Danger Lurks for GOP in Overdoing ‘Message’ Votes

Last week’s party-line House vote to repeal the 201o health care law was arranged so the 70 freshman Republicans could go on record in support of a campaign promise. Such messaging votes have their place, argues Don Wolfensberger of the Wilson Center and the Bipartisan Policy Center, but only if paired with debates that might actually produce some changes in policy.

And Wolfensberger, a Roll Call contributor and former House Rules Committee staff director, says the GOP is running a risk by not doing more on the legislative front these days. In light of the party’s new interest in investigating potential Obama administration scandals, his analysis is worth noting. Here’s Don:

“There must be 50 ways to leave your health care law.” That’s how  songwriter Paul Simon might describe repeated attempts by House Republicans to disengage from the president’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Actually, by last count the House has only voted 37 times to repeal Obamacare in whole or in part.  The most recent effort occurred on May 16 when the House voted 229-195 to pass a total repeal bill sponsored by Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.  This was the first run at the law in the 113^th Congress. Nevertheless, the exercise has become so old hat that none of the nine House committees of jurisdiction bothered to report the bill this time.  Full story

IRS ‘Scandal’ Touches More Nerves as Sign of Incompetence

The second congressional hearing on the IRS scandal, scheduled for Tuesday morning in the Senate Finance Committee, may offer solid clues about which of two possible ways the Republicans plan to play the imbroglio.

One choice is to pursue the matter as a potential scandal. The other is to portray the situation as emblematic of Big Government’s fundamental flaws.

The latter claim is what has created the ripest opening — if not the most obvious one to party fire breathers — to reverse the electoral fortunes of the embattled GOP. If not driven by malevolence, the only other viable reason for the IRS’ actions would be incompetence.

Concentrating on that second approach looks like the way many senior Republicans want to go. That’s in part because they’ve been given a wide opening to head in that direction by President Barack Obama himself and in part because they see the strategy as having a very high likelihood of underscoring their core criticisms about the failings of the administration and the ideology it espouses. Full story

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.

Full story

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. Full story

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.

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

Baucus Gets Busy Annoying His Own Party Again

Monday afternoon’s Senate vote is all about Democratic leaders finding another way around Max Baucus — one of the most frequent, unpredictable and enormously powerful thorns on their own side.

Senators will decide whether to break a filibuster helped by Baucus, who for years has been using his Finance Committee chairmanship to bottle up legislation leading to nationwide sales taxes on most online purchases. He says he can’t abide the measure’s effect in Montana — one of five states where there’s no sales tax, but where bigger businesses would have to collect sales taxes from Internet customers elsewhere. He says that’s both an unfair burden on his constituent businesses and an infringement on his state’s rights.

Baucus looks certain to lose; 75 senators voted for a nonbinding measure last month signaling support for the legislation. But the vote will also certainly do nothing to change the ways of a senator whose iconoclastic and parochially driven brand of centrism — especially when he’s within two years of an election — has often infuriated his leaders for the better part of two decades.

That’s because his approach has helped him repel a collection of vigorous challenges and win six terms in the Senate. It also makes him the front-runner at the moment to hold the seat again in 2014 even though President Barack Obama lost Montana by nearly 14 percentage points. Although his approval rating is at an underwhelming 45 percent, his $4.9 million in the bank at the start of April was more than anyone else in the “red state five” — the Democratic incumbents running next year in states Mitt Romney carried last year. And, although the recruiting of more formidable challengers hasn’t stopped, the only potentially viable opponent so far is a former Republican state senator, Corey Stapleton.

But it’s an axiom of Baucus’ congressional life that he’s only stayed safe by running scared, which helps explain why the Internet tax bill standoff marks the fourth time he’s so publicly scraped against the party grain in the past month.

Two of those times came just hours apart on Wednesday.

In the morning, he became the first senior congressional Democrat to publicly express apprehension about implementation of the health care law — which, of course, he had a central hand in writing, much to the consternation of his more liberal colleagues and many of the people in Montana.

