Today In Washington
THE HOUSE: Convened at 10, will begin legislating at noon and will be done for the day by 7. There will be a nearly unanimous vote to clear legislation combining a pair of new tax credits for hiring veterans (a sliver of the Obama jobs package) with the repeal of a 3 percent tax withholding from government contracts (a sliver of the GOP jobs agenda). But the debate will be much more contentious on the first pro-gun bill advanced by the Republicans since they took control this year. It would allow people with concealed weapon permits in their home state the right to carry a concealed gun in other states.
THE SENATE: Convened at 10 and is debating what seems on the surface like a relatively non-controversial $33 billion spending bill for the Energy Department and the Army Corps of Engineers. (Reid’s effort to combine it with two other fiscal 2012 appropriations measures fell apart yesterday in a welter of objections about its spending totals and language allowing American banks to do business in Cuba.)
Reid signaled that, if the energy and water debate bogs down, he was ready to quickly drop the bill and turn instead to the defense authorization measure updated by Armed Services yesterday. He also issued a vague exhortation for senators and their aides to keep their Thanksgiving week travel plans flexible — especially if anyone makes parliamentary trouble for the military policy bill.
THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is sound asleep in Canberra, where it’s almost 4 on Thursday morning. He’ll spend his second day in Australia addressing Parliament and traveling to a military base in Darwin. The remote northern coastal town is where 2,500 Marines will be stationed permanently under an agreement the president and Prime Minister Julia Gerard announced yesterday — much to the consternation of the Chinese government, which doesn’t appreciate the U.S. effort to become a military counterweight to China in the Pacific Rim.
BASIC MATH: The sum of today’s supercommittee tea leaves is that there’s just enough hope for a deal left that Reid and Boehner are willing to enter the fray — although maybe only long enough to conclude that the two sides cannot be bridged, and certainly not in the time available. While the formal legislative language has to be done by Monday and the committee doesn’t have to vote until a week from today, a general consensus has emerged that there needs to be a handshake by the day after tomorrow (maybe push-able until Saturday) for the paperwork and the budgetary scorekeeping to get done in time.
Pushed hard by John Kerry — who sees this budget deal as his legacy-maker — Democrats are now willing to drop their revenue number to $800 billion (from $1 trillion) in a final attempt to get to a deal. But in return, they’re going to insist that entitlement curbs over the next decade be held to that new, lower number as well. And the Republicans are showing every sign they’re going to spurn that offer. Not only do they want to extract more from Medicare and Medicaid, but much more importantly, they also are already so far outside their own comfort zone with their stated willingness to go for as much as $300 billion in new revenues.
Co-Chairman Jeb Hensarling signaled as much last night when he said of his side, “We have gone as far as we feel we can go” on taxes. That was an acknowledgment of the reality that — even with Pat Toomey, the small-government advocate turned senator, putting his name atop the tax plan, the leadership would be hard-pressed to corral enough members of the GOP rank and file to push such a deal to enactment.
The flurry of top leadership meetings last night could also be a signal that the supercommittee has revealed that it has essentially abandoned hope of reaching a $1.2 trillion deal, and that the two parties’ members are looking for guidance from the top Hill brass about whether they should walk away altogether — or roll out a bill worth less than that amount (the current best guess is they have agreement on about $600 billion in savings) that largely avoids addressing taxes and entitlements. The supercommittee is allowed to create a proposal that cuts just a few hundred billion dollars — and then the difference between that figure and $1.2 trillion would be the size of the across-the-board defense and civilian spending cuts. And shrinking the size of that sequester would at least be a way to tamp down talk that the self-imposed punishment should be skirted altogether.
EPARTURES AND ARRIVALS: Minibus No. 2 is permanently on blocks, and even the vestige that remains before the Senate — the Energy-Water bill — may be abandoned in the next 24 hours. (Reid really, really wants the bill to pass because it would put the Senate on record against any funding for the nuclear waste storage center under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, but he may be forced to relent in the face of a wave of GOP amendments designed to stoke the Solyndra controversy.)designed to stoke the Solyndra controversy.)
What it means: Appropriators will be spending the next month doing what they’ve been fighting against — but what’s been expected of them — all year: Assembling a behemoth appropriations package to handle the great majority of discretionary appropriations for the nine months of fiscal 2012 that remain. The must-pass, and generally bipartisan, Pentagon spending bill will be the vehicle that carries all the other measures.
That scenario assumes enactment by this weekend of Minibus No. 1, the three-bill domestic spending package that also keeps the rest of the government running until Dec. 16. That’s going to happen, but not without some sweating among the House Republican whips, who are now working hard to hold the number of GOP defections to no more than 40. (That number of “no” votes would mean 20 Democrats would have to vote “yes” to assure passage.) Their challenge is being made significantly more difficult now that two prominent conservative groups, the Club for Growth and Heritage Action, have come out against the bill — by putting it on their “key vote” lawmaker-approval scorecards — because in their view it doesn’t cut spending enough (less than 1 percent overall for the programs covered) and would increase the maximum size of home loans that can receive FHA guarantees.
