Today In Washington

Monday, October 31, 2011


THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is ordering the FDA to take new steps to prevent and reduce shortages of cancer medicines, anesthetics, emergency-room supplies and other drugs that have recently been in short supply. He’s signing an executive order to that effect within the hour, the latest move in his effort to advance his priorities without any input from Congress. But the president is going to endorse legislation requiring drug makers to notify the FDA six months ahead of a potential shortage.

Obama spent more than an hour in the Oval Office this morning with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who’s now leading a balky effort to broker Middle East peace.

THE SENATE: Convenes at 3 with no business beyond a 5:30 vote to confirm Stephen Higginson, who runs the appeals office for the U.S. attorney’s office in New Orleans and teaches full time at Loyola Law School, for a seat on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals

THE HOUSE: Convenes at 1 for a brief pro forma session.

BIG DOGS BARKING: With 23 days to the next big deadline for a deficit deal, look for the top four Capitol Hill leaders to get much more overtly involved this week in the search for a deal that could get through Congress with bipartisan support — and narrow the next decade’s yawning budget gap by substantially more than the $1.2 trillion supercommittee minimum. That’s because the continuing partisan impasse over taxes has kept the all-powerful 12 from getting close at all to an agreement — despite about two dozen gatherings for private negotiating sessions, social dinners and public hearings.


With the lights on in both chambers for the first time in three weeks, Boehner and McConnell have the opportunity to do some coordinated temperature-taking about the willingness of rank-and-file Republicans to accept some measure of additional revenue (whether tied to expected economic growth or not) as the price of a deal that makes a big dent in the deficit, eases economic anxiety and restores at least some confidence in Washington. If they conclude that close to half of GOP House members and senators are willing to make that trade-off, a grand bargain may yet be achievable — and they will give Jeb Hensarling and Jon Kyl the green light to work out the details.

Similarly, Reid and Pelosi will be doing some gentle whip-cracking of their own — to make sure that not too many in their ranks are rebelling against the big concessions to party principles embodied in last week’s opening Democratic bid at the supercommitee: $500 billion in Medicaid and Medicare reductions and trims to discretionary spending beyond what’s already in store — assuming that those cuts are paired with a decent-sized tax increase. (The liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the Democrats’ plan “actually stands well to the right of plans” offered by the Bowles-Simpson and Rivlin-Domenici commissions and is the best the GOP should be allowed to hope for in a negotiated settlement.)

The White House, meanwhile, shows less and less interest in the supercommittee process by the day. Officials there are concluding there’s so little chance for a deal that there’s no percentage in the president putting any of his dwindling political capital on the line — especially while he’s getting some mileage (and an uptick in his approval ratings) out of his “We can’t wait” campaign to show he can govern at the margins without any help from the do-little Congress.

As has been the case since the supercommitee was created in August, its best chance for overcoming the long odds for success lies in lawmakers’ concluding that the alternative would be worse: indiscriminate across-the-board cuts to domestic and defense programs that make Republicans and Democrats cringe with nearly equal anxiety.

A LITTLE GET-TOGETHER: The most tangible budget news of the week won’t be the Senate’s passage of only its second spending bill for the fiscal year that started a month ago. A solid bipartisan vote for that domestic spending “minibus” — $128 billion for the Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Transportation and HUD departments as well as the FDA and the National Science Foundation — is on course for no later than Wednesday. But the real news will be that, after that, House and Senate appropriators plan on convening their first actual conference committee in two years — and that those lawmakers actually have been authorized by their leaders to come up with a genuine compromise agreement.


The big question for the negotiators is whether to turn what’s currently a three-spending-bill amalgam into a package including five or six bills. They will do so only if appropriators are confident they can push whatever bill they come up with through the House — where a coalition of conservative Republicans (who lament the bills would spend too much) and liberal Democrats (who lament the opposite) appear to have the combined muscle to stop any spending legislation for now.

SOURCE:  CQ Roll Call--Daily Briefing, http://www.cqrollcall.com/
— David Hawkings, editor