CQ ROLL CALL: Daily Briefing August 5, 2011

Today In Washington


THE WHITE HOUSE: “When Congress returns in September, I want to move quickly on things that can create more jobs, right now,” Obama said in reacting to this morning’s better-than-expected jobs report: 117,000 new positions created in July and the unemployment rate slipping by a tenth of a point, to 9.1 percent.  (NOTE THESE NUMBERS WERE WELL MANIPULATED BY THE WHITE HOUSE, MORE ON THAT LATER, Lynn)

The president is at the Washington Navy Yard to outline his ideas for getting businesses to hire or train 100,000 veterans or their spouses by the end of 2013. At a cost of $120 million, he’s proposing a $2,400 tax credit for companies that sign on unemployed veterans during the next two years (twice as much if the person has been jobless longer than six months) as well as an extension of the existing tax credit for hiring disabled veterans. He’s also ordering the Pentagon to do more to help servicemembers get the skills and training they need before they enter the job market. (The current jobless rate for post-Sept. 11 veterans is 13.3 percent.)

Marine One will leave the South Lawn and ferry the first family to Camp David at 2:15.

THE SENATE: Convened at 10 and recessed 39 seconds later — after clearing (on a unanimous consent voice vote) legislation re-opening all the offices of the FAA for six weeks and allowing 70,000 construction workers to return to 200 airport improvement projects. (Maryland’s Ben Cardin presided, Virginia’s Jim Webb made the motion and California’s Barbara Boxer was the only other senator in the chamber — meaning the Republicans had no parliamentary defense against a much more aggressive Democratic legislative effort.) The next pro forma meeting will be at 11 on Tuesday.

THE HOUSE: Convened at 10 and recessed seven minutes later, after disposing of some routine paperwork.  Its next pro forma session will be at 10 on Tuesday.

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS:  Today’s employment report was initially greeted as unabashedly good news in financial markets, mostly because both the drop in the jobless rate and the rise in payrolls beat most analyst expectations. (The initial surges in all three major stock indexes dissipated after only an hour or so; each was down by about 1 percent at 11:30.) But that’s just the way investors behave. As a signal about the economy, the numbers can be seen as a glass that’s half full — or, just as plausibly, half empty. 

The optimistic view is that the almost non-existent payroll growth and the rise in joblessness of the past few months has seemingly been reversed. After GDP grew at a 0.4 percent annual rate in the first quarter and a 1.3 percent rate in the second, a jump in payrolls and a drop in unemployment for the first month of the third quarter may be a harbinger of strong growth in the latter half of the year. That’s what Bernanke has been promising. And when the Fed chairman and his monetary-policy-setting colleagues sit down next week to deliberate about what to do, the July jobs numbers may provide some reassurance.


The pessimistic view centers on the 154,000 positions created by private employers in July — because that’s about half as many as the economy will need month after month to pull the unemployment rate back into a politically acceptable place by next year. And the 37,000 government jobs that were lost (the ninth consecutive monthly decline) will be repeated as federal, state and local budget cuts continue for years to come. Moreover, there are some anomalies in the July private payroll figures, particularly seasonal adjustments for expected automaker layoffs that may have overstated the job growth figure for the month. Finally, the figures from the household survey showed a drop in the labor force and the number of people who were working, a troubling sign. Those statistics are notoriously volatile, however, and generally not as believable as company-reported payroll counts. So maybe they don’t mean much. Again, wait for the August jobs report that will be out a month from now.

Both parties, at least for a little while, appeared to agree that the best course was to see the report as a classic “on the one hand, on the other hand” event that shouldn’t be interpreted in any way as a panacea. “We’ve got a long way to go” was in the sound bite offered by both Cantor and Austan Goolsbee — who’s in his last day as chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.

MAE DAY:  Fannie Mae said today that it lost $5.2 billion in the second quarter while it continues to seek loan modifications to help reduce mortgage defaults. As a result it will ask for about the same amount in additional cash from the Treasury. It has already received almost $100 billion since a partial federal takeover during the housing meltdown of three years ago.

IN FOR A LANDING:  The FAA impasse ended because Reid concluded that — with the debt crisis averted and the aviation story suddenly the only thing drawing attention to Congress — Senate Democrats would not be able to reverse the intensifying and outraged national perception that their petulance and petty parochialism had put 74,000 workers out on the street.

And so he totally capitulated to the House Republicans that his side had characterized as bullies and hostage-takers only the day before. His only sliver of victory was getting LaHood to promise to at least consider using his powers to retain some of the $17 million in annual subsidies that would otherwise be ended on commercial service to 13 small or remote locales.

The bill neither gives back pay to the 4,000 agency workers furloughed 14 days ago nor guarantees the government will recoup about $420 million in ticket taxes it couldn’t collect during the standoff. And it lasts only until Sept. 16, or 10 days after Congress returns, meaning negotiators will be under enormous pressure next month to reach agreement on the airline union organizing dispute that’s prevented a long-term reauthorization from being enacted for almost four years.

THROW THE BUMS OUT?  An 82 percent disapproval rating for Congress was recorded by New York Times and CBS News pollsters on Tuesday and Wednesday, just as lawmakers were leaving town after avoiding default and as their initial decision to leave the FAA in limbo was becoming a headline. It was the highest level recorded by the Times/CBS poll since the question was first asked 34 years ago. And fully 75 percent of those polled said most members of Congress do not deserve to be re-elected while just 15 percent say they do — a finding that suggests an anti-incumbent wave could sweep across all four caucuses in 2012.


The poll offered other foreboding numbers for lawmakers — especially the Republicans — on virtually every front. While the survey showed a statistical tie on approval vs. disapproval for the debt deal enacted this week, 82 percent said the preceding standoff was “mostly about gaining political advantage” and just 14 percent said it was “mostly about doing what was best for the country.” And the survey signaled that the public saw the congressional GOP as politically motivated most of all: 72 percent said they disapprove of how Republicans handled the negotiations, while 66 percent disapproved of how Hill Democrats handled them.

But the poll showed a statistical tie between those who disapproved and approved of how Obama handed the standoff. And going forward, 47 percent said they trust him to make decisions about the economy — far better than the 33 percent trusting congressional Republicans. (Boehner’s own disapproval rating surged to 57 percent, up 16 points since April. His approval rating now is 30 percent.) One finding that suggests trouble ahead for the Republicans selling the argument that cutting federal spending is the best prescription for the economy: 62 percent think creating jobs should be Washington’s focus, 29 percent think it should be cutting spending — and only 8 percent say it should be both.

HOW GREEN WAS MY CAPITOL:  When House members return in a month, they will see that the “Green the Capitol” initiative — which Pelosi launched with so much fanfare when she was Speaker — is officially no more. In light of the 7 percent spending cut Congress is imposing on itself and in the face of comprehensive ridicule from the new Republican majority, the House’s chief administrative officer has decided to fold the initiative into an existing energy reduction program handled by the Architect of the Capitol. The idea is to save money, eliminate redundancy and allow the administrative office to get back to its core duties, which GOP members lamented had been ignored too often in favor of the green work.
— David Hawkings, editor

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