“I just see a huge train wreck coming down,” he said, mainly when the enrollment period for the new insurance exchanges begins this fall.

“I don’t know what he’s looking at,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius snipped to reporters when the Finance hearing ended.

Then in the afternoon, Baucus and just three other Democrats broke with the party mainstream on all four key amendments to the gun violence bill. As the National Rifle Association wanted, he voted against expanding background checks, banning assault weapons and restricting high-capacity magazines, and in favor of allowing one state’s concealed-carry permit to apply nationwide.

His first high-profile apostasy of the year came just before the spring recess, when he was one of only four in his caucus to vote against the Democratic budget, which squeaked through without a single vote to spare. It calls on Finance to write a bill raising $975 billion in taxes in the next decade, which the chairman says is way too much. He slipped out of the chamber early in the roll call, even as Majority Leader Harry Reid was trying to figure a way to allow colleagues in even more pronounced political trouble the option of voting “no.”

The Nevada Democrat was reminded in all four instances that there is little percentage in expecting Baucus to put his personal political considerations behind his responsibilities as a top committee chairman to help his party with its legislative goals. Tom Daschle learned that a decade ago, when Baucus openly defied the previous Democratic leader’s orders to stay away from the negotiations that yielded the first Bush tax cut and the Medicare prescription drug program. In the 1990s, George Mitchell had to worry about Baucus’ balancing act pulling him away from the positions he was supposed to promote as Environment and Public Works chairman.

This spring’s gun control, Internet levy and budget resolution matters are tiny fare, though, compared with the No. 1 item on the Baucus agenda, which is to engineer the biggest tax law overhaul since 1980s.

Republicans eager for a Democratic partner who would see things their way — that the corporate and individual codes should be simplified in ways that don’t demand more taxes from the rich — are salivating at the chance to cut a deal with Baucus while he’s running for his seventh term. Many Democrats are openly leery of letting that happen and are counting on Obama to keep the brakes on a tax rewrite tamped down until 2015.

Baucus hopes then to break the record for time on Finance and, because his party doesn’t believe in term limits, to still be chairman. He will be 73 and presumably in his final term. And so it’s only then when his fellow Democrats think he might be willing to strike a deal entirely on his party’s terms.

‘Entitlement Trap’ Is Alive and Well on Capitol Hill

It’s been a full two days since Greg Walden, who runs the House GOP’s political arm, derided the Obama budget as a “shocking attack on seniors” — and his fellow Republicans are still working to recover from their gob-smacked whiplash.

It’s no surprise, of course, that the congressman in charge of recruiting and financing GOP candidates in 2014 would have little nice to say about the president’s plan. But the focus of Walden’s criticism was so surprising that many people in both parties assumed he’d misspoken on Wednesday — and would surely row back his comments on Thursday.

But Walden is sticking by the view that Obama should be derided for his embrace of “chained CPI,” the shorthand for changing how the government calculates inflation in order to reduce cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security and some other benefits.

No matter that the proposal would cost the typical senior about $50 next year, and that it is just the sort of modest limit on entitlements that Republicans howl is long overdue, mainly because Democrats starting with Obama haven’t been willing to embrace them. No matter that Walden’s derision of Obama for “trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors” is impossible to square with the budget endorsed last month, not only by Walden but also by almost all the fellow Republicans he’s trying to re-elect next year. It would achieve balance by altogether ending federal medical benefits for the elderly under Medicare as an entitlement.

And no matter that he’s made the top leaders of his caucus furious and prompted the prominent conservative Club for Growth to encourage a 2014 primary challenge against Walden in eastern Oregon.

“This is the least we must do to begin to solve the problem of Social Security,” Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday. “Chairman Walden and I have had a conversation, and we’ll leave it at that.”

The head-spinning situation could be laughed off as so much pandering and posturing were Walden another backbench tea partyer or even in that rare camp of GOP House members vulnerable to defeat in a swing district. But instead he is the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, someone who’s won wide praise as a savvy strategic thinker for his party.

