelo” unit: NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions, Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon and fellow Californian Elton Gallegly. Only one Democrat, Ed Towns, got the sweetheart deal. And so yesterday the top Democrat on Oversight, Elijah Cummings, wrote Issa a brisk letter asking, in effect, So what are you going to do to make equal-opportunity political hay with this? The answer will inevitably include turning the papers over to the Ethics Committee, which will investigate whether the lawmakers received improper gifts and did any improper favors in return. All four assert that they did not know their mortgage applications were being given preferential  treatment.

THE JET AGE: Privately financed congressional travel jumped last year for the first time since Congress imposed what were supposed to be restrictive new rules on such trips back in 2007, when the perception of lawmakers as junketeers was on the rise. Outside groups spent at least $5.8 million to send members and their aides on more than 1,500 trips around the world — a 75 percent surge in just one year. The rules are supposed to prevent companies, trade associations and other groups that employ lobbyists from taking lawmakers on anything longer than a day trip — but K Street has figured out how to underwrite think tanks, foundations, educational institutions and other groups that can sponsor multiple-night getaways. Predictably, the three lawmakers who took more than $45,000 in trips last year are all from politically safe seats: Jim Cooper of Tennessee, fellow Democrat George Miller of California and Republican Doug Lamborn of Colorado.

THEY'LL FIND ANOTHER: The latest retirement from the House GOP’s obscurity caucus is one of the most surprising yet, because the rural slice of central Pennsylvania that Todd Platts has represented for six terms was made only more reliably Republican in redistricting. And so it’s unlikely the Democrats will seriously contend the open seat. Local Republicans, meanwhile, have a month to decide whether to try to succeed the 49-year-old Platts, who was known at the Capitol for little beyond commuting every day all the way from York, refusing to take PAC contributions and being one of those guys who always waits on the aisle for hours to get a presidential handshake on State of the Union nights. The early speculation is focused on a pair of legislators from York, state Sen. Mike Waugh and state Rep. Scott Perry.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Elijah Cummings of Baltimore (61), fellow House Democrat Michael Michaud of East Millinocket, Maine  (57) and House Republican Kay Granger of Fort Worth (69).
— David Hawkings, editor

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012
TODAY IN WASHINGTON

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is meeting in the State Dining Room now with the corporate and academic leaders he formed a year ago into his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. After lunch with Biden, the president will spend 45 minutes hearing King Abdullah II of Jordan explain his view of recent “baby steps” toward Middle East peace. Then Obama’s off to an East Room photo op at 3 with the World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals. His final scheduled event is a 4:30 meeting with Panetta — leaving plenty of time for the president to get ready to take the first lady out to dinner on her 48th birthday.

THE HOUSE: Convenes at 2 but will put off its two must-do pieces of opening day business until 6:30, when more lawmakers will be in town: An attendance vote to make sure a quorum (218 in this case) is available to get legislating started for the year, and a vote to make Paul Irving (who ended his 25-year Secret Service Career in 2008 as the assistant director for administration) the 36th sergeant-at-arms.

THE SENATE: Convened at 10:15 for only a 23-second pro forma session.

THE SHERPAS OF OPINION: With the streets slippery, the West Lawn soggy and the lights turned on in only the south half of the Capitol, the Occupy movement probably could have picked a better day for its latest march on Congress. But the chances that the protesters will be rewarded for their sodden persistence with some prominent TV coverage increased this morning with the release of the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. It shows that, on at least one score, the earflap-beanie crowd is speaking for the entire country today.

The Occupiers expect what would be, for them, a record crowd demonstrating disapproval of Congress — particularly the influence of corporate money in lawmakers’ campaigns and subsequent decision-making. And the new poll signals they are onto something, because it offers another stunning set of numbers illustrating just how low Congress has fallen in the public estimation: 84 percent said they disapprove of the institution’s job performance. Just 13 percent said they approve. The nationwide disdain falls more heavily on the Republicans — 75 percent disapprove and 21 percent approve of their work, compared with 62 percent and 33 percent for the Democrats — but the poll nonetheless makes clear that this may well become an anti-incumbent election as much as a referendum on how one party is running the House and the other party is running the Senate. Which is why the Occupiers might  get some TV time for their theatrical gesture of the day: an effort to produce a symbolic “pink slip” for every lawmaker.

The crowd is planning to follow its noon rally with a march to the Supreme Court at 2, and then down Pennsylvania Avenue at rush hour toward the White House. But after today, the odds are growing that the city will work with the National Park Service for help in moving to evict the twin encampments from Freedom Plaza and McPherson Square. Mayor Vince Gray says the conditions there have moved beyond unsanitary to downright dangerous to public health. And, while the protesters have a strong case to make that their free speech rights are especially sacrosanct when exercised on federal property, the law is clear that they may not sleep there — so their tents have been in violation of the rules from the start.

