Peter King: Give Oklahoma Tornado Relief Without Offsets

Moderate House Republicans such as Rep. Peter T. King are ready for another intraparty fight over whether emergency disaster aid should be offset, after a tornado ravaged parts of Oklahoma on Monday.

The New York Republican said that if central Oklahoma needs supplemental aid, Congress should grant it immediately without talk of offsetting the spending elsewhere.

“I think they should get every penny they need. I’ve been through this. We can do the political games later on, the important thing is to get them the aid as quickly as they need it and not to make a political issue out of it,” King said Tuesday.

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Boehner: Oklahoma Tornado Victims Will Get Relief

(Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

Speaker John A. Boehner is vowing that Oklahoma tornado victims will get relief — but he demurred on when and how the House might act on a bill, and whether his conference would support it.

“We’ll work with the administration on making sure they have the resources they need,” the Ohio Republican told reporters.

He repeated that promise, nearly verbatim, three times to each of the three questions he agreed to entertain from reporters at a leadership press briefing Tuesday morning.

He wouldn’t elaborate on when leaders might introduce a disaster relief package in the wake of the devastating tornado. Nor would he comment on whether sending financial aid to the storm’s victims would be a tough sell to his conference, which in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy put up a fight against any relief bill that didn’t have significant offsets.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., has already said he will demand offsets for disaster relief, a position he’s consistently held through the years.

Boehner wouldn’t permit the three Oklahoma Republicans in attendance — Reps. James Lankford, Frank D. Lucas and Jim Bridenstine — to field reporters’ inquiries.

House Republicans have struggled in the past to stay unified on disaster relief, a struggle that could continue if a relief bill is needed beyond the billions already in disaster relief accounts and doesn’t come with new budget cuts.

During the fight for Sandy relief, the overwhelmingly Democratic New York and New Jersey delegations had no trouble getting support from their caucus peers. It was New York Republican Rep. Peter T. King who famously broke party lines and publicly told fundraisers not to donate any more money to the Republican Party until they agreed to stop stonewalling the relief bill.

On Tuesday morning, though, Boehner appeared determined to divert attention from the politics of what comes next to acknowledgment of the reality of the tragedy. He and other members of Republican leadership — Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia; Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy of California; Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and Conference Vice Chairwoman Lynn Jenkins of Kansas — spoke in somber tones about the American spirit of coming together to mourn, pray and rebuild. Boehner, visibly affected, said he had ordered the House flags to be flown at half-staff.

Lankford, the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, and Lucas, the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, gave brief remarks on the tragedy that had befallen their home state before the question-and-answer session in which they did not participate.

“Understand,” Lucas said, “we will rebuild, and we in the delegation will work with our fellow Oklahomans to make sure they have the ability to do that.”

Late-Term Abortion Ban a Test for GOP

House Republican leadership will soon have to decide how hard to push a controversial ban on late-term abortions sought by the party’s base in the wake of Pennsylvania abortion provider Kermit Gosnell’s three murder convictions.

So far, GOP leaders have only made strongly worded statements regarding Gosnell, and it’s not yet clear whether GOP leaders will bring a national ban on late-term abortions, authored by conservative Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., to the floor.

Leadership has not yet scheduled even a nonbinding House resolution that would condemn Gosnell’s actions, and on Monday, Rory Cooper, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said only that his boss “supports legislation that brings to light the horrors both in the Gosnell case and when babies are killed at similar stages of development, whether born or unborn.”

A few weeks ago, Franks reintroduced legislation that would ban abortions after 20 weeks in the District of Columbia, the jurisdiction over which Congress has some control. But last week he announced that he would expand the bill to prohibit the practice nationwide.

“Had Kermit Gosnell dismembered these babies before they had traveled down the birth canal only moments earlier, he would have, in many places nationwide, been performing an entirely legal procedure,” Franks said in a statement.

Franks’ bill is scheduled for a hearing Thursday by the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, of which he is chairman.

A panel aide said Monday that there are currently no plans to consider the bill at the full committee level, though Franks told CQ Roll Call that Judiciary Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte, R-Va., is “very supportive of this new bill and, if anything, it has improved its chances of going forward.”

