A Do-Nothing Congress Won’t Surprise These Beltway Insiders

Lawmakers will spend the coming week performing yet another chapter of Groundhog Day, returning to debates that generated ample heat but yielded no conclusion during the election year.

The Senate will plow through the farm bill one more time. The House will vote again to insist on construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and to prevent student loans rates from doubling.

Very little of that will generate headlines, if for no other reason than the attention of Congress at the moment is all about training its investigative powers on the Obama administration controversies.

Then, at week’s end, the Capitol will go dark, with the entire community scattering for a long Memorial Day weekend of cookouts and commencements.

And when the lights go back on, one recess week later, it will signal the start of the second half of the scheduled legislative year. This is a marker that gives new meaning to the idea that time flies when not much of anything is going on.

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Obama Says ‘Check’ to GOP in Confirmation Chess Match

The most important Senate committee vote Thursday on a top-tier White House nomination was neither the party-line ballot advancing Thomas E. Perez one step away from becoming Labor secretary, nor the parallel 10-8 vote advancing the choice of Gina McCarthy as EPA chief to the Senate floor.

The day’s most consequential roll call was at Senate Judiciary, where all eight Republicans joined the 10 Democrats in endorsing Sri Srinivasan for a seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Such unanimity is an extraordinary and unmistakable sign that GOP conservatives are making a tactical retreat in the judicial wars — one that may influence the filling of a future seat on the Supreme Court.

Even as those Republicans contemplate filibusters designed to stop Perez or McCarthy from taking seats in the president’s Cabinet — where they could shape policy for three and a half years at most — they’re preparing to concede their side’s clear ideological advantage at the country’s second-most-important federal courthouse. And they look ready confirm someone who might hold sway over social and regulatory policy for three decades or more.

A lopsided confirmation vote by the full Senate, which now looks inevitable and could come within a month, would boost the odds that President Barack Obama turns to Srinivasan should a vacancy on the top court come open in the next three years. (Are you listening, Justice Ginsburg?) Four of the current high-court justices stepped up from the D.C. Circuit, which has unusual influence over federal policy because it hears constitutional appeals of most decisions involving government agencies and departments based in the capital.

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Damage Control: Obama’s Wednesday News Dump

The White House worked overtime Wednesday to try to change the narrative on two ongoing controversies embroiling the Obama administration.

First, it called reporters to a sudden afternoon “deep background” briefing, according to CQ Roll Call’s harried White House reporter, Steven T. Dennis. Just as Dennis emailed the newsroom that he was in possession of a binder full of emails relating to the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, the White House announced that the president would give a 6 p.m. statement on the ongoing scandal over the IRS’s decision to target conservative groups seeking non-profit status for extra scrutiny.

Whether the one-two punch will actually take the wind out of Republicans’ sails is yet to be seen, but there were some signs that Obama had successfully put the GOP on defense for the first time in a few weeks.

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Obama Gets Bitter Taste of History’s Second-Term Curse

Has Barack Obama already caught a terminal case of the second-term curse? Still too early to diagnose.

But such an affliction will inevitably suffocate all his remaining legislative aspirations. The evidence from the past four decades leads to an unavoidable prognosis: The man’s got a little more than a year left, at most.

Each of the four previous re-elected presidents saw their juice on Capitol Hill run out well before their second-term congressional midterms. And there’s no empirical reason to believe that Obama will be able to make his political capital last any longer in this divided and divisive Congress.

Richard M. Nixon was able to keep alive his top priorities, which were about taking more power for himself at the expense of Congress, for only four months in 1973. Then the Senate Watergate Committee convened, galvanizing the nation’s interest in what the president knew and how long he’d known it.

Ronald Reagan decided to make a tax code overhaul the top domestic priority of his second term in May 1985, and he was able to revel in the climatic votes a year later. After that, the Iran-Contra scandal is all the historians have to say about the remainder of his presidency.

Bill Clinton pushed a landmark, bipartisan agreement on plans for balancing the federal budget through Congress in August 1997 and got to work on a typically disparate collection of other priorities. Traction for virtually all of them disappeared for good the following January, after the nation learned Monica Lewinsky’s name.

