Failed Obamacare Bill Will Get House Do-Over

A month after House Republican leaders were forced to pull an unpopular Obamacare revision from the House floor, bill sponsor Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., said he expects to see a modified version under consideration again in “a couple of weeks.”

The reworked measure appears designed to mollify critics in the rank and file who argued that the bill, as introduced, would have, in effect, just bolstered the president’s signature health care law rather than repealed its provisions.

In its original form, the bill would have taken $3.7 billion from the 2010 health care law’s Prevention and Public Health Fund and directed that money toward allowing people with pre-existing conditions to continue enrolling in high-risk insurance pools. The White House has put a moratorium on enrollment in preparation for the 2014 launch of state-run insurance exchanges that will offer such coverage.

The revamped legislation, meanwhile, would completely zero out the Prevention and Public Health Fund, Pitts told CQ Roll Call on Wednesday.

About $8.5 billion in savings incurred by repealing the fund would go toward deficit reduction, Pitts continued, and the rest would go to states to run their own high-risk pools or create new ones.

“It goes to the states. It’s under their discretion,” he said.

It could make the bill more likely to pass muster with conservative members of the Republican Conference who were under pressure from the Club for Growth and The Heritage Foundation to vote against it. The Club for Growth and The Heritage Foundation both pledged to score a vote on the original legislation, saying it improved the law rather than repealed it.

On Wednesday, Pitts emphasized that repealing the prevention fund is critical because the administration has used some of its funding to implement other parts of the law.

“They’re using it as the implementation fund for Obamacare,” he said. “Basically $54 million was taken to hire navigators to sign up people. They’re using $304 million for an advertising, media campaign on Obamacare. And they’ve used it for all kinds of other grants.”

When GOP leaders halted floor consideration on April 24, they pledged to take members’ concerns into consideration and rework some of the language to make it more palatable.

At that time, House Republican Policy Committee Chairman James Lankford, R-Okla., said he had heard from some colleagues that they had concerns with the bill helping only a certain group of people and not all those who feel threatened by the law. He also said that colleagues might be more inclined to vote for the bill if they were first able to vote on full repeal of the law.

House leadership heeded that call May 16, when it held an up-or-down Obamacare repeal vote. Meanwhile, Rory Cooper, spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., demurred when questioned whether this vote was intended to be an olive branch of sorts to pave the way for the high-risk pool bill to return to the floor.

In an emailed statement on Wednesday, Cooper said the revised bill would address promises made in the health care law on which President Barack Obama has reneged.

“[He] has broken many of his fundamental health care promises, including helping those with pre-existing conditions,” Cooper said. “So House Republicans remain committed to ensuring those suffering with illness and disease are helped, and not left behind by the failed Obamacare law.”

Abortion Bill Could Hurt All House Republicans, Bono Mack Says

The conservative base is clamoring for the House to consider its first abortion-related bill of the 113th Congress, but at least one ousted GOP moderate is sounding an alarm about the political dangers for her party.

Former Rep. Mary Bono Mack, who lost her 2012 re-election bid to Democrat Raul Ruiz, said the House’s renewed focus on a Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy will likely hurt the party’s efforts to build a broader base.

“People who are in districts that are tighter, or people who, in my view, read the bill, will see that it is too extreme,” Bono Mack, now a senior vice president at FaegreBD Consulting, said in an interview with CQ Roll Call.  “The whole party is trying so hard to reach out to people who are not in the party right now. … This is one of those things where people who are on the fence, looking at both parties, deciding which one they like, they might look at this bill and say, ‘I just might not go there. This is a little too far for me.’”

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‘Conferencia GOP’ Reaches Out to Latinos in New Video

The Republican Party, long-marooned from the Latino voting bloc, has begun a concerted effort to mobilize this constituency as its own, particularly ahead of the 2014 and 2016 elections.

The most recent attempt at making its message resonate with Hispanic voters comes from the House, where GOP leadership has harnessed its new-media savvy to create an outreach video starring its Spanish-speaking members.

The House Republican Conference unveiled its latest Spanish-language video Wednesday, which features California Reps. Jeff Denham and David Valadao, along with Florida Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Trey Radel.

Titled “Energía Norteamericana,” or “American Energy,” the 1-minute, 42-second video highlights “the importance of an all-American energy plan that would create jobs and unleash countless opportunities for the Hispanic community,” according to a Republican Conference press release.

“With more than 2 million Latinos looking for work, we need more jobs, we need more opportunities, and we need them now,” say the lawmakers, according to a translation provided by the Republican Conference. “Tapping into American energy would unleash countless job opportunities. It would create jobs, lower prices at the pump and give all of us a more secure future.

“Republicans are working every day to improve people’s lives in our communities and create more jobs,” they say. “An all-American energy plan would do just that.”

The House Republican Conference’s Spanish-language video is not the first of its kind. The “Conferencia GOP” has its own YouTube channel, and it also maintains its own Twitter handle.

This particular video’s release, however, coincides with this week’s House floor consideration of legislation that would allow construction on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to commence without the need for a permit from the White House.

While critics argue the pipeline would have devastating environmental effects, supporters say it would maximize America’s access to cheaper energy sources and in general contribute to a more robust U.S. economy.

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.”