At issue is the scheduled doubling of the interest rate on subsidized Stafford student loans, a predicament that also produced a partisan standoff last year that threatened to delay the Independence Day recess. Back then, at the last minute (in an election year), Congress granted a reprieve to 7 million college students and their families, keeping the rate from doubling to a fixed 6.8 percent from the super-low 3.4 percent. But it made the fix for only one year.

With the election past, another round of drama over a temporary solution didn’t at first look likely to be repeated, especially not after President Barack Obama this spring proposed making the rates more flexible by pegging them to 10-year Treasury notes, a market-based approach designed to entice Republican support.

But the GOP bill being passed today takes the idea a significant step further — so much further, in fact, that the Obama administration has threatened a veto.

While the House measure would link the rate to T-bills, as Obama proposed, it would set a much higher cap than the president on the maximum interest rate: 8.5 percent. And it would dictate a resetting of the rate for all borrowers each year, based on market fluctuations (the president’s proposal would fix the initial rate for the life of the loan). The House bill also leaves out the plans for new repayment flexibility that Obama asked for.

The White House and most congressional Democrats say the GOP plan would revive the culture of  predatory adjustable-rate mortgage lending that fueled the housing collapse of the recession, and that lower-income students would end up ruing the day they signed up for Stafford loans.

The next step will come in June, when Democrats try to advance their counterproposal in the Senate. The leading option for them looks to be a lengthy kicking-of-can-down-the-road — continuing the current fixed rate for another two years, thereby synchronizing its renewal with the main law governing federal aid to higher education.

But that tack would cost $9 billion in the meantime, which is the first reason Republicans will balk. GOP critics also note that the current rate was set artificially low as part of the 2008 economic stimulus, which they abhor, and has outlived its justification in light of the improving economy.

The only reason many of them allowed it to continue for the past year, they concede, is that they were asked to give up the fight last summer by Mitt Romney, who endorsed the low rate as part of his effort to win over young voters and seem better tuned to the needs of the less-fortunate. (And we now know how well that worked out.)

Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the House this week that he wants to push hard in June for a market-based compromise and won’t be satisfied with another extension of the status quo. Whether Congress can find an interest-rate middle ground in June will offer a clue of its compromising nature during the rest of the year.

The post Student Loan Standoff to Test Hill’s Summer Tone appeared first on Hawkings Here.

By the time Lois Lerner was sworn in at the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Wednesday, a clattering symphony of cameras at her feet, everyone in the room knew the essence of what was coming next. She had served notice the night before that she would invoke her constitutional right against self-incrimination and decline to answer questions about her work as head of the IRS office that decides which organizations deserve tax-exempt status. That would be the office that applied an especially strict review to tea party and other conservative groups.

But before taking the Fifth, she broke from the playbook ever so briefly. “I have not done anything wrong,” Lerner read from a paper before her. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations, and I have not provided false information to this or any other committee.”

That categorical 17-second statement was played over and over on cable news for hours, allowing Lerner to control the IRS scandal headline of the day. But sneaking it into the script also infuriated her congressional inquisitors, who are sure to make a fevered search for contradictory evidence an essential part of the committee’s coming months of tax agency oversight.

Lawmakers really don’t like being outfoxed in their own house, especially by a previously anonymous bureaucrat acting with the help of a lawyer renowned for defending the scandal-tarred. (William W. Taylor III’s most infamous recent client was Dominique Strauss-Kahn.) So if they find reason to believe Lerner did act improperly in any of the ways she denies, she can count on Congress to dump on her like the proverbial ton of bipartisan bricks.

Members of Congress look to be on pretty solid ground with their complaints that Lerner and other senior IRS officials — including Douglas Shulman, who ran the agency until last fall and has come off as loquaciously unrepentant in his two turns as a Hill witness this week — were not at all forthcoming last year. Lawmakers and their aides had inquired about reports they had heard during the run-up to the 2012 elections, mainly from tea party groups back home, that their tax-exempt applications were being unfairly singled out for purgatory until after the elections.

From blacklisted screenwriter Lillian Hellman in 1952 to disgraced slugger Mark McGwire in 2005, prominent Americans have been taking the Fifth on the Hill in the hope of wriggling free of public opprobrium, congressional scrutiny and federal prosecution. Almost always, they do so without creating any rhetorical opening that could get them into even deeper hot water than where they started.

It’s a whole lot safer that way. Congress as an institution may be in record low regard, and its prospects for major legislative achievement may be receding by the day. But not telling lawmakers the whole truth and nothing but is still a federal crime, whether witnesses are formally sworn in or not. And the courses of several promising careers, as well as of a few profitable companies, have been altered by such perjury investigations.

In a settlement with the government that included a $4.5 billion fine, one of the 14 felonies that BP executives admitted to last year was lying to Congress about the amount of oil discharged into the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Also last year, federal prosecutors spent 10 weeks in trial seeking to prove that fabled pitcher Roger Clemens had lied to House Oversight during a nationally televised hearing in February 2008, when he denied using steroids and human growth hormone. (He was acquitted.)