George W. Bush was about to see his choice elevated to chief justice of the United States on Labor Day 2005, and there was still a fighting chance Congress would permit his top second-term wish of getting some Social Security savings invested in the markets. His political capital evaporated immediately thereafter, when fury at his arms-length response to Hurricane Katrina combined with imploding support for the Iraq War.

For Obama, the lessons of his recent two-term predecessors is this: Even if he succeeds in weathering the current scandalous-sounding triple whammy — the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the seizing of journalists’ phone records, the shifting story about the Libya consulate attack — the president will be in the clear no longer than Election Day 2014. By then his legislative goals will have either been met or sidetracked for the duration.

His political opponents will make sure of it, one way or another.

Maybe they will tiptoe past the point of no return in pursuing a controversy, the way the Watergate investigations progressed, because plenty of lawmakers in both parties were willing to disbelieve as long as possible that their president was a criminal conspirator.

Maybe they’ll launch a formalized bipartisan court of inquiry, a la the Iran-Contra hearings, the path Democrats who ran the 100th Congress chose for marginalizing a still personally popular president.

Maybe the zealous umbrage and take-no-prisoners partisanship of a few Republicans will trump the cooler heads of the rest, the way Tom DeLay and his acolytes forced their way past the conventional wisdom that lying about sex with an intern was not the sort of “high crime” that drafters of the Impeachment Clause had in mind.

In each of those cases, the party that wasn’t running the White House came up with a way to turn one scandal into their best leverage for neutralizing whatever mandate could be claimed from the previous presidential election.

That’s not what happened four years ago. The most prominent scandal then — the case of the covert CIA agent exposed by White House officials as payback for her diplomat husband’s apostasy on Iraq — was certainly seamy. But no one ever talked seriously about impeaching Bush for it.

Instead, the Democratic minority decided its best approach was to turn its collective back on almost everything the president asked for, betting the voters would respond to the gridlock by turning over to them the keys to both the House and Senate in 2006.

It worked just as planned. That’s why the best wager at the moment is that Republicans will start emulating that approach very soon, assuming it can’t help but cement the universal expectation that they’ll hold the House and make a strong run at taking back the Senate next year.

Although an immigration overhaul remains the potential top-shelf exception, deficit curbs and gun control and the rest of Obama’s wishes will simply be left to wither. Instead, the GOP will seek to fill the air with a welter of oversight hearings on the three controversies of the moment, with some Democrats joining the outrage in the name of buying themselves political cover.

And the 2014 campaign will rumble into second gear as early as ever. For those of you not yet counting, the election is now 538 days away.

IRS Scandal Is a ‘Crime’ in Boehner-McConnell Echo Chamber

The three-ingredient stew pot of Obama administration controversy got a personal stir this morning from the top Republicans in Congress — both of whom suggested that federal crimes were committed when the IRS targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny.

Separate statements by Speaker John A. Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, just a few minutes apart, suggested a coordinated decision by the GOP leadership to turn up the political pressure on the president as high as possible. It may serve to prevent the White House from shaping the narrative as one in which thorough punitive follow-through will follow the exposure of bad behavior.

“Now, my question isn’t about who’s going to resign. My question is who’s going to jail over this scandal?” Boehner told reporters after the first of two GOP caucus meetings today. “Someone made a conscious decision to harass and hold up these requests for tax exempt status. I think we need to know who they are, whether they violated the law. Clearly someone violated the law.”

McConnell was just one notch less emphatic in his suspicions. “If there was an effort to bring the power of the federal government to bear on those that the administration disagreed with in the middle of a heated national election, it actually could be criminal and we’re determined to get the answers,” he said on the floor.

He also announced that 40 other GOP senators had joined him on a letter to the president demanding additional disclosures in the case, including regarding an apparent lack of candor about the IRS targeting when some officials were asked about it in congressional testimony more than a year ago.

