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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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. Full story

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. Full story

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. Full story

Does Obama Care About Housing Pick Mel Watt?

One day after bluntly conceding the limits of his congressional suasion, President Barack Obama is picking another potential uphill fight with Congress — curiously, by choosing one of its own for a top administration job.

The president is nominating Rep. Melvin Watt — the No. 3 Democrat on House Financial Services in his 21^st year as a North Carolina congressman — to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Even before the formal announcement Wednesday, some senior Senate Republicans began signaling they will move to block Watt’s confirmation. Full story

How 37 Percent of the Nation Still Rules in 100-Member Senate

The way the drive for gun control got stymied shows that the operative dynamic in the Senate has become more insidious than ever.

It turns out that, in this case, the wishes of 9 in 10 Americans can be repelled by a group of lawmakers representing fewer than 3 out of every 8.

A whole series of surveys have found support in the 90 percent range for requiring background checks before almost all commercial firearms sales. That’s about as close as it gets to unanimity in the polling world. And that’s the heart of the proposal that was blocked Wednesday, effectively ending the debate over how best to reduce gun violence  — at least until after the next massacre in a schoolhouse, movie theater or supermarket parking lot.

On the surface, the reason was that 45 senators opposed the idea and, under the new normal for accomplishment in the chamber, any proposal of consequence can be stopped by any bloc of 41 or more. That’s because, three years ago, the dilatory dysfunction got so bad that the leaders of both parties struck a handshake deal. To keep filibusters from swallowing the Senate calendar whole, they would grant the minority an extra measure of leverage on any controversial votes for passing bills or adding amendments: They could insist that the other side come up with 60 affirmative votes, or a three-fifths supermajority. Full story

Obama’s Budget Opens Final Door Toward a Deal

(Douglas Graham/CQ Roll Call)

It’s 65 days overdue and has been formally unveiled for less than an hour, but so far the Obama budget is being greeted with more bipartisan bewilderment than with genuine Republican anger or Democratic excitement.

And the nonplussed nature of the congressional response could be the best reaction possible for those who still hold out hope of achieving a grand bargain or, more precisely, for completing one. Things will stay muted for another couple of months, mainly to allow the gun control and immigration debates to play out but also because the next fiscal deadline is not until the middle of the summer, when Congress will need to raise the Treasury’s borrowing limit to avoid a default on government debt. Full story

Gay Marriage Cases Offer Perils for GOP — Win, Lose or Draw

For gays and lesbians, the marriage cases being debated at the Supreme Court this week hold the potential for either a landmark expansion or a painful contraction of their civil rights, some narrower changes, or really nothing meaningful at all. But for members of Congress — Republicans, in particular — their political lives will be shaped profoundly by whether the justices go big, go small or essentially stay home on the issue.

The case with the broader constitutional, as well as political reach, being argued Tuesday challenges the California prohibition on same-sex marriage known as Proposition 8. The arguments Wednesday, about the constitutionality of the law denying federal benefits to legally married gay people, hold additional import for Congress as an institution and for every Republican running in 2014. This is especially true for those who voted to enact that law 17 years ago, those who pressed the House to take the legal lead in the current case, and those with statewide or national dreams.

A ruling upholding Proposition 8 would provide the most culturally conservative wing of the GOP a huge shot of momentum for its goal of keeping the party the bulwark against attacks on marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. It would also stand to trigger a wave of ballot initiatives on both sides of that issue, complicating the lives of dozens of congressional candidates — especially in California, where advocates of lifting the ban will be counted on to ask voters to do what the court did not. Full story

Obama’s Jab in Boehner’s Ribs: Why Now?

Congress is used to being the butt of the joke. And ribbing from the president comes with the territory, especially at annual formal-dress affairs where top government officials poke at each other for the benefit of the press.

But those ground rules also hold that attempts at lame political humor ought to stop at the water’s edge.

Two weeks ago to the Gridiron Club, where the motto is “singe not burn,” Obama’s monologue referred to “a dysfunctional Congress, a looming budget crisis, complaints that I don’t spend enough time with the press,” and then noted that those were the headlines when he previously addressed the dinner, two years before. “It’s funny, it seems like it was just yesterday,” he said to a silent rim-shot in the background and warm laughter from the crowd.

Such soft-soap comedy is what passes for social lubricant in the all-too-humorless capital these days, because all the players have essentially agreed to get the jokes, accept their limitations and move on.

Which is why Obama’s quip Tuesday on the Tel Aviv tarmac fell with such a thud. Full story

10 Years Later: The Iraq War Changed Congress, Too

The 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War on Tuesday was a generally muted affair, reflecting the sustained national ambivalence about whether it merited the deaths of 4,488 Americans in uniform, the wounding of another 32,000 or the deficit spending that crested above $800 billion even before the last combat troops left 15 months ago.

That more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died — and that their country remains beset by sectarian tensions, terrorist bombings and political stalemate — helps account for the fact that the American public is split over whether the conflict was worth it: 46 percent said the war mostly achieved its aims, while 43 percent called it mainly a failure, according to a Pew Research Center poll from last weekend. That’s a statistical tie given the poll’s margin of error.

