Mon, January 3, 2011: CQ Roll Call Daily Briefing: Ignore the House for a Minute

Today In Washington


THE HOUSE AND SENATE: Neither is in session until Wednesday, when both will convene at noon for the start of the 112th Congress.

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is on the final full day of his Hawaiian vacation. He’s expected back in Washington tomorrow afternoon.

OPENING CEREMONIES: The first days of the year, on both sides of the Capitol, are shaping up to be much more about political tone-setting than about launching grand legislative drives.

Most of the attention, naturally enough, is being paid to how the Republicans are stage-managing their return to power in the House, from the subdued tone Boehner is setting for his ascent to the Speakership to the stately pace and modest expectations that his leadership team is setting for the party’s agenda. (The first spending cut the House will approve this week will be a drop-in-the-bucket $25 million, which will be marketed instead as a bold 5 percent reductions in the office budgets of all House members.)

What’s not gotten much attention, yet, is the potential for an opening day Senate showdown on filibuster rules. The Latin-infused rhetoric and parliamentary maneuvering will sound like a lot of insider mumbo jumbo to much of the nation. But making it more difficult for the minority party to block bills and nominees has the potential to narrow the partisan chasm and alter the way Congress does business much more than an annual recitation of the Constitution’s text on the House floor, which is being arranged by the GOP as a shout-out to the tea party faithful.

In the past two years, Reid had to spend an extraordinary amount of time honing his skill at breaking filibusters, which in the end he was able to do more often than any majority leader before him. But for more than a year now many of his fellow Democrats — mostly first-termers led by Missouri’s Claire McCaskill and New Mexico’s Tom Udall — have been mulling over what’s their highest-percentage shot at a rules change that would weaken the filibuster. They have not yet shown their cards, but they’re expected to make their move this week in the belief that precedent should allow them to get whatever change they want with a simple majority vote (in other words, the GOP won’t be able to block them) if they act right at the start of the new Congress.

Slightly reducing the supermajority of 60 required to invoke cloture, doing away with the power to mount a filibuster on the motion to begin debating a bill, or maybe just requiring senators to make good on their filibusters the old-fashioned way — by standing in the well and talking all night — would all tend to force the weakened minority to be more willing to compromise on legislation. It would not, however, do anything to speed the ratification of treaties, which will still need a two-thirds vote.

SHAVE AND A HAIRCUT: Republicans already are conceding that they will be unable to make good on their highest-profile aspiration, repealing the new health care law, because there’s no way the Senate will go along even if there’s a veto-proof majority for doing so in the House. (Michigan’s Fred Upton, the new Energy and Commerce chairman, yesterday predicted at least a two-third majority for total repeal and said the House vote would come before the State of the Union address, which Obama is likely to deliver Jan. 25.)

Absent outright repeal, the GOP strategy is to pick away at the health overhaul’s most contentious provisions through a combination of hearings, narrow legislation and — probably most effective of all — single-line amendments to spending bills that prevent the spending of any money to carry out a narrow provisions of law, or the regulations to carry it out.

One of the first efforts will be to try to prevent Medicare bureaucrats from spending money on their new regulation designed to promote discussions about end-of-life issues between doctors and patients — the sort of talks that were going to be written into the law, but got dropped, after Sarah Palin famously derided the idea as leading to the creation of government “death panels.”

THE FIELD NARROWS: Only four of the people who want to replace Michael Steele as the Republican Party’s national chairman will be debating him at the National Press Club at lunchtime. That’s because the fifth would-be challenger — Gentry Collins, who stepped down as RNC political director just after the election — dropped out of the race overnight.

The front-runner is clearly anybody but Steele, whose support has been sagging in the runup to Friday’s voting at the party bosses’ annual winter meeting. The man to beat has been Wisconsin GOP chairman Reince Priebus, but his star has faded the longer people ponder that he was once Steele’s general counsel. (Two of the chairman’s current top aides, chief of staff Mike Leavitt and spokesman Doug Heye, are on their way out of GOP headquarters even if their boss scores an upset win for a second term.) The remaining candidates for party chairman are former Missouri party chief Ann Wagner, onetime GOP convention chief executive Maria Cino, and former Michigan party chairman Saul Anuzis.

TAMPA TICK-TOCK: The new year signals the unfettered, unambiguous start to the 2012 presidential campaign — with almost all the attention focused on maneuvering by the Republicans who could form a potentially enormous and fractious field of would-be Obama challenges. (One of them will be nominated on Florida’s Gulf Coast fully 20 months from now.)

The big New Year’s weekend coup went to Mitt Romney, who secured the endorsement of the senior senator from a crucial early primary state: South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, as he prepares to seek a third term in his own right next year, apparently has concluded he’s not going to go out of his way to curry favor with the tea party crowd by endorsing someone more overtly and reliably conservative. Someone like, for example, the state’s other senator, Jim DeMint, who is among the huge GOP crowd still toying with the idea of a White House run.

As for Sarah Palin — whose own intentions continue to mystify GOP professionals — she continued to get attention for intensifying her connection to a state in the Lower 48. A week after word that her daughter Bristol paid $172,000 for a five-bedroom house in the hard-hit-by-foreclosures Phoenix suburb of Maricopa, a Palin acolyte has been named chief of staff to one of Arizona’s three new Republican congressmen: Paul Gosar of Flagstaff. The new top aide, Rob Robinson, has been a dentist just like his new boss. It was Robinson who introduced Gosar to the former Alaska governor, who ended up giving him a pivotal endorsement.

— David Hawkings, editor

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