The executives of seven major tobacco companies saw their careers falter and their businesses suffer after they declared together, under oath before House Energy and Commerce in 1994, that they believed nicotine was not addictive. They were never indicted. Two years earlier, though, CIA official Clair George was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. Michael Deaver was convicted in 1987 of lying to Energy and Commerce about how quickly he spun through the revolving door between the Reagan White House and K Street. In 1973, Richard Helms was convicted of lying to lawmakers about his efforts as CIA director to engineer election fraud in Chile.

At a federal courthouse, Lerner would have opened herself up to cross-examination by taking the stand to profess her hands were clean. She ticked off the lawyer-lawmakers on the Oversight Committee all the more by exploiting a wrinkle in the rules that allowed her to have it both ways this time. They have already signaled they’ll use the trump card at their disposal, which is a grant of immunity that will compel her to set down her Fifth Amendment shield.

She’s made herself into more of a Hill celebrity than she could have imagined when she began her career as a civil-service lawyer 34 years ago.

The post Lois Lerner’s Gambit Has Guaranteed She’ll Talk — Some Day appeared first on Hawkings Here.

Anthony Weiner — who resigned his House seat in disgrace 23 months ago, after his sexting and his lies were exposed — declared his candidacy for mayor of New York in a video posted on You Tube without any advance notice.

“Look, I’ve made some big mistakes and I know I let a lot of people down, but I have also learned some tough lessons,” Weiner says in the 2 minute spot. “I am running for mayor because I have been fighting for the middle class and those struggling to make it my entire life, and I hope I get a second chance to work for you.”

The announcement was much less overtly contrite, and alluded to his downfall much more obliquely, than the approach his former colleague Mark Sanford took this spring. In Sanford’s successful campaign to reclaim his former House seat, he repeatedly sought his constituents’ forgiveness for using state money to travel overseas for an extramarital affair, and lying about it, when he was the Republican governor of South Carolina.

The stylistic difference may have something to do with the very culturally different constituencies the two would represent. Surely, part of it is that Jenny Sanford divorced her husband in a fury, while Huma Abedin quietly stayed at her husband’s side. In the climactic scene in the announcement video, Abedin sits beside Weiner on the stoop of a townhouse and offers her endorsement: “We love this city and no one will work harder to make it better than Anthony,” says the longtime aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The video’s high-gloss production values are a reminder that Weiner is entering the crowded field with almost $5 million already in the bank. He raised that during a dozen years representing parts of Brooklyn and Queens in the House, where he had become a prominent rhetorical warrior on behalf of the Democratic leadership. He also made a serious run for mayor eight years ago, and until his social media self-immolation, he was considered the clear front-runner to succeed Michael Bloomberg this fall.

He will almost surely be able to supplement his own war chest with about $1 million in public funds, and all that money gives him a chance to leverage his  universal name recognition for the better during the 16 weeks before the Sept. 10 Democratic primary.

The opportunities and limits for Weiner were sketched out in results of a poll taken last week by Quinnipiac University and released today: It found him second in support, at 15 percent, behind City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, with 27 percent of primary voters undecided and a pair of prominent Democrats in single digits.

But nearly half of all registered voters polled, including 52 percent of women and 44 percent of Democrats, said the former congressman shouldn’t run.

This race will go to the swift.

The post Weiner Launches His Comeback Bid in NYC Mayor’s Race appeared first on Hawkings Here.

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. 

Both political parties when in the majority send clear signals on when they are engaging primarily in partisan messaging versus serious policymaking. One signal is lack of any committee hearings, deliberations or report. Another is the preclusion of any minority party input or amendments. A third is the preemptory scheduling and consideration of a measure.

In the case of the health care repeal, a fourth is the lack of any majority party attempt to offer an alternative.  Does anyone recall the original House GOP pledge in 2010 to “repeal and replace” Obamacare?   Majority Whip Eric Cantor made a run at a partial replacement with a bill to ensure insurance coverage of people with preexisting conditions.  But he didn’t get any farther than House adoption of a rule for its consideration, after which he was chased into the penalty box by his own teammates for deigning to suggest an alternative.

In fact, it was the backlash against Cantor’s strategy that forced the leadership to hastily schedule a vote on the Bachmann repeal bill.  That followed directly on Heritage Action’s May 16 letter advising Speaker John A. Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor not to schedule any legislation that would highlight “ideological differences within the House Republican Conference.” Instead, the letter urged the GOP to focus on Obama administration scandals.

There are two possible downsides to this proposed strategy for retaining control of the House in 2014. First, Republicans could end up getting hurt more than helped by running investigations of the Obama administration into the ground.  While the GOP thinks it smells blood in the current scandals, the odor may wind up being from the party’s own self-bloodied nose. Those pushing hardest for an all-scandal, all-the-time approach, even to the point of dropping the “I” word, weren’t here two decades ago and are operating on the glory days folklore of  the Gingrich Republican revolution.