That the war has had a profound effect on the institution of Congress during the past decade is not up for dispute.

The invasion was the last major military operation granted an explicit, advance stamp of approval by Congress, and the lopsided and bipartisan votes of October 2002 remain the only time lawmakers ever authorized a preemptive strike on a sovereign nation. Full story

Can Obama Cure His Reverse Midas Touch?

The president’s with the two minority caucuses ­in Congress this afternoon — a lobster and blueberry pie lunch with the Senate Republicans and coffee with the House Democrats 90 minutes later — will bring an anticlimactic pause on the Obama courtship of Congress.

After three trips to the Capitol in as many days, and two intimate meals with senior Republicans last week, Obama will have no tangible deal to announce, and not even any professed promises of newfound GOP collaboration to boast about. Instead, the best he’ll be able to claim is that he’s made some inroads on doing better at legislative relations in his second term, and that he’s laid the predicate for more substantive bargaining in coming months. Full story

Obama’s Outreach to GOP: Nevermind??

Maybe it’s just awkward timing dictated by the White House media management team. But the excerpts of an interview President Obama gave ABC on Tuesday — broadcast this morning just hours before his meeting with House Republicans — amount to a sodden wet blanket on all the mildly optimistic talk about a grand budget bargain this year.

The president described his forays to the Capitol this week as efforts to reach “the common-sense caucus” in both parties, whom he views as insufficiently aware (thanks to their leaderships) of the sincerity of his interest in reaching a deal or his outline of what he’d agree to. Other than pointing out the available middle ground, he said, there is nothing he can do to force lawmakers on either side to get there.

And — laying the blame squarely on the GOP — Obama held out much less hope for a deficit compromise than he has during his past week of reach-outs to the Republicans. If the Ryan budget is more than an appeal-to-the-base political document and continues to be the party’s barely alterable position, the president signaled, then his efforts at accommodation will have quickly come to naught. And the more he’s at the center of the talks, he said, the more likely the GOP right would spurn and then kill whatever agreement might get reached.

“At some point I think I take myself out of this; right now what I’m trying to do is create an atmosphere where Democrats and Republicans can go ahead and get together,” the president told “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos. “But, ultimately, it may be that the differences are just too wide. It may be that, ideologically, if their position is, ‘We can’t do any revenue,’ or, ‘We can only do revenue if we gut Medicare or gut Social Security or gut Medicaid,’ if that’s the position, then we’re probably not going to be able to get a deal.”

But that won’t “create a crisis,” at least in the short term, he added. “It just means that we will have missed an opportunity.”

This latest twist in Obama’s approach-avoidance attitude toward fiscal dealmaking is sure to give Republicans a case of skeptical whiplash. For the past week, many of them have been professing to a readiness to give the presidential outreach the trust-but-verify treatment — especially because he’s been quite specific about what things-that-make-liberals-furious he’d be willing to endorse in the name of compromise. Curbing the growth of Social Security benefits by adopting a new government gauge for inflation is Exhibit A on that front.

Now, many of these same Republicans will lament that they’re being played by a president willing to sound accommodating just often enough to keep his approval ratings from slipping below the symbolic 50 percent mark.

Oh-oh. Look here.

A Sequester Silver Lining: More Hill Tourists

The House Republicans have opened a subtle new front in their battle with the Obama administration for the hearts and minds of sequester-addled D.C. visitors. As anyone who holds a passionate fondness for the Capitol’s beauty, history and import will attest, it’s a fight the legislative branch ought to be given a decent chance to win.

Last week, when the White House announced that its most visible compliance with the spending cuts would be the cancellation of its public tours, GOP leaders were quick to pounce with the predictable rhetoric: The president was making a politically petty and unwise move, thinking he was punishing the lawmakers who hand out almost all the tickets when the real sufferers would be the 11,000 school kids and others denied access to the mansion every week, all to save $2 million a year in Secret Service overtime. But fear not, the Republicans said, Congress had made smarter spending reductions so the real “people’s house” can continue welcoming all visitors as usual.

To underscore the point the House Republican Conference quietly unveiled a video Tuesday called “Your House.”  In just 90 un-narrated seconds, it beautifully illustrates why so many of the people of Capitol Hill view their workplace as a more worthy icon of American democracy than the house down the way – and have always hoped that their frescoed corridors and vaulted chambers would replace the State Floor as the ultimate Washington tourist mecca.

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Signs of Life in the Dead-on-Arrival Budgets

The two fundamentally different budget plans being unveiled on opposite sides of the Capitol today are both dead on arrival. But at least they have arrived.

Not so, of course, the president’s fiscal policy blueprint, which is still MIA. His plan is supposed to kick-start the annual congressional budget process. The thick volumes from OMB have been late in arriving on the Hill’s doorstep in many other years. But never in the history of the modern budget process (which dates to 1975) has the president submitted a budget after the House and Senate have produced budget resolutions of their own. Full story