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.

Promising Jobs Report Fuels Both Sides of the Budget Wars

For shaping politics, the rosy jobs reports out today are undeniably a kick start for President Barack Obama and a kick in the teeth for his Republican critics. As for shaping fiscal policy, the numbers look to fuel the currently ambivalent muddle.

The headline figures are that a net 165,000 jobs were created in April, well above the consensus forecast and enough to help push the unemployment rate down to 7.5 percent, its lowest level since December 2008. The short-term message countermands some much more ambivalent recent economic data, which had signaled a “spring swoon” for the third year in a row.

But reasons for optimism over the longer term are found just below the surface in the job creation report. The Labor Department now says it underestimated the number of payroll positions added in the previous two months by a combined 114,000. Most notably, instead of the 88,000 new jobs initially estimated for March — a far worse-than-expected number that gave rise to considerable anxiety — the number is actually 138,000 thanks to some additional data.

And those upward revisions mean that, during the previous half year, the economy created an average of 208,000 jobs a month. The conventional view is that a characteristics of an economy that’s healthy enough to shrink unemployment in a sustained way is monthly job creation above 200,000.

The reports will provide evidence for both sides in the arguments over how to shrink the deficit and whether the sequester should be fully turned off before a bigger budget deal is reached.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated those deep and across-the-board cuts will trim the gross domestic product by 0.6 percent this year. Private economists have warned that leaving the sequester in place through the end of the year would hold down private sector job creation by hundreds of thousands, mainly because of its effect on government contracting,

Today’s report will be hailed by some fiscally conservative Republicans as evidence those warnings are overblown, and that the economy is proving itself strong enough to stabilize and start expanding despite the reductions in the size of the federal government they so emphatically espouse. They also point to numbers in the report showing many full-time positions being supplanted by temporary workers as a way for companies to avoid having to provide medical insurance under Obamacare.

In contrast, Democrats will argue that job creation and other economic indicators would be able to do even better if the indiscriminate spending cuts were replaced with a more proactive budget deal that includes trims to health-care entitlements and more tax revenue from the wealthy.  They also note that the full effects of the sequester, which has only been in place two months, will not be felt on business hiring until summer.

“While more work remains to be done, today’s employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression,” said the president’s top economic adviser, Alan Krueger. “Now is not the time for Washington to impose self-inflicted wounds on the economy.”

Governments at all levels shed an additional 9,000 jobs in April, while private sector firms added 176,000 positions. While 11.7 million people remained unemployed but are still looking for jobs in April, that number is 5.4 percent smaller than it was in January.

The financial markets took quick and enthusiastic note of the news, pushing the Dow Jones industrial average past 15,000 and the S&P 500 index above 1,600 for the first time by mid-morning.

But Republican congressional leaders, who for more than a year have had their “not nearly good enough” news releases queued up to send minutes after Labor releases its monthly numbers, stayed silent for more than an hour before issuing more tepid than usual statements.

The reports “showed some signs of hope for the thousands of people who found a job in April,”House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said, but “this growth is way behind our nation’s potential. We must focus on job creation more than one day a month.”

Second Chance for Manchin-Toomey Gun Bill?

Do-overs resurrecting legislation that failed the first time are a pretty rare phenomenon in Congress. But Joe Manchin III is predicting that he and Patrick J. Toomey will be able to find the five votes they need to advance their background check expansion proposal a second time around.

A wave of polling in the two weeks since the Senate gun control measure first foundered is offering a decent road map for where to start their search.

Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, said on Fox News over the weekend that “some confusion” about the measure contributed to its initial defeat. President Barack Obama has gone further, alleging the National Rifle Association and others “willfully lied” in arguing the measure would lead inexorably to a national registry of gun owners.

But if Manchin and his Pennsylvania Republican partner devote some time to educating close-call colleagues about the reach of their proposal, he says, they will prevail. “The only thing that we’ve asked for is that people would just read the bill,” he said. “It’s a criminal and mental background check strictly at gun shows and online sales.”

Whatever their persuasive skills, the pair will also be aided by polling in states represented by some of the last senators who got off the fence and voted against the background check vote.

Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning firm, released results Monday of recent surveys showing declines in the favorability numbers for a handful of senators who signaled they were at least considering a “yes” vote but in the end voted “no.”

In Arizona, background checks were favored by 70 percent but the approval rating for Jeff Flake, who won his seat last fall with just above 50 percent, was pegged at only 32 percent. And, by a 21-point margin, those polled said they trusted John McCain, one of the four GOP senators who voted for the background check measure, more than Flake on gun issues.