The new Republican majority in the 104th Congress embarked on a series of investigations of the Clinton White House.  Who can forget those golden oldies of  Whitewater, filegate and travelgate — capped-off by the impeachment of President Bill Clinton himself in 1998?   The only thing Republicans had to show for it all after the 1996 and 1998 elections was an increasingly smaller majority and a speaker forced to step down over his own ethics problems and likely defeat.

The second downside to the Heritage Action approach is the assumption that people won’t notice that Congress is again not getting anything done legislatively.  Passing bills that only have unified Republican support in the House only guarantees they won’t go anywhere in the Senate.  That do-nothing approach lost House Republicans seven seats in 2012. It is unlikely the voters will reward the party in 2014 if it fails to produce for the second consecutive Congress.

If there was one mandate that resonated from the 2012 elections it was for the president and both parties in Congress to work together to get some critical things done for the country on jobs and the economy.  The repeated Obamacare repeal attempts, if embraced as a model for the future, portend a party that has run-out its string and is left spinning aimlessly — a yoyo to nowhere.

The post Danger Lurks for GOP in Overdoing ‘Message’ Votes appeared first on Hawkings Here.

Majority Leader Harry Reid said this afternoon he intends to push for a vote by the end of the week confirming Sri Srinivasan to one of the four vacancies on that bench. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled he wouldn’t stand in the way of such a move,  but needed to get final sign-off from his GOP colleagues.

The D.C. Circuit is considered the second-most-important court in the federal system, because it hears so many cases involving the regulatory actions of federal agencies. Four justices of the Supreme Court were promoted from that appellate courthouse. But, until now, the Republicans have refused to seat anyone new, which has had the effect of giving the nominees of GOP presidents a 4-3 majority.

The GOP looks to be relenting now because Srinivasan, the principal deputy solicitor general, has impeccable credentials and a short paper trail, which has made it tough for either side to be certain of his future jurisprudence, and because another judicial battle now could spark a “nuclear option” move by the Democrats to prevent dilatory death for future judicial choices.

Republicans are already signaling, though, that they will prevent any of the remaining vacancies from getting filled while President Barack Obama is in office, on the grounds that the D.C. Circuit is not busy enough to justify 11 full-time judges.

Update: Reid filed a motion Tuesday intended to get Srinivasen’s nomination on the  floor. He’ll need 60 votes to limit debate, or invoke cloture. That vote is likely to occur Thursday.

Senate Republicans said they were willing to allow a vote after the Memorial Day recess but Reid pressed the issue, saying he wants to deal with the nomination this week, even if he has to delay the start of the recess.

The post Truce in Judicial Wars: D.C. Court to Get Democratic Pick appeared first on Hawkings Here.

Just as soon as constituents get safely away from the destruction and beyond their shock, they expect their lawmakers in Washington to deliver aid without limit and without delay.

That will be the test for the two senators and five representatives from Oklahoma — all Republicans — even though President Barack Obama declared this morning that the state “needs to get everything it needs, right away” to recover and rebuild after Monday’s destructive and deadly tornado.

The trouble is this: The delegation is split between budgetary centrists and fiscal hawks, and it’s the latter point of view that dominates.

The most prominent member of the group, Sen. Tom Coburn, is already vowing to insist that any special federal aid in his state be matched with an equivalent amount of cuts elsewhere in the budget. News of his position, first reported by CQ Roll Call’s Jennifer Scholtes, went viral last night on Twitter.

Unless the seven unify quickly behind the alternative — that the Oklahoma twisters are the sort of natural calamity meriting immediate federal assistance without regard to spending caps — the congressional debate over a relief and recovery package will probably bog down quickly.

While it’s the biggest state in the country with an all-GOP delegation, Oklahoma has seen its potential for influence on Capitol Hill slip significantly this year, according to the most recent Roll Call Clout Index. Based on an array of factors —  seniority, positions of legislative power and per capita federal spending among them — Oklahoma’s team is now 38th in power and influence among all the delegations after finishing 33rd in the previous two Congresses. (The state’s 3.8 million people make it 28th in population.)

What this points to, emphatically, is that the Oklahoma lawmakers have a much better chance of leveraging their limited collective power if they speak with one voice about how assistance to their communities should be handled.

The money for Northeast communities crushed by Superstorm Sandy was held up for 13 weeks because of a debate within the GOP over whether the $50 billion should be matched with offsetting cuts.

In the end, it wasn’t offset, in large measure because almost all the Republicans in the relatively powerful New Jersey and New York delegations joined their Democratic colleagues to rebuff the offset campaign by the fiscal hawks.

Both Coburn and Oklahoma’s other senator, James M. Inhofe, voted against the Sandy package after they joined an unsuccessful effort to insist on offsets. They have been relatively consistent in that position toward supplemental spending requests throughout their careers, including voting two years ago against replenishing the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency relief fund when it was about to run dry in the aftermath of an unexpectedly large number of disasters.

Three House members from the state also voted for an across-the-board spending cut to finance the Sandy relief: James Lankford, a member of the GOP leadership team as Policy Committee chairman, and freshmen Jim Bridenstine and Markwayne Mullin.

The two who didn’t were Agriculture Chairman Frank D. Lucas and Tom Cole, who has positioned himself as a bridge-builder between the two budget camps in the caucus — and whose hometown is Moore, where the latest tornado wreaked the most havoc.

