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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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

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

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

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

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

Rand Paul, New Best Friend of Flibuster ‘Reform’ ?

Rand Paul’s 12 hours and 52 minutes of speechifying was the epitome of the sort of old-school protest move that’s fallen so far out of favor in recent years. But his filibuster, which ended at 12:39 this morning, turned into such a social media sensation that it could actually presage a what’s-old-is-new-again shift in the way the Senate operates. Full story

Here Comes the Biggest Judicial Vote of the Year

Wednesday’s vote on whether to keep Caitlin Halligan off the nation’s second-most-important federal bench is a bellwether test about the future of the judicial wars.

Assuming the coming snow isn’t falling too hard, senators will decide at midday whether to advance Halligan past a GOP filibuster and toward one of the four vacant seats on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals – which, because of its jurisdiction over almost all cases where the federal government is a party, is generally considered the penultimate place of judicial power after the Supreme Court. (She would be the first Obama appointee to that court, which hasn’t welcomed a newcomer since 2006.) So far, though, Halligan can count on the support of all 55 Democrats but only one Republican: Lisa Murkowski, who says she’ll oppose confirmation but believes Halligan’s record is not so far outside the mainstream that she should be denied an up-or-down roll call. Full story