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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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

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.

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Gangs in Congress Go Where Partisans Fear to Tread

The Senate “gang of eight” unveiled its bipartisan immigration bill at a packed news conference earlier this month. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Here’s a bit of Hill news that registered barely a ripple Thursday, in light of all the more pressing matters of the moment: Four top senators are renewing talks on what to do with the nation’s nuclear garbage.

Nothing to shout about, one might say, though the backstory offers insight into one of the defining characteristics of the current Congress: It’s overrun by gangs. Their outside-the-system approach to doing legislative business seems to be working as well as anything else at the moment.

Decades of planning to bury the country’s radioactive waste inside Yucca Mountain came to a halt four years ago, after Sen. Harry Reid made plain he’d spend all his political capital as Senate majority leader to keep the stuff away from his Nevada constituents. But that NIMBY approach is spread far and wide through the Capitol, so there was little chance that any bottoms-up legislative edict could muster a majority.

In other words, an approach dictated by the leadership was not sustainable, but a solution assembled using the committee process was not achievable. And so another Senate gang was born. Full story

Female Senators Bring Committee Chops to Obama Dinner

Tuesday night’s dinner may have been the most consequential one yet in President Barack Obama’s quest to cultivate a more collaborative and collegial second-term relationship with Congress.

And the president pulled it off by, in essence, crashing one of the most quietly powerful, and rare, bipartisan social gatherings in the capital: the meal shared every month or so by the 20 women of the Senate.

Rather than traipse out to the suburban Virginia home of Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, whose turn it was to host, the president invited the group over to the White House at the last minute — but asked if they could have the Alaskan halibut the senator had already arranged to ship in for the occasion. (The provenance of the peach pie was not disclosed.)

All 16 Democrats and four Republicans showed up, even though a couple had initially begged off because of scheduling problems. And, in keeping with the ground rules for their regular suppers, none spoke to reporters when the two-hour gathering broke up just before 9 p.m. The president’s press office said the group discussed the budget impasse, Obama’s job creation agenda, his proposal for federally funded universal preschool, the growing momentum for the bipartisan “gang of eight” immigration overhaul, last week’s defeat of his gun control agenda and the federal investigations and prosecutions in the Boston Marathon bombings.

For a couple of reasons, the meal held as much potential to benefit the president’s agenda as any of his earlier senatorial soirees.

Most tangibly, Obama’s guests control more legislative firepower than the clusters of senators at his three previous gatherings; eight Senate committees are currently led by females. Beyond that, there is a growing appearance the 20 are cultivating the sort of genuinely collegial, non-ideological, professional friendships that have become close to extinct in recent years — the sort of bonds that, in the eyes of so many veterans of the culture of Washington before the 1990s, were essential to making legislative compromise the norm rather than the exception back in the day. In addition, there is some research to support the “men are form Mars, women are from Venus” notion that female politicians are more regularly driven to achieve consensus than their male counterparts.

The guest lists for the other meals were assembled mainly in search of senators willing to compromise; five female Democrats were at the Jefferson Hotel supper a week ago, and three women attended Obama’s two meals with GOP senators.

Separate invitations to the president for one of the female senators’ dinners had been extended in recent months by Murkowski and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. The ritual was the initial brainchild of the longest-serving woman in Congress, Democratic Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland.

The seven chairwomen in the room were: Appropriations’ Mikulski, Budget’s Patty Murray of Washington, Agriculture’s Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Indian Affairs’ Maria Cantwell of Washington, Intelligence’s Dianne Feinstein of California, Small Business and Entrepreneurship’s Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Barbara Boxer of California, chairwoman of both the Ethics and Environment and Public Works committees.

The other nine Democratic senators are: Gillibrand, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

The four Republicans are Murkowski, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Susan Collins of Maine and Deb Fischer of Nebraska.

Gun Votes Herald New Kind of ‘Scorecard’ Season

This is a season when lawmakers’ hopes for the new Congress still spring eternal. But that’s not all. It’s also a time of finalized reckoning for all their votes in the old Congress.

Scorecard time is climaxing at the Capitol. More than 80 advocacy groups — from all along the ideological spectrum and from every mainstream and obscure corner of the policy universe — have come up with their own algorithms for measuring every member’s level of loyalty with a single letter or number. When the Chamber of Commerce unveils its scores next week, it will signal an end to the 2012 grading season.