Both Inhofe and Lankford appeared on several TV reports this morning, but neither took a clear position on the offset question. Both said it was premature to start talking about legislation because it’s too soon after the deluge to tell how much federal help will be required and also too early to say whether FEMA has adequate reserves to cover the response without an extra appropriation.

The sooner they settle on what they’re asking for, the better for the Sooners.

The post Oklahoma’s Clout Tested by Tornado Aid Divide appeared first on Hawkings Here.

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.

For those GOP leaders, the risk of the search-for-scandal approach looks less and less worth it. Some rank-and-file senators and House members have an emphatic — if admittedly gut level — belief in the conspiracy theory that has brought the phrase “Nixonian” back into overuse: that the targeting of conservative groups for exhaustive scrutiny, when they applied for tax-exempt status, was orchestrated by politically minded officials in Washington, maybe even in the West Wing, who were seeking to quash a grass-roots uprising against the president’s re-election.

If true, it would take an army of congressional investigators, armed with dozens of subpoenas, the rest of the year to lay the situation bare. And, disgusting as such a political witch hunt would be, there’s a genuine dispute over what, if any, crime may have been committed.

And as my colleague, Stuart Rothenberg, noted in his space nearby, the 15-year-old lessons of the Clinton impeachment remind the top Republican brass today that an overzealous pursuit of fuzzy malfeasance can backfire big time on the congressional scalp-hunters. The tangible evidence: The GOP lost House seats in 1998, the first time the party outside the White House had suffered losses in the 17 midterm elections since FDR’s first.

Finally, in the 10 days since the IRS story broke, no evidence has come to light that bolsters the conspiracy theory. Rather, the Republicans’ dirty tricks suspicions are based on the deductive reasoning that low-levels in the Cincinnati field office would never have taken it on themselves to play with such political fire. And the president and his team have been emphatic in declaring that, outrageous and inexcusable as the behavior was, no scandalous motive was at fault.

But if Democrats want to pursue that line of defense, they’ll be walking  into a trap of their own making. Republicans have plenty of reasons to jump on such a failed test of basic government competence.

Asked “How much confidence do you have in the people who run our government?” by a CNN poll over the weekend, only 8 percent said “a great deal,” while a majority of 54 percent said just a little bit or none whatsoever.

In other words, distrust of the federal government extends well beyond the conservative GOP base of support. Independents and some Democrats, too, share the bedrock belief of those Republicans that there are too many bureaucrats.

They also suspect these civil servants are acting ham-handedly too much of the time — not only because they’re overburdened trying to implement too many overly complex rules and regulations, but also because of union rules that coddle the poor performers and make sure a bloated federal payroll stays that way.

Making the IRS their favorite illustration for these criticisms looks like a can’t-lose proposition for congressional Republicans. Which is why three of the most prominent among them — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, his Senate colleague Rob Portman and House Budget Chairman Paul D. Ryan — all used similar talking points on the Sunday talk shows.

Whoever ordered the hard time for the tea party groups, they all said, the story underscores the more endemic shortcoming of an arrogant, activist and overly large government where bureaucrats think they know best and are eager to use their overly broad powers to impose their will on the rest of us.

It’s a description that will prove much more difficult for the president to rebut than the accusation that he or his team countenanced a tawdry political payback scheme.

And it’s a description you can guarantee the Republicans will deploy in at least two of the top-flight debates that will shape the 2014 campaign — the immigration overhaul and the implementation of Obamacare.

They will ask: Why should the public believe the IRS would accurately accomplish one of its likely new duties under an immigration overhaul — deciding how much in back taxes is owed by someone on a newly created path toward citizenship?

And, they will ask, why should the tax collectors be trusted to fairly decide which people should qualify for the new medical insurance subsidies under the health care law, let alone who should be charged the new tax penalty for failure to maintain coverage?

Until the Democrats devise convincing comebacks to those rhetorical daggers, the legacy of the IRS mess looks to be a leg up for the GOP — even without a scandalous smoking gun.

The post IRS ‘Scandal’ Touches More Nerves as Sign of Incompetence appeared first on Hawkings Here.

The majority Republicans on House Appropriations will push through the spending caps they will use in drafting the dozen bills expected of them for fiscal 2014. All the Democrats will oppose the numbers, because they completely disregard one of the central tenets of the too-tough-to-swallow sequester that Congress swallowed anyway this year: The spending cuts are supposed to be as severe for defense programs as they are for domestic operations.

Instead, the House will set about drafting three measures — for the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs (which also includes military construction) — that in the aggregate would cut spending by less than 1 percent from current levels.

But to hold those national security efforts harmless, while still keeping all their decisions under an overall cap of $967 billion, the GOP appropriators are assigning shriveled-up bottom lines to the other nine bills devoted to domestic spending and foreign aid. They would face cuts of $72 billion, or 17 percent, from current levels. Almost half of the reduction, or $35 billion, would come from imposing a 22 percent cut on the social programs that Democrats are most interested in preserving at the departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services.

Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky., has absolutely no expectation that depth of domestic cuts will be realized. Instead, his proposed grand totals for the spending bills — known in Hill shorthand as the 302(b) allocations — are obviously his opening bargaining position for the inevitable negotiations at the end of the year with Senate Democrats and the Obama administration.

The numbers are also a signal of how House GOP leaders will seek to leverage that bargaining position this summer: They will push the three national security bills through the House along with Rogers’ favorite domestic measure, for the Agriculture Department. And then their side will stand pat, knowing the rest of the bills have little chance of passing the House.

Rogers’ hope is that, by fall, some sort of deficit-reduction deal might be engineered that does away with the sequester, allows the level of national security spending the GOP insists on and also allows him to ameliorate the non-starter cuts he’s now got penciled in for domestic programs.

At the head of the other side of the bargaining table is Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., who is preparing to unveil her initial bargaining posture in two weeks, right after the Memorial Day recess. It’s a very safe bet that she will do the opposite of what Rogers did, holding the social programs harmless and calling for defense budgets to take the most significant hits.

The one top-line fact she’s made clear is that her 302(b) allocations will add up to $1.06 trillion. That’s $91 billion, or 9 percent, more than the House bottom line, because Mikulski and the Senate Democratic leadership’s bargaining starts with the assumption that the sequester will be canceled by the fall, with or without a taxes and entitlements budget deal that promises an equivalent amount of deficit reduction.

And, with that as her opening posture, it’s very tough to see how she’ll get any of her bills passed by the Senate, or even through the theoretical filibusters that will surely be mounted by GOP budget hawks.

In other words, a flurry of activity on the spending front in the next month seems guaranteed to produce a long summer and early fall with no overt progress at all. And it’s inevitable that a continuing resolution, or a series of them, will be needed to keep the government open and running in place long past the new fiscal year’s start on Oct. 1.

Another patchwork resolution between Thanksgiving and Christmas is by far the best bet.

The post Budget Wars Coming to Early Showdown — and Stalemate appeared first on Hawkings Here.

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.

This is the 16th week of 2013 when at least one chamber of Congress has been in session. After the recess, that many weeks of legislating remain before Veterans Day in November. The Senate has no announced plans to be around beyond then, although if past practice is a guide, it will keep churning away as long as the House, which has penciled in the second Friday in December as the year’s last getaway day. (It’s been a decade since either chamber closed up shop before Thanksgiving in an off year.)

Still, the notion that the first session of the 113th Congress is at halftime makes intuitive sense to many corporate lobbyists, K Street rainmakers, think tank analysts, nonprofit advocates and political-intelligence purveyors — all of whom have to pace themselves to stay on top of things until the last roll is called.

The first year of a president’s term traditionally provides a guarantee of over-employment for those folks because the president is spending down his political capital before its expiration date and lawmakers are as far away from facing voters as they’ll ever be. No other year in the four-year cycle comes close.

But there’s already the palpable sense of profoundly lower-than-normal expectations for Congress this year. Evidence to support that view comes from a survey of Washington insiders by CQ Roll Call’s marketing team, which got 1,715 responses from a mix of customers and prospects from companies, trade associations and lobbying shops.

The headline of the survey: The immigration bill was the only item on the potential legislative agenda that more than 1 in 3 predicted would get done in the next seven months.

The depth of the skepticism is underscored by the fact that the online questionnaire was filled out the week ending May 10 — before the IRS scrutiny of conservative groups, the warrantless seizing of journalists’ phone records and more shape-shifting about the Libyan consulate attack combined to suggest a whole new option for Republicans. They will now make the rest of the year much more about investigation than legislation.

Confidence that an immigration package will become law is the exception: 71 percent said they expected that outcome to be successful.

Such a solid majority isn’t that surprising: Revamping immigration rules has been seen as No. 1 on the domestic policy to-do list since the election, when Republicans’ abysmal showing among Latino voters provided an obvious incentive for the party to compromise on the issue.

What’s noticeable is that nothing else even comes close. Only 35 percent of respondents expect that defense policy will be tackled by the divided Congress, for example, even though lawmakers have finished an annual defense authorization bill without fail for 51 consecutive years.

With remarkable uniformity, the insiders raised a collective eyebrow at the notion that health care, tax or gun control legislation would get done this year. In each case, just 32 percent said it was their expectation the issue would get addressed.

Pessimism on other fronts was starker still. Only 22 percent forecast a compromise for limiting the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of both the government and businesses that maintain economically critical systems.

Only 21 percent checked the phrase “appropriations process.” Since there’s no real move afoot to revamp how Congress apportions discretionary spending, the sentiment probably underscores one of the most widespread expectations at the Capitol: This year’s process will be as ad hoc as any in the past decade, with most of the preliminary decisions ignored or delayed by continuing resolutions this fall, then cobbled together in a year-end omnibus.

The appropriations question highlighted the disconnect between what the insiders expect and what they’d like to see happen. Three in eight volunteered that restoring regular order to the budget system would benefit their organizations. Asked what issues “that impact your organization do you want Congress to address in 2013?,” only three topics finished higher. No. 1 was health care, at 49 percent; taxes was second at 42 percent; and immigration followed at 39 percent.

