CQ Roll Call Daily Briefing: Newt vs. Nancy

Tuesday, December 6, 2011


Today In Washington

THE WHITE HOUSE:  Obama is flying toward Kansas, where at 2 (Washington time) he’ll deliver a speech that aides describe as a curtain-raiser for one of his central 2012 campaign themes. At the high school in Osawatomie — the town 50 miles southwest of Kansas City where Teddy Roosevelt delivered his New Nationalism address in 1910, calling for a “square deal” for all Americans — the president will describe this as a “make-or-break moment” for the middle class and all those working to join it in the face of widening income inequality. And he’ll promise to spend the rest of his presidency working for a country “where everyone engages in fair play, everyone does their fair share, and everyone gets a fair shot.” (Excuse me does this not sound like it is right out of Atlas Shrugged?)  (Aides say Obama’s been working in the speech for a month and that a pitch for the payroll tax extension will be only a tangential add-on.)

THE SENATE: Convened at 10 and at noon (just before the weekly caucus lunches) will vote on whether to break a filibuster that’s preventing the confirmation of Caitlyn Joan Halligan, who was first nominated for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals 15 months ago. The outcome appears too close to call. Most Republicans think she’s too liberal, and they’re eager to maintain the three vacancies on the country’s second-most-prominent federal bench at least until after the next presidential election. (They’re also aware that Democrats view the 44-year-old Halligan as eventual Supreme Court material: New York’s solicitor general from 2001 until 2007, she then headed Weil, Gotshal’s appellate practice for three years and is now general counsel to the Manhattan D.A.)

THE HOUSE: Convened at 10 for speeches and this afternoon is set to pass 10 more non-controversial bills. One would outlaw the sale of synthetic drugs that imitate the hallucinogenic or stimulant properties of drugs. Another would tinker with D.C. zoning rules to speed up the long-planned redevelopment of the Southwest waterfront.

IT’S ON: Four weeks from the Iowa caucuses, and it’s clear the opening round of the Republican nomination race has become Newt Gingrich’s to lose — and that his legendary lack of self-discipline and delayed fundraising aren’t the only big reasons he might stumble. He’s also got to get past another former Speaker of the House.

Nancy Pelosi says she has a dossier on her predecessor that she’s ready to talk about “when the time’s right,” and yesterday she suggested that — if Gingrich’s presidential run sustains its new viability — she’d go public with her views about the House ethics committee case against Gingrich that resulted in a $300,000 fine against him during his third year as Speaker. Pelosi wasn’t then in the Democratic leadership, but she was on the investigative panel. She had initially suggested — in talking to the liberal Talking Points Memo over the weekend — that she was preparing to disclose confidential documents from that era. But her office now says she’d only be out to explain the myriad details of the ethics case, which she thinks would poison the GOP electorate on its new favorite. (The panel concluded Gingrich used tax-exempt contributions for political purposes and then misled congressional investigators about it. He’s the only Speaker ever formally reprimanded by the House.)

Gingrich, with typical brio, responded to Pelosi yesterday “for what I regard as an early Christmas gift,” then attacked her integrity and called for harsh House sanctions if Pelosi violates congressional ethics secrecy rules. “It tells you how capriciously political that committee was that she was on it. It tells you how tainted the outcome was that she was on it,” he said.

The additional scrutiny on the former Speaker’s every move will intensify in light of the newest Iowa poll — from the Washington Post and ABC — that has Gingrich at 33 percent among likely caucus-goers and Mitt Romney and Ron Paul tied for second at 18 percent. Michele Bachmann seized on the results as good news of sorts this morning, because she said her 8 percent (when combined with the undecided) shows she still has a chance to win — and live up to her Iowa straw poll boomlet from the summer. The Minnesota congresswoman said there was plenty of time left for the voters to realize that both front-runners Romney and Gingrich “are flawed candidates.”

Romney, meanwhile, was continuing his steady, mainstream, establishment, presumed-front-runner campaign today with a visit to Arizona, where he’ll pick up former Vice President Dan Quayle’s endorsement.

DEFENSE OUT FRONT:  The military spending bill, by far the biggest single piece of the unfinished appropriations agenda, is close to final form.