If the bill gets a markup and a vote on the House floor, it would surely satisfy conservative members of the rank and file who want the chamber to take a firm stance on the Gosnell conviction and against abortion practices generally.

By this time in the 112th Congress, House Republicans had already made an unequivocal statement that they stand against the practice with the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which passed on a 251-175 vote.

The House’s silence on the issue is notable because of the high-profile nature of the Gosnell trial and also given last week’s vote to repeal Obamacare. GOP leaders argued that the vote was scheduled for the benefit of freshmen who had campaigned on overturning the 2010 health care law and wanted to go on the record against it. In theory, the same argument could apply to abortion.

But abortion has always been a volatile issue, and leaders will have to gauge how much they want to emphasize it heading into 2014 — and 2016, for that matter. According to Franks, leadership was not involved in discussions about expanding the bill’s effect to the whole country, but rather outside groups helped push the legislation in a new direction, using the Gosnell matter as leverage.

“There was a difference of opinion among some members about whether this should be for D.C. or nationwide,” Franks acknowledged.

Republican leaders might want to spare some members the unsavory prospect of taking a vote — and having a lengthy debate on a controversial policy position that has no chance of getting signed into law in this Congress. As members of the party that by and large opposes abortion rights, some moderate GOP lawmakers could be torn between not wanting to alienate influential outside groups that “score” votes on abortion-related bills and their constituents who might see such bills as overreaching.

This could especially be true for Franks’ bill, which would seek to institute in all jurisdictions a ban that has already been instituted in nine states.

But there are fewer of those moderates around. Last summer, when the House voted on Franks’ earlier legislation, only six Republicans voted against it. One of those Republicans, Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, won re-election; David Dreier of California, retired. The four others — Mary Bono Mack of Florida, Charles Bass of New Hampshire, and Judy Biggert and Robert Dold of Illinois — were all defeated in 2012.

Franks disagreed that there’s any possibility for backlash, adding that he thought the bill would be brought to the House floor under regular order. Last year, the bill won a simple majority but did not receive the two-thirds affirmative votes required to pass under suspension.

“This is a pro-life conference,” Franks said, “that believes that if we can’t protect children … then maybe it’s time to pack it in as a party.”

House Democratic leaders plan to fight.

“I think there is obviously bipartisan condemnation of disgusting actions taken by this clearly deranged individual, but using this isolated incident as some sort of vehicle to change what is the law of the land is going to be greeted with fierce opposition,” a House Democratic leadership aide suggested Monday.

Daniel Newhauser contributed to this report.

Boehner Asks Obama to Push Putin on Russian Adoption

Speaker John A. Boehner wants President Barack Obama to help Ohioans adopt Russian children.

In a little-noticed letter last week, Boehner and the rest of the Ohio congressional delegation asked Obama to bring up the current ban on Americans adopting Russian children when he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G8 Summit in June.

What’s it to Boehner and his colleagues? Well, according to the letter, “The number of Ohio families halted by this ban is the highest of any state in the country.”

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5 Takeaways From the Ways and Means IRS Hearing

George, left, and Miller are sworn in before testifying at the Ways and Means Committee hearing. (Douglas Graham/CQ Roll Call)

On a rare Friday of congressional action, the first hearing was held to examine the IRS scandal involving the extra, and in some cases unprecedented, scrutiny given to conservative organizations that applied for tax-exempt status over a two-year period covering 2010 to 2012.

Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller was in the hot seat for nearly four hours, as the House Ways and Means Committee grilled him on how and why the federal tax-collecting agency appeared to inject politics into what is supposed to be an independent process. Miller, who will leave his job next month, was joined by Treasury Department Inspector General J. Russell George — he received a considerably more friendly reception.

As the hearing progressed, Ways and Means members slowly but surely veered into typical partisan camps. Republicans insisted that a political conspiracy was behind the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups. Democrats tried to walk a line between disapproval of the IRS’ actions, while defending the credibility of the IRS and accusing the GOP of using the scandal to undermine Obamacare, which requires the agency to hire thousands of new agents to police the new law.