The survey’s third question sought to gauge how the insiders thought their own lives might change because of congressional action.

The respondents seemed to ignore the old saw about death and taxes being the only certainties in life, because only 3 in 5 picked health care and taxes as issues important to them personally that Congress ought to tackle this year. Third was gun control, at 43 percent. None of the others were even close.

The post A Do-Nothing Congress Won’t Surprise These Beltway Insiders appeared first on Hawkings Here.

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. 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.

On paper, there’s no apparent reason for senators to deny Srinivasan whatever promotion he’s up for. He’s spent the past two years as the principal deputy solicitor general, the president’s No. 2 advocate at the Supreme Court. He’s argued there two dozen times, most recently for the administration’s point of view in the Defense of Marriage Act case.

But Srinivasan also spent five years working in President George W. Bush’s solicitor general’s office, after clerkships for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and a conservative appeals judge in Virginia. In between, he was a partner specializing in federal appellate litigation at a top-flight firm, O’Melveny & Myers.

That gold-plated résumé means he’s spent virtually his entire career litigating on behalf of others, not espousing his own views. And, in the modern era of intense combing through every utterance of every appeals court nominee, the lack of a paper trail is working to his benefit. Conservatives have found almost nothing in his record to point at with concern, although neither have liberals found much tangible reason to believe he’d be on their side.

Srinivasan is about to become the first federal appeals judge of South Asian heritage and, at 46, the youngest judge on the D.C. Circuit. Of more consequence, he’ll be the first newcomer to that court in seven years. Since 2006, the number of vacant seats has grown to four. Of the seven full-timers on the bench, four were nominated by Republicans and three by Democrats, so Srinivasan will make it an even split.

That simple math helps explain why all those seats have stayed vacant since long before the election — and why that situation is about to change, although only a little bit.

Obama has made just two nominations for the D.C. Circuit so far. And he spent considerable effort promoting his other choice, former New York Solicitor General Caitlin J. Halligan, giving up only after successful filibusters in both 2011 and 2013 by Republicans complaining she was an outside-the-mainstream activist liberal.

Those senators have found no plausible rationale for opposing Srinivasan the same way, which would guarantee renewed Democratic threats to invoke the “nuclear option” of changing Senate rules to ward off any future judicial nominee kill-with-delay campaigns

The only politically safe Republican option is to gamble that Srinivasan’s current ideological mysteriousness will evolve into centrism on the bench, that no Supreme Court seat opens up  anytime soon — and that they can prevent any of the remaining three D.C. Circuit vacancies from getting filled while Obama’s in office.

The president knows this is the GOP fallback position, and he’s already readying his tactical response: a roster of three D.C. Circuit choices to be nominated in coming weeks as a slate — challenging the Senate, in effect, to embrace at least one of them because surely they can’t all be activist leftists.

The Republicans know this is coming and have their counter-programming planned out: There’s no need to seat anyone else, they’ll insist, because the court’s caseload is not big enough to justify the eight judges on the job.

The Srinivasan confirmation will shift the judicial wars into something more like a chess match. The stakes will be just as high, and in some ways, it might be more fun to watch.

The post Obama Says ‘Check’ to GOP in Confirmation Chess Match appeared first on Hawkings Here.

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.

The president’s announcement that he had asked for and received the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller seemed to leave Republicans with little to do but praise Obama and pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., for example, tweeted that he was glad Obama had taken his advice: “Pleased Pres Obama listened to my call for accountability. New IRS Commissioner is necessary to begin to restore public confidence.”

Of course, the GOP’s current attempts to block the president’s picks for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Labor Department may foreshadow the confirmation debate that’s likely to come, once Obama actually nominates someone to the post.

Other Republicans seemed to have not heard Obama say that he would work hand-in-hand with Congress to fix problems at the IRS.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., released a statement shortly after the president spoke. “If the President is as concerned about this issue as he claims, he’ll work openly and transparently with Congress to get to the bottom of the scandal — no stonewalling, no half-answers, no withholding of witnesses,” he said. “These allegations are serious — that there was an effort to bring the power of the federal government to bear on those the administration disagreed with, in the middle of a heated national election. We are determined to get answers.”

To be fair, McConnell probably doesn’t trust Obama’s promise to help Congress investigate his administration.

Meanwhile, the White House hopes the 100 pages of internal documents relating to Benghazi will cut into the GOP’s narrative that the White House and State Department staffers sought to downplay the idea that the attack — which killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three others — was caused by terrorists.

As Dennis reported for CQ.com, senior administration officials contend that the Benghazi talking points used by administration officials after the attack were edited almost exclusively by CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell.

“Morell independently shared State Department concerns about the level of detail in the talking points, and felt it would not be professional to include repeated CIA warnings about violence in Benghazi without giving the State Department a chance to say what it had done to respond to those warnings,” Dennis reported. “Administration officials also emphasized that the emails given to reporters — and earlier shown to congressional investigators — show that it was the CIA that took out references to al-Qaida and inserted references to protests into the talking points before the White House ever saw them.”