The GOP leaders are likely to get what they say they’re after. Both spoke the morning after a Treasury inspector general concluded that lax oversight permitted the targeting of groups with conservative-sounding names to be singled out for heightened and extensive review of their applications. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said he would follow through on Obama’s orders to fire the people responsible for the “intolerable and inexcusable” conduct.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that the FBI had started investigating the matter last week to see if the “outrageous and unacceptable” moves were criminal behavior. He’ll be pressed to say more on that score, as well as about his department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records as part of a leak investigation, when he testifies this afternoon before the House Judiciary Committee.

Neither Boehner nor McConnell talked about the AP case this morning, but the speaker said he wasn’t backing away from his considerable interest in the kaleidoscope  of contradictory information that’s circulated since the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya’s second-biggest city.

That controversy now appears to be slipping quickly into third place among the dust-ups that are dominating Washington. “I don’t want to prolong this any more than anyone else,” Boehner said. “What I want is the truth.”

IRS Mess Exposes Split Between What Congress Will Say and What It Will Do

It took four days in Congress for predictably unanimous rhetorical outrage at the IRS to devolve into a predictably partisan disagreement over the proper legislative response.

There may be 100 senators willing to vote to excoriate the agency for subjecting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status to an intensified level of investigation. But there’s no sign that a necessary 60 of them will get behind meaningful legislation to make sure that positioning anywhere along the ideological spectrum is never the interest of the tax auditors again.

Congress will manage no more than a symbolic swipe at the symptoms of the more fundamental problem, which is the currently vague and confusing state of campaign finance law. Full story

Left, Right and Center Tag Obama as ‘Nixonian’

Many things were widely predicted for Barack Obama when he first ran for the White House five years ago, and many recent presidents were seen as likely role models. One side of the great partisan divide forecast historic achievements in the mold of FDR, while the other side foresaw overreaching failure in the mold of Jimmy Carter.

But almost no one — save a couple of commentators on the ideological fringe — expected Obama would get to a second term and find his legislative agenda suddenly frozen in the face of a bipartisan wave of comparisons to Richard Nixon.

“The Day the Obama Administration Went All Nixon On Us,” is the headline on today’s post from Will Bunch on the left-leaning Huffington Post, who focused his ire on revelations of Associated Press phone record seizures by the Justice Department.

“This is an agency with an enemies list,” target=”_blank”>Lou Dobbs said of the IRS on the right’s favorite cable news network, Fox, after Obama’s Monday news conference. “This is a president whose inner Nixon is being revealed.”

“Has Obama Taken a Page Out of Nixon’s Playbook?” asks the headline atop a column today by editor Jacqueline Leo in the budget hawkish but otherwise down-the-middle Fiscal Times. “There may not be direct parallels to the Obama administration, but the events of the last few months have become too big to ignore. There’s the Benghazi cover up; a slew of executive orders that bypass Congress; the IRS targeting of GOP conservative organizations; and now, the intrusion, violation and intimidation of a major news organization.”

That commentators from the left, right and center have all seen the parallels to the 37^th president, who was forced to resign when his views of the “imperial presidency” jumped the shark during Watergate, should be “chilling” to the president, to use the word being ascribed to both the IRS special scrutiny for conservative groups and the DOJ’s unprecedented prying into a newsroom’s operation as party of a leak inquiry.

Forty years on, the Nixon taint remains probably the most difficult for an American politician to scrub away. And the fact that it’s being applied so widely now could not be worse for the president’s timing, because it means his already teetering domestic legislative agenda may well be supplanted at the Capitol for months to come by nothing but oversight hearings.

House Prospects Snub a Senate Run and Who Can Blame Them?

Campaign 2012 was a vintage year for House members seeking promotion to the Senate: A dozen tried, and half of them made it.

There were an imponderable number of other variables, of course, but that 50 percent success rate would suggest that the oldest up-or-out move in the American political playbook is working better than ever. In the five previous elections, 16 of the 45 House members who staked their careers on a run for Senate succeeded in moving to the north side of the Capitol — still, a winning bet 36 percent of the time.

So why are so many current House incumbents saying, “No, thanks,” to opportunities to run for the “upper chamber”? Full story

IRS Has No Friends in Washington

President Barack Obama moved tentatively today to join the bubbling outrage at the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups, although he said he didn’t have sufficient reason yet to either condemn outright or apologize directly for the tax agency’s behavior.