Does this mean House Republican candidates are going to be urged to run away from even the most modest of the entitlement curbs they’ve clamored for? Does it mean the NRCC has concluded that voters have no memories or respect for ideological consistency? Does it mean Obama has just found a convenient exit hatch from the grand bargain budget talks that he probably didn’t know existed on the GOP side of the talks just a few days ago.

Those were some of the questions MSNBC’s Karen Finney, Indiana GOP spokesman Pete Seat and I talked about with Chuck Todd on “The Daily Rundown” this morning. You can watch it here.

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

After a Surge, Is There Even One More Senate Vote for Gay Marriage?

Murkowski (left) has said her views on gay marriage are “evolving” while Landrieu has signaled personal ambivalence but will honor the values of her state as she is up for re-election in 2014. (Douglas Graham/CQ Roll Call)

So who will be No. 54? How long after that announcement will the roster of senators supporting gay marriage become filibuster-proof?

Predicting an answer to the first question requires looking more closely at the 43 potential Republican senators than at the list of just four Democrats who haven’t yet endorsed the concept of same-sex marriage. So does forecasting an answer to the second question, but on that one it’s safe to say it won’t happen before the next election.

Senate support for marriage equality surged into majority territory this week when Sen. Mark S. Kirk of Illinois became the second Republican backer of same-sex marriage; he was joined by five centrist Democrats, all of whom just won an election and are betting they’ll be squarely on the right side of history by the time they next face the voters in six years. The Democrats are third-term winners Bill Nelson of swing state Florida and Thomas R. Carper of Delaware; second-term survivor Bob Casey of bellwether Pennsylvania; and a pair of freshmen who scored upsets in GOP states, North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp and Indiana’s Joe Donnelly.

But the notion that a political tipping point is at hand — and that a wave of changed minds and modernized hearts will crest at the Capitol before the Supreme Court reveals itself on the gay marriage question — is swiftly put to rest by a look at the senators who remain either uncommitted or publicly on the other side. Full story

Hello, Alison Grimes? Why McConnell Isn’t That Worried

Here’s why Mitch McConnell’s chances of winning re-election remain solid, no matter whether Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes or any other potential Kentucky Democrat ends up as his opponent.

There’s no clear partisan domination of state capital politics, but at the federal level, the GOP dominance is undeniable. Seven of eight members of the congressional delegation are Republican, and Mitt Romney carried the state by 22 points last fall.

And as a national figure, McConnell stands to benefit from the fact that second-term midterms generally favor Hill leaders of the party not in the White House, who get to benefit from antagonism toward a president who won’t ever be on the ballot again.

Full story

Goodbye, Ashley Judd? Why McConnell Might Be More Worried

(Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

Ashley Judd’s decision to stay out of next year’s Kentucky Senate race absolutely won’t deprive Democrats of the sort of young woman who’s well-funded and telegenic enough to topple Mitch McConnell. In fact, the chances have gone up on just such a scenario.

That’s because the candidate who’s always been preferred over Judd by the Democratic establishment, both in the state and inside the Beltway, is now positioned to step in and take a clear shot at becoming only the third challenger in more than 60 years to deny re-election to an incumbent Senate party floor leader.

She is 34-year-old Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky secretary of state for the past year and the scion of one of the best-connected Democratic families in the state. Because she’s already won statewide but is in a job that does not require her to stake out firm positions on any of the polarizing issues of the day, Grimes has the potential to be a difficult combination for McConnell to counter. 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

A Budget Vote Today That Could Haunt an Election Tomorrow

The political class will spend much of the next two weeks’ recess poring over results from Friday’s vote-a-rama, with each party’s consultants plumbing for the best examples of senators stepping unwittingly into the frame of a future attack ad.

The rapid sequence of roll calls, each one designed as much to buttress one side as to trip up the other, is a return to a tradition that’s been suspended these past four years, because no budget resolution ever made it to the floor to be amended in this unique-under-the-rules manner. Some veterans of the ritual will be out of practice, some newcomers will be caught unaware.

And the pressure will be especially intense on the staffers advising the senators whose one false step could hobble their chances for re-election next year. Full story