But there still appears to be plenty of fodder for Republicans, given that the emails include concerns from State Department staff that they would be criticized by Congress for failing to heed warnings about security threats.

As Speaker John A. Boehner’s spokesman Brendan Buck said Wednesday evening, “The seemingly political nature of the State Department’s concerns raises questions about the motivations behind these changes and who at the State Department was seeking them. This release is long overdue and there are relevant documents the administration has still refused to produce. We hope, however, that this limited release of documents is a sign of more cooperation to come.”

Emily Pierce is deputy editor of Roll Call.

The post Damage Control: Obama’s Wednesday News Dump appeared first on Hawkings Here.

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.

His political opponents will make sure of it, one way or another.

Maybe they will tiptoe past the point of no return in pursuing a controversy, the way the Watergate investigations progressed, because plenty of lawmakers in both parties were willing to disbelieve as long as possible that their president was a criminal conspirator.

Maybe they’ll launch a formalized bipartisan court of inquiry, a la the Iran-Contra hearings, the path Democrats who ran the 100th Congress chose for marginalizing a still personally popular president.

Maybe the zealous umbrage and take-no-prisoners partisanship of a few Republicans will trump the cooler heads of the rest, the way Tom DeLay and his acolytes forced their way past the conventional wisdom that lying about sex with an intern was not the sort of “high crime” that drafters of the Impeachment Clause had in mind.

In each of those cases, the party that wasn’t running the White House came up with a way to turn one scandal into their best leverage for neutralizing whatever mandate could be claimed from the previous presidential election.

That’s not what happened four years ago. The most prominent scandal then — the case of the covert CIA agent exposed by White House officials as payback for her diplomat husband’s apostasy on Iraq — was certainly seamy. But no one ever talked seriously about impeaching Bush for it.

Instead, the Democratic minority decided its best approach was to turn its collective back on almost everything the president asked for, betting the voters would respond to the gridlock by turning over to them the keys to both the House and Senate in 2006.

It worked just as planned. That’s why the best wager at the moment is that Republicans will start emulating that approach very soon, assuming it can’t help but cement the universal expectation that they’ll hold the House and make a strong run at taking back the Senate next year.

Although an immigration overhaul remains the potential top-shelf exception, deficit curbs and gun control and the rest of Obama’s wishes will simply be left to wither. Instead, the GOP will seek to fill the air with a welter of oversight hearings on the three controversies of the moment, with some Democrats joining the outrage in the name of buying themselves political cover.

And the 2014 campaign will rumble into second gear as early as ever. For those of you not yet counting, the election is now 538 days away.

The post Obama Gets Bitter Taste of History’s Second-Term Curse appeared first on Hawkings Here.

Separate statements by Speaker John A. Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, just a few minutes apart, suggested a coordinated decision by the GOP leadership to turn up the political pressure on the president as high as possible. It may serve to prevent the White House from shaping the narrative as one in which thorough punitive follow-through will follow the exposure of bad behavior.

“Now, my question isn’t about who’s going to resign. My question is who’s going to jail over this scandal?” Boehner told reporters after the first of two GOP caucus meetings today. “Someone made a conscious decision to harass and hold up these requests for tax exempt status. I think we need to know who they are, whether they violated the law. Clearly someone violated the law.”

McConnell was just one notch less emphatic in his suspicions. “If there was an effort to bring the power of the federal government to bear on those that the administration disagreed with in the middle of a heated national election, it actually could be criminal and we’re determined to get the answers,” he said on the floor.

He also announced that 40 other GOP senators had joined him on a letter to the president demanding additional disclosures in the case, including regarding an apparent lack of candor about the IRS targeting when some officials were asked about it in congressional testimony more than a year ago.

The GOP leaders are likely to get what they say they’re after. Both spoke the morning after a Treasury inspector general concluded that lax oversight permitted the targeting of groups with conservative-sounding names to be singled out for heightened and extensive review of their applications. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said he would follow through on Obama’s orders to fire the people responsible for the “intolerable and inexcusable” conduct.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that the FBI had started investigating the matter last week to see if the “outrageous and unacceptable” moves were criminal behavior. He’ll be pressed to say more on that score, as well as about his department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records as part of a leak investigation, when he testifies this afternoon before the House Judiciary Committee.

Neither Boehner nor McConnell talked about the AP case this morning, but the speaker said he wasn’t backing away from his considerable interest in the kaleidoscope  of contradictory information that’s circulated since the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya’s second-biggest city.

That controversy now appears to be slipping quickly into third place among the dust-ups that are dominating Washington. “I don’t want to prolong this any more than anyone else,” Boehner said. “What I want is the truth.”

The post IRS Scandal Is a ‘Crime’ in Boehner-McConnell Echo Chamber appeared first on Hawkings Here.

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.

One rifle-shot response has a chance to make it into law without too much fuss: a proposal by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio, requiring the IRS to fire any employee who “willfully” violates “the constitutional rights of a taxpayer” and subjecting such bad actors to five years in federal prison.