In Alaska, both senators’ approval ratings have declined sharply since the last PPP survey in February. Both Democrat Mark Begich, who was one of four red-state Democrats who voted against the legislation and faces a tough battle for a second term next year, and Republican Lisa Murkowski saw their approval ratings slip by 8 points — his to 41 percent and hers to 46 percent.

In Nevada, 46 percent of of voters said they would be less likely to back Republican Dean Heller, who just won a full term, because of his “no” vote.

The new PPP numbers come a week after the firm released a poll showing 75 percent support for background checks in New Hampshire but a 15-point plunge in the approval rating for Republican Kelly Ayotte from October to when she voted against the background check language.

FAA Sequester Reprieve: The Start of Things to Come?

Congress moved quickly today toward putting a stop to the air-traffic-controller furloughs. It won’t be the last such backstop effort to skirt the dreaded sequester knife, though it may be the fastest.

Today’s action means that lawmakers will be subjected to only one more sequester-delayed trip home, and perhaps they won’t be buffeted by town-meeting turbulence during the coming recess. But members are sure to be chastised for making an exception to their tough budget rules that only makes life more convenient for themselves and their business constituents.

The House arranged this morning for expedited enactment of legislation the Senate passed Thursday night, albeit on a rushed voice vote after several budgetary hard-liners at each end of the political spectrum had left town.

Now that one relatively small rifle shot has found its mark. And with no reason to believe there will be progress before summer on a sequester-replacing budget deal, there is every reason to believe that May will be filled with well-lobbied lawmaker appeals to relax the across-the-board strictures at other agencies, from the National Institutes of Health to the National Park Service.

Had the hardliners been around, the ad hoc approach to relaxing the across-the-board cuts would have prompted outraged rhetoric from conservative Republicans, who view acceptance of all the indiscriminate but meaningful spending curbs as a decent price to pay for shrinking government; and liberal Democrats, who want the sequester turned off altogether as a way to help a range of people who are feeling the pinch.

The White House echoed that sentiment in a statement announcing that President Barack Obama would sign the bill. “We hope Congress will find the same sense of urgency and bipartisan cooperation to help the families who have had children kicked out of Head Start, the seniors who have lost access to Meals On Wheels, the hard-working employees who have been laid off due to defense cuts, and the 750,000 Americans who have lost a job or won’t find one because of the sequester.”

Republican leaders crowed that the angry reaction — from the passengers on about a thousand delayed flights every day this week — had forced an unusually quick and complete capitulation by Obama and the Democrats, who had been emphatically opposed to taking this sort of piecemeal approach.

“Consider that the Democrats opening position was they would only replace the sequester with tax increases,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said in a message to his caucus this morning; then they “proposed replacing the whole sequester with phony war savings. And by last night, Senate Democrats were adopting our targeted ‘cut this, not that’ approach.”

The bill doesn’t ease the $637 million in savings the Federal Aviation Administration has to come up with by September as its share of the sequester’s $85 billion grand total. Instead, it allows the agency to cover the cost of fully staffing all the air traffic control towers by trimming as much as $237 million from other accounts for less pressing projects.

That sort of flexibility is generally prohibited under the terms of the law, which was designed to be so mindlessly draconian that lawmakers would come up with some alternative budget solution in time. They may yet, one pet program at a time.

15 Fun Facts About the Obamas’ and Bidens’ Taxes

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press)

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. released their tax returns Friday — three days ahead of the April 15 Tax Day deadline.

Both men filed jointly (although Dr. Jill Biden also filed a separate non-resident tax return in Virginia). The Obamas reported adjusted gross income of $608,611 and paid $112,214 in total tax. The Bidens reported AGI of $385,072 and paid $87,851 in total federal tax for last year. They paid $13,531 in Delaware income tax and $3,593 in Virginia income tax.

Our ace White House reporter Steven T. Dennis has been tweeting out some noteworthy nuggets based on his perusal of the filings — the Obamas’ filing was 38 pages and the Bidens’ was 31 pages. You can download the returns over at the official White House site.

Here are Steve’s fun facts:

• Obama’s net tax rate on his $608K AGI: 21.2% Biden’s net tax rate on his $385K AGI: 22.8%
• AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) hit the Obamas with a $21,221 bill
• AMT also hit the Bidens — $5,987
• Barack & Michelle Obama gave $150K to charity. Joe & Jill Biden gave $7,190 in cash & goods
• Obama’s biggest charitable contribution by far — $103K — went to the Fisher House Foundation for military families ‪
• 
There is no mention of a Trans Am anywhere in Biden’s tax return.

 Full story

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