“If it turns out that IRS employees acted in anything less than a neutral and non-partisan way, then that is outrageous,” Obama said in a mid-morning news conference with visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron.

But he also said he would wait to say more about the revelations — that groups with conservative-sounding names were singled out for heightened IRS scrutiny before being granted tax-exempt status during the 2012 campaign — until Treasury’s inspector general for taxes concludes whether the behavior was politically motivated or otherwise broke regulatory rules.

That yearlong investigation is done and the recommendations are expected to be made public this week, maybe as soon as today.

Since the story broke May 10, congressional anger has come mainly from Republicans, who are falling all over themselves promising all manner of investigations, hearings and legislation. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., for example, called today for the ouster of the IRS commissioner.

The GOP seems to have had no trouble realizing that it has been handed the gift-wrapped political package of its dreams, a contretemps the public can easily grasp and which will galvanize base supporters behind the two things in Washington they dislike most: the president and the tax collectors.

But congressional Democrats are starting to catch on, realizing that unless they match the GOP in excoriating the behavior of the IRS field office in Cincinnati — which was in charge of reviewing all applications by political groups seeking tax-exempt status — the story will quickly supplant the allegations of a Benghazi attack cover-up, which is both more confusing and has been around for six months, as the most potent Washington controversy of the season.

“The IRS will now be the ones put under additional scrutiny,” said Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., who promised a comprehensive investigation by his panel. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations, has also promised hearings, and statements of outrage were issued this morning by two centrist Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Tim Kaine of Virginia.

The rationale is clear for Democrats getting in as high dudgeon as the Republicans. Their sense of the Nixonian overtones of the facts so far should be as clear as it is to those on the other side, and provide a pretty easy way to score some rhetorical points with the Tea Party crowd.

Democrats may have almost nothing nice to say about what those people believe in, but that has nothing to do with their being out under the IRS’ microscope in ways that haven’t applied to groups with liberal-sounding names. In other words, the Democrats can demagogue the process without getting close to their underlying policies they disdain.

It’s perhaps not so surprising that Obama is taking a more measured approach. It’s still not clear how high up at the IRS the chain of blame properly ascends. And, over the long haul, the agency will need to come up with a non-partisan and easy-to-apply test for the waves of politically committed groups seeking to reap the benefits of the Citizens United decision by registering as tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations.

That process reportedly got started after the Cincinnati office’s first approach was rejected as discriminatory toward groups on the right, but before it came to light. So, in that sense, it looks as though correcting the mistake got started even without the thunderous force of a Washington controversy making it so.

Budget Wars Likely to Fizzle Fast

After a two-week break — heralded by the quick and bipartisan capitulation to exempt the flying public but no one else from the sequester’s scythe — the budget wars are getting started again.

But signs point to the next few skirmishes fizzling fast.

Although it appeared likely when the year began, with a last-minute deal that looked like only a balky skid along the edge of the fiscal cliff, Congress is not facing a summer that’s going to look like 2011 all over again.

That’s mainly a consequence of the government’s short-term fiscal position, which on paper looks pretty good. The Treasury’s balance sheet for April was $113 billion in the black, the biggest monthly surplus in five years. Steady economic growth and the higher tax rates put in effect in January have quickened the flow of revenue. And the flow of spending has slowed now that those deep spending cuts, once dismissed as too indiscriminate to carry out, have nonetheless been put in place (except, of course, for those air traffic controllers).

The result is a federal deficit for the first seven months of this budget year totaling $488 billion, or just two-thirds of what it was during the same period the year before. At that pace, there will be less red ink on the books in September, at the end of fiscal 2013, than in any year since the finale of the George W. Bush administration.

With news like that, it’s going to be essentially impossible for conservative Republicans to build a head of steam behind their “shut it down” crusade.

The year began with the GOP agreeing not to hold the limit on federal borrowing hostage — but only until May 18. When that limited truce was set, the universal expectation was that the government would need congressional permission to borrow again by summer, meaning the fiscal hawks would once again be able to insist on budget concessions just before the House and Senate scattered for their off-year August recess.