Rubio was unable to get the language attached to the water bill as it moved through the Senate. He’ll have easier openings soon enough. And word is the GOP leadership might speed the Turner measure through the House as soon as next week.

But the two parties have diametrically different ideas about how to bring clarity to the campaign finance system. Democrats would like to make the rules much more forcefully tight and the required disclosures much more expansive. Republicans would deregulate almost entirely.

Three years ago, the Supreme Court opened the money-in-politics Pandora’s box with its Citizens United decision permitting corporations to spend whatever they want on campaigns. The next big decision for federal regulators became how to extend the same sort of freedoms to not-for-profit organizations.

Tax-exempt organizations created to promote “social welfare” — known for the place in the IRS code that describes them, section 501(c)(4) — were told within weeks of the court ruling that they could raise money without limits and didn’t have to disclose their donors as long as less than half their activity was overtly about influencing elections.

A flood of applications for that tax-exempt status started pouring in during the early months of the 2010 campaigns. A system for applying extra scrutiny to dozens of smallish groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or  “9/12 Project” in their names was soon put in place. But the scrutiny didn’t slow down applications for tax-exempt status from the arms of such major political players as Priorities USA on the left and Crossroads GPS on the right.

Whether it’s appropriate to give the IRS so much responsibility for regulating the flow of millions of dollars in campaign spending would seem to be an easy question for Congress, especially given the bipartisan sentiment that it should steer entirely clear of partisan matters. But don’t expect an easy answer.

One obvious legislative opportunity would be a bill setting rules to separate the groups that qualify for the coveted 501(c)(4) designation from the groups that don’t. That way the careerists in the tax office wouldn’t have to keep trying to make those inherently political distinctions. But for now, lawmakers seem closely divided between those wanting to broaden the definition and those wanting to narrow it.

Another alternative would be to unify all regulatory power for groups engaged in politics at the Federal Election Commission, which for now sets the rules only for organizations created for the benefit of candidates.

That’s an idea Democrats have been pushing since 2010 as part of a bill they call the Disclose Act. Its main provision would require corporations, labor unions and many advocacy groups to immediately tell the FEC every time they spend $10,000 or more to influence an election — and every time they receive a donation that big that’s meant to go into such independent expenditures.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is plotting to put that bill to another test vote soon, but it looks impossible for him to find the 60 votes needed to advance it. Republicans know as well as they know anything that nothing’s a bigger test of loyalty to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell than votes to tighten campaign finance regulation, which he views as both First Amendment violations and unilateral disarmament by the GOP.

In the end, the IRS imbroglio looks to be another instance of congressional words not being followed with legislative deeds.

And that may go double for the other major controversy of the week, the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records as part of a national security leak investigation. The Washington press corps and their constitutional protections are getting plenty of props from both sides of the aisle. But so far there’s been no discernible momentum for a legislative perennial that’s been around much longer than the Disclose Act — a federal shield law.

It would boost journalists’ protections against having to reveal sources or turn over documents to government agencies by requiring those agencies to prove to a judge that the information’s importance outweighs reporters’ rights to keep confidences.

It’s not going anywhere, either.

The post IRS Mess Exposes Split Between What Congress Will Say and What It Will Do appeared first on Hawkings Here.

But almost no one — save a couple of commentators on the ideological fringe — expected Obama would get to a second term and find his legislative agenda suddenly frozen in the face of a bipartisan wave of comparisons to Richard Nixon.

“The Day the Obama Administration Went All Nixon On Us,” is the headline on today’s post from Will Bunch on the left-leaning Huffington Post, who focused his ire on revelations of Associated Press phone record seizures by the Justice Department.

“This is an agency with an enemies list,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuKPy00zOjQ

target=”_blank”>Lou Dobbs said of the IRS on the right’s favorite cable news network, Fox, after Obama’s Monday news conference. “This is a president whose inner Nixon is being revealed.”

“Has Obama Taken a Page Out of Nixon’s Playbook?” asks the headline atop a column today by editor Jacqueline Leo in the budget hawkish but otherwise down-the-middle Fiscal Times. “There may not be direct parallels to the Obama administration, but the events of the last few months have become too big to ignore. There’s the Benghazi cover up; a slew of executive orders that bypass Congress; the IRS targeting of GOP conservative organizations; and now, the intrusion, violation and intimidation of a major news organization.”

That commentators from the left, right and center have all seen the parallels to the 37^th president, who was forced to resign when his views of the “imperial presidency” jumped the shark during Watergate, should be “chilling” to the president, to use the word being ascribed to both the IRS special scrutiny for conservative groups and the DOJ’s unprecedented prying into a newsroom’s operation as party of a leak inquiry.

Forty years on, the Nixon taint remains probably the most difficult for an American politician to scrub away. And the fact that it’s being applied so widely now could not be worse for the president’s timing, because it means his already teetering domestic legislative agenda may well be supplanted at the Capitol for months to come by nothing but oversight hearings.

The post Left, Right and Center Tag Obama as ‘Nixonian’ appeared first on Hawkings Here.