GET USED TO IT: Tomorrow in the House will offer a scale model for the year of legislative impasse that lies ahead. The Republicans will push through legislation underscoring their view of fiscal policy — a symbolic rejection of the latest increase in the national debt ceiling — knowing full well the measure will be rejected outright as soon as the Democratic Senate takes it up. Then, having acted out its half of the standoff and with nothing else to do, the House will adjourn until next week.

So it will go for the winter, spring and summer. The House will take votes designed to remind the GOP political base what its majority stands for. (Energy drilling and deregulation, for example.) The Senate will do exactly the same thing, for the benefit of the Democratic base. (Immigration and job creation, for starters.) Plenty of time will be set aside for lawmakers to go home and defend their use of the Capitol as a campaign stage set. And almost no legislation altering federal public policy will end up on Obama’s desk — which is just the way he wants it, too, because he’s planned his whole re-election campaign as an attack on the do-nothings who have stood in the way of so much of the “change” he promised four years ago.

Yes, there probably will be a relatively close-to-on-time appropriations agenda — because the grand totals for fiscal 2013 discretionary spending are more or less locked in place at $1.047 trillion, at the start, minus the $97 billion that will have come through the no-supercommittee sequester. And, yes, before the end of next month (but, naturally, only at the last minute) there will be a deal on an extension of the payroll tax cut, new jobless aid and a preservation of the “doc fix” through the end of the year. But, no, there will not be a deal this year to rein in online piracy. There will not be a long-term rewrite of federal aviation programs, or highway programs, or aid to elementary and secondary schools. Instead, when Obama delivers his State of the Union speech a week from tonight, he will already be looking forward to seeing whatever he talks about addressed, if at all, in a lame-duck session, when Congress must unavoidably consider (at a minimum) the latest expiration of the Bush tax cuts even if it sticks to its guns and leaves the sequester alone.

THE SHAKEOUT: With four days and just one more debate before the South Carolina primary, there’s as little reason as ever to bet against Mitt Romney.

His performance before the raucous crowd in Myrtle Beach last night was probably his weakest in  the 16 GOP presidential debates so far. But the fact that he stumbled into Rick Santorum’s trap about voting rights for convicts in Massachusetts, that he couldn’t quite remember whether he shot a moose or an elk — and, most curiously, that he declined to squarely face the inevitable and make a straightforward promise to release his tax returns — matters hardly at all. The old political adage that has defined his campaign’s soft-but-steady success all along — you have to have somebody to beat somebody — still applies. There are still three more-conservative somebodies out there trying to stop him. Unless there’s only one, Romney wins. Transforming himself from the 25 percent man to the 35 percent man in the past two weeks is about to prove good enough.

Newt Gingrich was in top form last night — and he went on CBS this morning to argue that his debating skills alone should earn him the nomination, because it will take someone of his rhetorical skill to rattle Obama this fall. But he conceded it would be almost impossible to catch Romney if he gets above 40 percent on Saturday. And the ex-Speaker is still about 10 points behind in the South Carolina polls, meaning the ex-governor is in striking distance of meeting that expectation. And there doesn’t seem to be any hope that his old “junior partner” from the days of the GOP congressional revolution will defer to him in time to make a difference; the maybe-not-so-strong-as-first-presented evangelical leaders’ endorsement that Santorum got over the weekend — and his sense of being disrespected by the former Speaker — are enough to keep him in the race until his credit card maxes out.

As for Ron Paul, he’s settled decisively into his role as a sideshow. Even if he stays in the hunt until the end, he has no hope of plumping up his share of the vote as long as he keeps emphasizing his isolationism and odder foreign policy views — last night he suggested a trial would have been the preferable option for Osama bin Laden — as much as his libertarian economic ideas. And the longer he stays in, the more time the media have to write fun stories about him. Two today: He’s got the prostitutes at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Nevada working to raise money for him (he supports their industry as an appropriate free-enterprise exercise) and he’s used his congressional expense account to buy first class seats on at least 74 flights between D.C. and Houston in the past two years.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: No lawmakers today, but a pair of GOP House members celebrated over the long weekend: Tennessee’s Diana Black (61) yesterday, and Texan Michael McCaul (50) on Saturday.
— David Hawkings, editor

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  The New Face Of Poverty

 

“What we are experiencing at OACAC Energy Assistance is the realization that there is a new face of poverty.  The new faces are those who have never experienced having to ask for help.  They are our neighbors who have lost their jobs,  their homes and their savings.  They are people who are not able to meet their basic needs: food, medicines, gas.  These are friends who never dreamed they would be without work and facing this situation.  The face of low-income has changed.  We are now seeing a new face of poverty."
Tommie Trammel, OACAC LIHEAP Director