But the process for 2013 is just now coming into full flower, as the Senate prepares to cast the most intensely lobbied and passionately debated votes of the young year. And the groups that have announced they’ll take special note of the roll calls on gun control — to “score the votes,” in K Street parlance — offer a window into the current state of the complex, high-stakes and big money mainstay of modern lobbying. Full story

Pay Cut Solidarity: Don’t Look for Congress to Match Obama’s Team

Don’t look for congressional leaders to follow the president’s lead in returning some of his paycheck to the treasury. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

President Barack Obama promised this week to give back 5 percent of his salary so long as federal workers were facing sequester-fueled furloughs, and at least seven members of his Cabinet have quickly followed the boss’s lead.

There’s been no such groundswell of solidarity from members of Congress, and there probably won’t be.

A relative handful already turn back some of their salaries as a gesture of fiscal discipline. (The money goes to a special Treasury deficit-reduction fund.) And a few more will be doing so for political reasons in the coming months, and especially if their re-election prospects look dicey next year.

But beyond sticking by the salary freeze they imposed on themselves four years ago, don’t look for any legislative groundswell to reduce congressional paychecks across the board. So many members have such safe seats that they see no need to make such a move, plus many of them are having trouble managing their two-city lives on $174,000 a year. Full story

Must-Do: A STOCK Act Can-Kick

When lawmakers come back from spring recess, there’s really only one item on their “must finish” agenda for the first week: legislation that would buy more time for Congress to figure out how to untangle some of the problems they created for the federal bureaucracy when they enacted the STOCK Act a year ago.

The acronym stands for “stop trading on congressional knowledge,” and the original purpose of the measure was to do no more than put an election-year exclamation point on rules against insider trading by senators, House members and their aides. But along the way, the bill was dramatically expanded to require thousands of executive branch officials to post online the details of their financial and investment lives. The current start date is April 15.

And last week an independent study commissioned by Congress concluded that these officials, especially people working abroad, were right in complaining that so much disclosure could expose them to blackmail and that Congress should reopen the law to tamp down on the sunlight. The rewriting won’t happen in the few days before the deadline, so, instead, look for blink-and-you’ll-miss-them voice votes in the House and Senate to delay the effective date into the summer.

You can listen or read here about some reasons for this latest example of congressional can-kicking, which I offered during my most recent appearance on WAMU, the NPR affiliate in D.C. (They invite me on Monday and Friday mornings to talk about things happening in official Washington that have a special impact on people in local Washington.)

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

Ted Cruz: The Education of an Unrepentant Freshman

Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee meeting may be remembered as this year’s high-water mark for those promoting the most ambitious aspects of the Obama gun control package. It will also be remembered as a milestone in the education of an unrepentant Ted Cruz.

During his first 10 weeks as the junior senator from Texas, Cruz has leveraged almost every available opportunity to burnish his reputation as the most intellectually rigorous and rhetorically forceful of this year’s tea party congressional newcomers. So far, his strategy for achieving quick and approving prominence on the right seems to be working; Cruz has been selected to deliver the keynote speech on Saturday night at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

At the same time, his confrontational style has rattled many of the more senior Republicans in the Senate. They worry that his reliance on pedantic questioning and unsubstantiated claims — both on full display during his battle against Chuck Hagel as secretary of Defense — will not only harm his effectiveness as a policymaker but also drag the bar for senatorial comity to a new low. Full story

Pope Watch: The Year’s Top Codel Starts Now

You’ll have Pope Francis to thank for a shortened period of legislating next week — and for an exception to new limitations on members’ overseas trips imposed by the sequester.

House votes are sure to be called off Tuesday, the day of the papal inaugural mass at the Vatican, and more than a dozen lawmakers are likely to be sent there as the official congressional delegation.

Politically, there are two very simple rationales for scrambling the pre-recess schedule and spending more than is in the budget on a quick round trip to Rome: The American public won’t mind, and the members of Congress will demand it. Full story

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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Is This the Year of the Woman Legislator?

A full two decades later, 1992 is still universally recognized as “The Year of the Woman” in the annals of congressional history. The next couple of months will decide whether 2013 should become its closest rival.

By the numbers, the suddenness of the Capitol’s demographic change in the 103rd Congress remains amazing to consider. Famously fueled by the Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas showdown in front of an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, more women sought and won seats in Washington than ever before in 1992. The number of female senators tripled, from two to six, and two dozen newcomers nearly doubled the ranks of women in the House. Full story