Here are the top five takeaways from Friday’s hearing:

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Democrats Try to Punch Back at House GOP

It was a long week on Capitol Hill for House Democrats, as the chamber’s Republicans hammered President Barack Obama for agency misconduct under his watch, then topped things off with a House vote to repeal his 2010 health care law.

Democrats, however, tried to fight back on Thursday afternoon, looking to beat their GOP counterparts at their own game.

House Republicans scheduled the up-or-down vote to dismantle Obamacare, they said, in part to give the GOP freshman class a chance to go on the record against it.

In that vein, 45 freshmen Democrats argued Thursday, they should be able to have a chance to vote up-or-down on legislation to replace the sequestration with a “balanced solution.”

“This week, the House will vote on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which it has already done thirty-six times,” they wrote in a May 16 letter to Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio. “Your justification for another unnecessary repeal vote has been that it allows freshmen members their first formal opportunity to let their constituents know where they stand on repeal. However, you have not allowed freshmen the same opportunity to vote on a balanced alternative to replace sequestration.”

Meanwhile, House Administration Committee member Gregg Harper, R-Miss., continued his crusade this week to pass legislation that would terminate the Election Assistance Commission.

Created when Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, the EAC was given more than $3 billion to dole out to states for improved election administration and is intended to be a clearinghouse of sorts to help facilitate the electoral process.

Harper, however, along with fellow House Administration Committee Republicans, contends that the EAC has outlived its usefulness and has not had any meaningful impact for a long time. Though the House passed his bill in the 112th Congress, it went on to die in the Senate.

On Thursday, panel Democrats introduced legislation that would do the opposite of Harper’s bill: it would reauthorize the EAC and make “substantive improvements” to reinvigorate the commission.

Of course, both Democratic efforts are symbolic ones. In a Republican-controlled House, they are all but dead on arrival – or, dead on press release.

Q&A With Gov. Brian Sandoval (Part II)

CARSON CITY, Nev. — Gov. Brian Sandoval has cut a lower, less-partisan profile than many Republican chiefs executive.

But as a Hispanic Republican and the relatively popular leader of a Western swing state that sided with President Barack Obama last November, Sandoval might be uniquely qualified to offer his party political advice as it seeks to recover in the wake of the disappointing 2012 elections.

In part two of our discussion pulled from my wide-ranging interview conducted earlier this week in the governor’s private office in Nevada’s historic Capitol, Sandoval sounded off on how efforts to change U.S. immigration law might affect the GOP nationally, and what he really thought when 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney talked about “self deportation” as an immigration policy.

The governor revealed some of his thinking about the political landscape at home ahead of the 2014 and 2016 elections and discussed how the actions of the Congress and the White House, or lack thereof, have affected his ability to help Nevada recover from an economic downturn that was felt more acutely in the Silver State than perhaps any other state in the nation.

And we closed the interview with a short segment on Sandoval’s choice of footwear — and discovered a Capitol Hill connection.

Q. Over time, will the Senate immigration reform proposal help the image of the GOP with different ethnic demographics?

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Boehner Wants Debt Limit Talks With Obama

Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, said Thursday that the White House should be prepared to negotiate with House Republicans on the debt limit – despite President Barack Obama’s insistence that he wants to extend it later this summer without strings attached.

“It’s easy to make a statement to that effect,” Boehner said of Obama at his Thursday morning news conference ,”but it’s just not reality.”

Of course, Boehner himself does not appear to have settled on exactly what he would be negotiating for, considering House GOP members emerged from Wednesday’s debt limit brainstorming session without a consensus on what to fight for.

Still, Boehner indicated that House Republicans would likely be seeking deeper spending cuts. “The fact is, that if the Treasury Department needs to pay the bills, the debt limit has to be dealt with, and should be dealt with in a responsible way,” he said. “[Obama] can’t continue to increase the debt limit without doing something about what’s driving the increase in the debt limit, and that is out of control spending.”

Boehner also took the opportunity to tout the House’s vote, set for later in the day, on a bill that would fully repeal Obamacare, the third of its kind since the GOP gained control of the chamber in 2011.

Standing beside the now-infamous, seven-foot “Red Tape Tower,” he gestured to the thousands of pages stacked on top of the other, tied with a red ribbon and balanced on a red hand-cart.