THE SENATE: Convened at 10 and is debating what seems on the surface like a relatively non-controversial $33 billion spending bill for the Energy Department and the Army Corps of Engineers. (Reid’s effort to combine it with two other fiscal 2012 appropriations measures fell apart yesterday in a welter of objections about its spending totals and language allowing American banks to do business in Cuba.)
Reid signaled that, if the energy and water debate bogs down, he was ready to quickly drop the bill and turn instead to the defense authorization measure updated by Armed Services yesterday. He also issued a vague exhortation for senators and their aides to keep their Thanksgiving week travel plans flexible — especially if anyone makes parliamentary trouble for the military policy bill.
THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is sound asleep in Canberra, where it’s almost 4 on Thursday morning. He’ll spend his second day in Australia addressing Parliament and traveling to a military base in Darwin. The remote northern coastal town is where 2,500 Marines will be stationed permanently under an agreement the president and Prime Minister Julia Gerard announced yesterday — much to the consternation of the Chinese government, which doesn’t appreciate the U.S. effort to become a military counterweight to China in the Pacific Rim.
BASIC MATH: The sum of today’s supercommittee tea leaves is that there’s just enough hope for a deal left that Reid and Boehner are willing to enter the fray — although maybe only long enough to conclude that the two sides cannot be bridged, and certainly not in the time available. While the formal legislative language has to be done by Monday and the committee doesn’t have to vote until a week from today, a general consensus has emerged that there needs to be a handshake by the day after tomorrow (maybe push-able until Saturday) for the paperwork and the budgetary scorekeeping to get done in time.
Pushed hard by John Kerry — who sees this budget deal as his legacy-maker — Democrats are now willing to drop their revenue number to $800 billion (from $1 trillion) in a final attempt to get to a deal. But in return, they’re going to insist that entitlement curbs over the next decade be held to that new, lower number as well. And the Republicans are showing every sign they’re going to spurn that offer. Not only do they want to extract more from Medicare and Medicaid, but much more importantly, they also are already so far outside their own comfort zone with their stated willingness to go for as much as $300 billion in new revenues.
Co-Chairman Jeb Hensarling signaled as much last night when he said of his side, “We have gone as far as we feel we can go” on taxes. That was an acknowledgment of the reality that — even with Pat Toomey, the small-government advocate turned senator, putting his name atop the tax plan, the leadership would be hard-pressed to corral enough members of the GOP rank and file to push such a deal to enactment.
The flurry of top leadership meetings last night could also be a signal that the supercommittee has revealed that it has essentially abandoned hope of reaching a $1.2 trillion deal, and that the two parties’ members are looking for guidance from the top Hill brass about whether they should walk away altogether — or roll out a bill worth less than that amount (the current best guess is they have agreement on about $600 billion in savings) that largely avoids addressing taxes and entitlements. The supercommittee is allowed to create a proposal that cuts just a few hundred billion dollars — and then the difference between that figure and $1.2 trillion would be the size of the across-the-board defense and civilian spending cuts. And shrinking the size of that sequester would at least be a way to tamp down talk that the self-imposed punishment should be skirted altogether.
EPARTURES AND ARRIVALS: Minibus No. 2 is permanently on blocks, and even the vestige that remains before the Senate — the Energy-Water bill — may be abandoned in the next 24 hours. (Reid really, really wants the bill to pass because it would put the Senate on record against any funding for the nuclear waste storage center under Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, but he may be forced to relent in the face of a wave of GOP amendments designed to stoke the Solyndra controversy.)designed to stoke the Solyndra controversy.)
What it means: Appropriators will be spending the next month doing what they’ve been fighting against — but what’s been expected of them — all year: Assembling a behemoth appropriations package to handle the great majority of discretionary appropriations for the nine months of fiscal 2012 that remain. The must-pass, and generally bipartisan, Pentagon spending bill will be the vehicle that carries all the other measures.
That scenario assumes enactment by this weekend of Minibus No. 1, the three-bill domestic spending package that also keeps the rest of the government running until Dec. 16. That’s going to happen, but not without some sweating among the House Republican whips, who are now working hard to hold the number of GOP defections to no more than 40. (That number of “no” votes would mean 20 Democrats would have to vote “yes” to assure passage.) Their challenge is being made significantly more difficult now that two prominent conservative groups, the Club for Growth and Heritage Action, have come out against the bill — by putting it on their “key vote” lawmaker-approval scorecards — because in their view it doesn’t cut spending enough (less than 1 percent overall for the programs covered) and would increase the maximum size of home loans that can receive FHA guarantees.
— David Hawkings, editor
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