Now, the newly rosy deficit scenario means Treasury probably won’t be bumping up against its debt ceiling before November, maybe not even before the end of the year. And without that pressure, the next budget deal looks to be six months away at the earliest.

That buys a sufficient amount of time for Republicans to get their story straight about what they want in return for permitting the national debt to rise to more than $17 trillion.

Deliberations will get started for two hours Wednesday morning, during a special closed meeting of the House Republican Conference.

There’s already pretty wide agreement against seeking deeper cuts to military and domestic discretionary programs than what’s now on course because of the sequester. That leaves two obvious alternatives.

One is to press Obama once more to negotiate deficit reduction entirely from curbing Medicare and other entitlements, and not at all from raising revenue. The president would, of course, reject that out of hand, but at least that approach would live up to the requirement for debt-increase deals set by Speaker John A. Boehner two years ago: Every dollar in new borrowing permission needs to be paired with at least a dollar in spending cuts.

The second alternative was getting more buzz last week, after it was promoted not only by Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp but also by Budget Chairman Paul D. Ryan: Condition GOP support for more borrowing on Obama’s support for a revenue-neutral tax overhaul — one designed to simplify the system — by ending many deductions and exemptions, and cut rates for businesses and maybe individuals as well.

How this would meet the “Boehner rule” is a mystery, because even the GOP tax writers aren’t claiming that their achievement would spur an economic surge and oceans of revenue along with it.

And why anyone would think the president would go along is at least as unclear. Obama might abandon his “I’m not bargaining on the debt ceiling, period” approach if he got a tax simplification deal ending more breaks for the rich than for the rest and contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to the balance sheet in the next decade. But that’s not what’s in the offing.

For now, congressional Democratic leaders are essentially laughing off the tax overhaul talk and having a terrific time poking at Republicans for refusing to return to the budgetary regular order they’ve bellyached about missing in recent years.

And it’s the policy wonks at Treasury, not the political types in the West Wing, stoking the notion that the most comprehensive update of the IRS rulebook since 1986 still may be a 50-50 proposition.

The final decision about whether this Congress will tackle the tax code is way on the other side of summer vacation. And that budget resolution conference agreement will remain a permanent mirage. But there’s still real fiscal work to be done, and it starts this week with initial debate in House Appropriations on one or two spending bills.

The two sides are already $91 billion, or 9 percent, apart on what the coming year’s grand total for discretionary spending should be. That spat alone should be enough to keep the budgeteers busy for a while.

GOP Grievances on Benghazi, Obama Nominees Share Two Points

The growing opposition to Labor secretary nominee Thomas E. Perez and EPA director pick Gina McCarthy is very similar to what’s going on with the intensifying congressional skepticism about the Obama administration’s performance in the Benghazi consulate attack.

Republicans have raised detailed and substantive concerns about how Perez has performed as Justice Department civil rights chief and what McCarthy has been doing as the government’s principal clean air regulator. Along the same lines, they have uncovered a welter of reasons to wonder whether the State Department was on its toes before the Sept. 11 attack in which the American ambassador to Libya and three others died — and whether it’s been on anything close to its best behavior in explaining itself since.

Without doubting for one moment the sincerity of the GOP motives or the intensity of their legitimate oversight concerns in any of those matters, it’s also totally fair to observe the obvious political and policy benefits for them on all three fronts. It’s possible to have genuine concerns about poor government performance and be politically opportunistic at the same time.

That’s happening on the two Cabinet nominees just as much as it’s happening over Benghazi. In the latter case, the palpable concerns about national security are paired with clear interest in making life as touch as possible for Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the case of McCarthy, the Republican objections to her lack of “transparency” and forthrightness have the added benefit of slowing down the environmental regulations they like least.

And in the case of Perez, the GOP’s multi-faceted disapproval of his work at Justice has the added benefit of obscuring the party’s undeniable interest in keeping a pro-union stalwart from taking over federal oversight of labor-management relations.

The ever-more troublesome future of the Perez nomination was the topic of my conversation today on WAMU, the NPR affiliate in Washington. (You can read a summary here or listen to it here.) The station’s listeners are keenly interested in Perez because he was both a suburban county elected official and Maryland’s labor chief before joining the Obama administration two years ago.