“These are the thousands and thousands of health care regulations,” Boehner explained. “And if we want jobs, we need to get rid of this, because this is getting in the way of employers hiring workers around the country.”

Boehner’s news conference also included mention of the two major scandals that have wreaked havoc on the Obama administration this week, namely revelations that the IRS inappropriately targeted conservative nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status and that the Justice Department seized records from Associated Press phone lines.

“Nothing dissolves the bonds between people and their government like the arrogance of power here in Washington,” Boehner said. “And that’s what the American people are seeing today from the Obama administration: remarkable arrogance.

“This house will stop at nothing to get to the American people the answers that they expect,” he continued. “But the best way to repair this damage is for the Obama administration to come forward with the truth — the whole truth — so that the American people will have all the facts.”

Reinvigorated Tea Party Bands Together Against IRS

Tea party leaders banded together Thursday morning to sound a rallying cry for the first time since news broke last week that the IRS disproportionately scrutinized conservative nonprofits applying for tax-exempt status.

Convened by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., former presidential candidate and chairwoman of the House Tea Party Caucus, the news conference outside the Capitol included tea party allies in the House and Senate, national leaders and representatives from local groups around the country.

Their rhetoric left little room to wonder how they feel about the recent developments.

Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, called for an audit of the IRS, which she described as “thuggish.” Adam Brandon, the executive vice president of FreedomWorks, said the government was operating more like “a third world junta than a constitutional republic.”

“It’s an abuse of power, potentially by this administration, to advance their own political ends,” Bachmann told a crowd of reporters afterward. “And story after story after story leads one to the conclusion, based upon the presumptive evidence, that the administration was willing to misuse and abuse government power to advance its own re-election chances in the next election. That’s wrong.”

Lawmakers and political organizers pledged one after another that this is an issue that won’t temper a roaring boil anytime soon, and that they would continue to speak out until they had answers.

They were also joined by pro bono attorneys on Thursday, a clear signal that the voices of those targeted by the IRS will only grow louder.

“They lost funding, they lost donors,” said Jordan Sekulow, the executive director for the American Center for Law and Justice. “We have a group out of Tennessee that lost a $3,000 donation because they weren’t approved.

“There are monetary damages here. Events had to be canceled. Attorney fees before they hired us … groups hired local attorneys and were not allowed to even operate once they got approved,” Sekulow said.

Though revelations about IRS misconduct became public May 10, conservative organizations have been voicing concerns beginning around February 2012, at which point 27 of them became clients of Sekulow’s group.

Did Justice Monitor Congress’ Phone Calls With AP?

Nunes said he believes the Obama administration seized AP phone records to track GOP House members. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

Some Republicans are concerned that the Justice Department was essentially able to spy on Congress through its seizure of Associated Press phone records.

Expanding on a Wednesday interview with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Rep. Devin Nunes told me Thursday morning that there is no other explanation in light of the DOJ’s acknowledgment that, as part of its inquiry into national security leaks, it subpoenaed AP phone records from the House press gallery. That’s a prime spot from which reporters frequently initiate and receive telephone calls from members of Congress and their staff.

The California Republican said that the AP phone records scandal that has focused on First Amendment infringement actually runs deeper, and should examine what he is convinced includes an illegal violation of the separation of powers by President Barack Obama’s administration.

“As I pointed out to Hugh Hewitt, there’s no question that Justice knows what members of Congress the AP was talking to during the two-month time period,” Nunes told CQ Roll Call.

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House GOP Still Struggling for Consensus on Debt Limit

They talked about balancing the budget in 10 years, repealing Obamacare, slashing spending and overhauling the tax code.

In other words, the House Republican meeting Wednesday afternoon to brainstorm a path forward for dealing with the debt limit basically consisted of “a laundry list of everything imaginable,” in the words of Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah.

That isn’t to say it was a surprise, or a disappointment. Leading up to the GOP leadership-convened conference, lawmakers said that they expected it to be a listening session rather than a strategy meeting on what demands they should bring to the negotiating table as a condition of raising the debt ceiling.