If the other eight measures don’t get unstuck over the weekend from their year-long limbo, defense hawks will push hard to clear this one measure ahead of all the others — arguing that it’s ultimately non-controversial and closely tracks the policy decisions that are sure to emerge from the defense authorization conference. But the leadership will surely resist, because it sees the Defense appropriations package as a legislative sweetener that, if combined with the more contentious domestic spending bills, would make a “megabus” that is relatively easy for both parties to accept. In fact, if any measure is likely to drop out of such a catchall, it’s going to be the most controversial one — governing the departments of Labor, HHS and Education — which is deeply mired in disagreements about both spending levels and policy riders. Unless the parties can quickly resolve their differences on both fronts, Hill leaders are likely to insist on a continuing resolution that would simply keep funding for those three departments at current levels through next September.

In the military spending bill, the tentative $518 billion grand total would be about 2 percent less than what the House advocated and 4 percent less than what Obama initially sought — but about 1 percent more than what the Senate planned to spend, which was based on the number nominally agreed upon in this summer’s debt limit deal. That mans appropriators will need to shave $5 billion from the other national security bills, for foreign aid and the Homeland Security Department.

One of the final sticking points — as has been the case for several years now — is language governing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. But the debate isn’t anymore about whether there should be a super-expensive backup engine; there isn’t going to be one. Instead, the debate is about the pace of the purchase plan for a plane that’s supposed to anchor the fleets of all the services for the next decade or more. The program’s managers are having second thoughts about how quickly to procure the jets while glitches continue to surface on test models, and slowing down the procurement would save a bit of money in the short run.

NO SHORTAGE OF IDEAS: Two centrist senators, Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Susan Collins, say they’ll unveil a payroll tax extension plan this afternoon with potentially broad bipartisan support. (They’re keeping the details under wraps until their rollout.) Unless their plan catches fire, it looks as though the week will end on a note signaling continued impasse: Another Senate vote on Friday in which almost all the Democrats vote in favor of, and almost all the Republicans vote against, raising taxes a smidge on millionaires to finance another year with $1,000-lower Social Security taxes for everyone else. But on either side there’s still not all that much sense of panic, or even suspense, about the ultimate outcome: A holiday-season package — with a price tag above $180 billion — that would extend (but not expand) the payroll tax cut, renew unemployment benefits and avert a 27 percent reduction in payments to doctors who take Medicare.

Reid’s latest plan is to pay for the continued payroll tax break by imposing a lower-than-before surtax of 1.9 percent on household earnings above $1 million beginning in 2013 — and ending after 10 years. He’s also come up with $38 billion by increasing fees that mortgage lenders pay to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and means testing jobless aid and food stamps to exclude millionaires. Except for the millionaire tax part, Reid’s plan is pretty close to something that would be acceptable as a starting point to the GOP leadership in the House — which would then want to add the "boiler MACT" and Keystone XL pipeline provisions.

OFF RAMP: Randy Babbitt probably won’t last the week as head of the FAA, and he’s almost certainly spent his last day wielding any federal authority. He’ll probably resign by tomorrow, before the “discussions with legal counsel” about his employment status reach the conclusion that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is justified in firing him. Babbitt was put on indefinite administrative leave yesterday, as soon as word reached DOT that he’d been arrested Saturday night on charges of drunken driving in the northern Virginia suburbs.

Deputy Administrator Michael Huerta is running he agency for now — and when Babbitt goes he’ll likely be tapped to be acting administrator through the end of next year. (Though Huerta, who’s running the troubled NextGen effort to reinvent the air traffic control system, is on generally good terms with Congress, there’s little incentive for Obama to tempt a confirmation fight for a job that’s really high-profile but might be open again in January 2013.) Lawmakers and the airline industry had almost nothing but good things to say about Babbitt — an Eastern pilot for 25 years and also president of the pilots' union — but his position has not become untenable, if for no other reason than LaHood has made a campaign against drunken driving one of the hallmarks of his tenure.

INSIDE SHIFT: Two big West Wing moves involving long-ago Capitol Hill staff power players are being rolled out more or less in tandem this week. Jennifer Palmieri, who’s now the top political person at the progressive Center for American Progress think tank, is headed back to the White House as deputy to Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. (She toiled there for all eight years of the Clinton era, the last three as deputy press secretary — having entered the Clinton orbit as a senior aide to Leon Panetta back when he was making the switch from California congressman to OMB chief.) Palmieri was also DNC press secretary in 2002 and John Edwards’ spokeswoman in 2004. Phil Schiliro, meanwhile, is completing his slow fade out of the president’s inner circle; he’ll leave the White House payroll altogether at the end of the month, with no private-sector-landing-pad job announced. He’s been a special assistant with a hodgepodge portfolio this year — following two years of mixed results as the president’s top lobbyist on Capitol Hill, a job he got after decades as the right-hand man to Henry Waxman, another House Democrat from California.

— David Hawkings, editor



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