Is Republican Petulance a Tactic Worth Fighting For?

This week’s get-out-of-town day in the Senate was one of the more schizophrenic in recent memory, leaving aides and lobbyists little clue about what sort of mood will reign after the weekend.

On the one hand, the most consequential legislative debate this year got off to an efficiently substantive, occasionally eloquent and solidly bipartisan start. Members of the immigration overhaul “gang of eight” moved to embrace some limited ideas for boosting border security, hoping to attract more Republican votes. Then they united to stop other GOP amendments they all viewed as poison pills.

With C-SPAN broadcasting much of the proceedings in the cavernous Hart Central Hearing Room, the first session in what could be a two-week Senate Judiciary Committee markup was widely hailed as reflecting the legislative process at its civics-textbook best.

Not so on the fourth floor of the Dirksen Building, where another TV feed provided live — albeit static — pictures of eight empty chairs reserved for the Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee. The senators banded together to boycott the day’s session, which, under an arguable wrinkle in the rules, stopped the panel from advancing Gina McCarthy’s nomination to run the EPA.

The choreographed petulance was one of three passive parliamentary moves this week by the Republican high command, which seems suddenly willing to test fate by resorting to just the sort of partisan high jinks the electorate says it abhors. The intensified use of the throw-the-rule-book-at-’em approach came off as all the more curious in light of the immigration debate’s bipartisan sense of purpose and decorum.

The chairs in Dirksen sat empty less than 18 hours after the Republicans on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions panel leveraged another obscure procedural obstacle to stop Thomas E. Perez’s nomination for Labor secretary from getting to the Senate floor.

And, on a separate front, House Speaker John A. Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced Thursday they would ignore a provision of the 2010 health care law calling on each leader to nominate someone for a new panel with the power to dictate Medicare spending reductions with minimal fear of congressional reversal.

In a letter to President Barack Obama, the two GOP leaders conceded that such a bureaucratic feint was the best way they knew to protest the new Independent Payment Advisory Board in light of their inability to kill it by repealing the entire law.

Each of the three moves seemed certain to help energize the Republican base, which likes few things going on in Washington less than the implementation of Obamacare, new environmental regulations on business and efforts to tip the federal rules toward labor at the expense of  management.

But none of the maneuvers, at least in the short term, have any chance of achieving the GOP’s stated objective: to prevent Obama from filling the top seats in his second-term administration for as long as possible.

Democrats say they’re confident they have a way around walkouts like the one Thursday, they will soon get McCarthy’s nomination before the entire Senate and they will rebuff any filibuster there. The maneuver that stalled Perez in committee is good for only one week, so his nomination, too, is destined for the floor, though its fate there is looking wobbly at the moment.

And while the 15-member IPAB could operate with two seats vacant, there’s a growing bipartisan sentiment that the whole panel is an idea that might best be delayed to oblivion.

The question, then, is why the party leaders decided to focus so much attention this week on parliamentary machinations rather than overt ideological argument. Why go through these motions at a time when voters say they want their lawmakers to focus much more on the merits and less on the maneuvers?

One reason, it seems, is that the tactic drives the White House crazy. Now that the fancy dinners and other items on the charm offensive to-do list have been checked off, thumping the bully pulpit is about all the president can do to promote quick confirmations for his team.

“We call on Republicans to stop the theater and to move forward with the process,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said when asked what the administration would do to combat the slow-walking of Perez and McCarthy. He offered nothing more concrete, not even “strong letter to follow.”

If enough constituents are paying attention and start jawboning their senators about it this weekend, there’s still a chance the executive calendar for the rest of May can become as functional as the Senate Judiciary.

GOP Throws Rulebook at Obama to Block His Agenda

Republican resistance to President Barack Obama’s second-term plans intensified another couple of notches today.

Speaker John A. Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced they would simply ignore a provision in the health care law calling on each leader to pick someone for a new panel with the power to dictate Medicare spending reductions without fear of congressional reversal.

The two said in a letter to Obama that such a bureaucratic maneuver was the best way they knew to protest the new Independent Payment Advisory Board, in light of their inability to kill it by repealing Obamacare completely.