Policy Committee Chairman James Lankford, R-Okla., said Tuesday that he didn’t anticipate consensus around a single idea, but that perhaps “instead of 10 options, maybe we’ll come out with three or four.”

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WH Email Dump Proves GOP Case on Benghazi, Boehner’s Office Says

A spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner said late Wednesday that White House emails just released by the Obama administration bolster the findings of a House Republican investigation into the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The White House released 100 pages of emails in a beefed up effort to prove false the GOP charges that the administration attempted to cover up the true nature of the Benghazi attack, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three others. Here is the full statement from Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck:

“The House interim report found that ‘senior State Department officials requested the talking points be changed to avoid criticism for ignoring the threat environment in Benghazi’ and that those changes were ultimately made. Those findings are confirmed by the emails released today, and they contradict statements made by the White House that it and the State Department only changed one word in the talking points. The seemingly political nature of the State Department’s concerns raises questions about the motivations behind these changes and who at the State Department was seeking them. This release is long overdue and there are relevant documents the Administration has still refused to produce. We hope, however, that this limited release of documents is a sign of more cooperation to come.”

Q&A: Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval

CARSON CITY, Nev. — From his spacious office in the Silver State’s historic Capitol, Gov. Brian Sandoval keeps one eye focused on Washington, D.C., as he attempts to mitigate the political and economic minefield that has become the implementation of Obamacare.

The first-term Republican governor opposed the Affordable Care Act and joined the lawsuit challenging the legality of President Barack Obama’s landmark health care law. But after the Supreme Court upheld the statute, he moved ahead with the creation of a state health insurance exchange, deciding he would rather have Nevada shape its citizens’ access to care under the law rather than have federal bureaucrats do it 3,000 miles away.

But that doesn’t mean Sandoval, who is up for re-election in 2014 and has been mentioned as a GOP vice-presidential candidate, is happy with the law’s implications for Nevada’s arduous recovery from what was arguably an economic depression brought on by the 2008 real estate collapse. Nor is the governor pleased with the Obama administration’s slow and uncertain pace for writing the regulations that will dictate how states are supposed to operate under the new health care regime.

In part one of my broad interview with Sandoval: our discussion about Obamacare and his thoughts on an immigration overhaul. As a Hispanic Republican and a former federal judge who both presided over citizenship ceremonies and prosecuted undocumented immigrants for breaking immigration laws, Sandoval shared his unique perspectives on the matter and the bill that is currently winding its way through the Senate.

Q. Let’s talk about the Affordable Care Act. We know about the old debate, but now there’s the new debate about implementation. Is the implementation process making it harder for Nevada businesses to expand, or for other businesses that want to expand into Nevada, is the uncertainty around the Affordable Care Act making things difficult?

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Issa Schedules IRS Hearing

The Oversight and Government Reform Committee has scheduled a hearing for next week on allegations of misconduct within the IRS, the panel’s chairman, Darrell Issa, confirmed Wednesday.

The California Republican announced the May 22 hearing date to a small group of reporters following a weekly meeting of the House GOP Conference.

It will come just days after the hearing the Ways and Means Committee has set for this Friday.

However, Issa stressed that the two panels would ultimately be seeking answers to different questions relating to charges that the IRS disproportionately targeted the applications of conservative groups with certain signifiers, such as “tea party,” in their names.

“There are a number of various ways in which Ways and Means has unique jurisdiction,” Issa explained of the committee responsible for overseeing the nation’s tax policies, among other things, “but I think for the American people, they want the facts of transparency.

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Bachmann to Lead Tea Party’s Response to IRS Matter

Since news broke of allegations that the IRS improperly targeted applications for conservative tax-exempt organizations, members of Congress of all stripes have been eager to go on the record condemning these revelations.

On Tuesday, however, lawmakers who are actual stakeholders in the controversy continued to move the ball forward in responding to the charges and holding the agency accountable.

The Congressional Tea Party Caucus, which just last month relaunched after a period of dormancy, will hold a press conference Thursday morning.

Caucus chairwoman and former federal tax attorney Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and “Tea Party leaders” will “tell their stories of IRS intimidation and demand further investigation,” according to a Tuesday press release.

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