DesJarlais Will Pay State Fines for Medical Misconduct

Several months since the revelation broke that Rep. Scott DesJarlais engaged in inappropriate relationships with patients during his pre-congressional career as a doctor, the tea-party-backed, two-term Tennessee Republican will pay a fine and receive admonishment from the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners.

According to official documents provided by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and first reported by the Tennessean, DesJarlais will be required within 60 days to pay a $500 fine for engaging in sexual affairs with two female patients he was treating at the time, which runs afoul of state law for medical practitioners and is punishable by penalties such as suspension or revocation of a physician’s medical license.

DesJarlais will also have to pay $1,000 to cover the costs incurred during the medical board’s investigation into allegations of his misconduct, first brought to its attention by CREW.

Earlier Thursday, in an exclusive interview with the Tennesseean, DesJarlais said, “I take responsibility for past mistakes and am happy to get this resolved.”

House Republican leaders and colleagues, he continued, feel the same way: “They are happy to get this resolved.”

When reached for comment by CQ Roll Call, DesJarlais’ spokesman Robert Jameson referenced the Tennessean interview. “He accepts the ruling of the board,” Jameson added.

Though news broke on Thursday that DesJarlais would incur fines, the official documents are dated for Wednesday, May 22.

It brings to an end a saga that’s been ongoing since last fall, when sworn testimony from court documents during DesJarlais’ 2001 divorce proceedings showed that he had “sexual relationships with at least two patients, three co-workers and a drug representative while he was chief of staff at Grandview Medical Center in Jasper, Tenn.”

Perhaps more damning politically for DesJarlais, an avowed anti-abortion lawmaker and member of the conservative Republican Study Committee, was information from that sworn testimony showing he had “supported his ex-wife’s decision to get two abortions before their marriage.”

During that time, his House GOP colleagues stayed largely silent on the allegations, and it’s not likely many of them will be speaking out publicly on his behalf in the wake of the Tennessee Medical Board’s verdict.

CREW, meanwhile, slammed the board’s decision not to penalize DesJarlais above and beyond what the group’s executive director, Melanie Sloan, belittled as “more expensive traffic tickets.”

“Accountability begins at home,” Sloan continued in a statement. “As we predicted when we filed our complaints, despite the fact that Rep. DesJarlais’s conduct is a clear-cut violation of Tennessee law, state authorities gave him a pass.  Let’s hope the Office of Congressional Ethics, which is also considering a complaint against Rep. DesJarlais, takes a dimmer view of his outrageous misconduct.”

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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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.

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.

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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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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House GOP ‘Gang of 6′ Slams Senate’s ‘Gang of 8′ Immigration Bill

As the Senate Judiciary Committee continues to debate the immigration overhaul measure authored by the bipartisan “gang of eight,” a more informal and more partisan “gang of six” gathered outside the Capitol to slam what it called an “amnesty bill.”

The cadre of House Republicans, led by Rep. Steve King of Iowa, held a Tuesday morning news conference to weigh in on how to address the nation’s population of undocumented immigrants.

The answer, group members said, is to start by securing the borders before passing any bill that attempts a comprehensive overhaul.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, said that President Barack Obama wants to offer legal status to any immigrant without discretion and have that be the condition on which he agrees to secure the border.

“[It is] hypothetically like some random president saying, ‘Hey media, if you don’t write good stories, I’m gonna be going into your phone records on a regular basis until you start,’ just hypothetically, or like, ‘Hey groups, you gotta get off my back or I’m going to harass you with the IRS,’” Gohmert said referencing two scandals within President Barack Obama’s administration: one dealing with the Justice Department seizure of Associated Press phone records, and another involving the IRS inappropriately targeting applications from conservative organizations.

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Blast From the IRS’ Scandal Past

Way back in March 2012, Roll Call published a story about how tea party types were pretty irate over the amount of info they were being asked to provide to the IRS in order to get nonprofit status.

“In the past two months, dozens of tea party groups … say they have received lengthy and intrusive questionnaires, some of which request the names of donors and volunteers,” staff writer Janie Lorber wrote. Full story

Pelosi Injects Campaign Finance Debate Into IRS Scandal

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s two-paragraph statement on allegations that the IRS targeted tea party organizations for extra review could have come from any concerned lawmaker Monday.

But a single sentence tying the IRS’ alleged misconduct with a controversial Supreme Court decision signaled that Democratic leaders see an opening to restart the debate over the nation’s campaign finance system. Full story

House GOP Investigating IRS Focus on Tea Party Groups

Updated 5:52 pm | House Republicans are seizing on the IRS admission that personnel improperly targeted tea party groups for scrutiny, with Speaker John A. Boehner drawing a connection to abuses of the past.

“The admission by the Obama administration that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political opponents echoes some of the most shameful abuses of government power in 20th-century American history,” Boehner said in a statement Friday.

Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., is leading the push through his role as chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight. The Louisiana Republican has already sent a letter to acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller seeking all agency correspondence relating to the exact terms “conservative,” “tea party” and “patriot.”

Boustany noted that the Ways and Means panel already has an investigation under way.

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