At the same time, all eight Republicans boycotted this morning’s meeting of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which under a wrinkle in the rules prevented the panel from advancing Gina McCarthy’s nomination to run the EPA.

The protest came less than 18 hours after the Republicans on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions panel leveraged another obscure procedural obstacle to stop Thomas E. Perez’s nomination for Labor secretary from getting to the Senate floor.

The question for the GOP is whether those oppositional tactics, which are all about passive parliamentary maneuvering rather than overt ideological argument, will provide any traction for their policy objectives or if they will only succeed at further annoying an electorate wary of partisan hijinks.

Majority Leader Harry Reid sought to stoke that sentiment when the Senate opened for business. “This type of blanket, partisan obstruction used to be unheard of. Now it’s become, really, I guess, the pattern Republicans have adopted,” the Nevada Democrat said of the back-to-back committee delays.

In the McCarthy case, at least, committee Republicans forcefully rebutted the idea that their walkout was simply a dilatory stunt. Instead, they said, they were protesting the notion that her nomination should be hustled along before they got answers — promised at her confirmation hearing — about her involvement in her current EPA post with matters of transparency.

Republicans, who have made the agency a focus of their deregulatory efforts, say they have been too often stymied by officials denying or slow-walking requests from Congress or conservative advocacy groups for information.

They also note that Democrats used the same sort of boycott against George W. Bush’s nominee to head the EPA a decade ago.

In the Perez case, Wednesday’s delay appears designed to do no more than allow additional time for opposition to build. And the move appears to be working. McConnell signaled his opposition to Perez, the Justice Department’s top civil rights lawyer, and suggested the White House would need to find a filibuster-proof 60 votes. Perez would be the only Hispanic in the president’s second-term Cabinet.

Mark Sanford Arrives Late to His Own Capitol Hill Roast

(Mary Ann Chastain/Getty Images)

No special-election winner in modern congressional history has had to put off a celebratory swearing-in because of a pending court date.

It’s just one more reminder of why no special-election winner in modern congressional history will arrive in Washington with less good will from his new colleagues than Mark Sanford. Which is why it’s not surprising that he won’t actually come back to Congress before the middle of next week.

At 9 points, Sanford’s margin of victory Tuesday was decisive enough that the certificate-of-election formalities could have been overlooked and he could have flown to Washington to become the new Republican House member for South Carolina’s coastal Lowcountry. Instead, he spent much of Wednesday working to make sure part of his past would not put an immediate crimp on his future.

Full story

Ted Cruz Leads the Twitter Pack in Texas

Ted Cruz remains combustibly in the news again this week — a high-profile speech to Republican faithful in early-primary South Carolina followed up with another tart public spat in the Senate, with Majority Harry Reid likening him to a schoolyard bully.

Four months into his time as the junior Republican senator from Texas, Cruz appears to operating on the principle that no amount of publicity is too much — especially for someone who’s suddenly tilting toward a run for president. His affect will get plenty more media attention starting Thursday, when the Judiciary Committee on which he sits opens debate on the immigration overhaul, probably lasting until Memorial Day. Cruz is going to work to slow or derail the bill at every turn.

All the while, the 42-year-old has been working diligently to cultivate his conservative base on social media, with what looks to be decent success. If he runs for the GOP nomination in 2016, he’ll potentially be doing so with the help of more Twitter followers than anyone else in the field.

Some enlightening detail about this has been assembled in recent days by the Houston Chronicle, the senator’s hometown paper. Its Texas on the Potomac blog made Cruz a test case of an effort to gauge the social media usage of all 38 members of the state’s congressional delegation.

Cruz is averaging 353 new followers every day and he sends out an average of 3.5 tweets daily — Wednesdays being his most prolific days. The favored conservative hashtags #defundobamacare or #2ndamendment are in more than half the posts @SenTedCruz has sent so far. He’s only tweeted 405 times from his Senate account, but those missives have collectively been retweeted almost 105,000 times. (The most recent, about the Benghazi embassy contretemps, went out at breakfast time and had been retweeted almost 4,000 times before noon.)

And get this: 86 percent of Twitter sentiment about the senator has been positive, by the Chronicle’s calculation.