Monday, April 16, 2012: Today In Washington

THE SENATE: Convenes at 2 and at 5:30 will rebuff legislation to implement Obama’s “Buffett rule” — by creating a new alternative minimum income tax of 30 percent for about 210,000 people making at least $2 million annually, while phasing in the higher rate for those earning at least $1 million.

Sixty votes will be required to keep the measure alive, and there’s almost no chance the majority will be within five of that. (A pure 53-47 party-line result is the likeliest.) As will be the case on so many Senate votes over the next six months, the roll call is more about making a campaign ad than making a law, and the only suspense is whether any of the senators most vulnerable to defeat this fall — Claire McCaskill, Jon Tester and Bill Nelson among the Democrats, and Dean Heller and Scott Brown among the Republicans — go against the party line.

Senators also will confirm Stephanie Thacker, a former prosecutor who’s now partner at a firm in Charleston, W.Va., as a judge on the Fourth Circuit. She’ll be only the second new federal appellate judge seated this year; five other circuit court picks are awaiting floor votes.

THE HOUSE: Convenes at 2 and will be done no later than 6:30, after passing separate measures honoring Raoul Wallenberg, Lena Horne, Jack Nicklaus and Mark Twain.

THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama, who got back home from the Summit of the Americas in Colombia after midnight, has nothing on his public schedule.

His re-election campaign, meanwhile, announced this morning that he’d raised a combined $53 million for his own bid, the Democratic Party and other campaign funds in March — bringing his total haul this cycle to nearly $350 million.

Mitt Romney hasn’t reported his March numbers yet, but through February had raised $75 million for his campaign. (He only started raising money jointly with the Republican National Committee a few weeks ago.) The all-but-official GOP nominee began March with $7.2 million in the bank; the president’s cash on hand at the same time was $85 million.

LINE ’EM UP: With essentially no sustained and meaningful legislating in the offing during the two weeks before the next recess, Congress will while away the time with the sort of oversight efforts that make terrific television (and pretty good campaign rhetoric) but do almost nothing to shape public policy or limit governmental waste and federal employee misbehavior.


The opportunities for sound-bite mischief-making were presented on a pair of silver platters by two federal agencies — one that hardly anybody outside the Beltway knows about (the General Services Administration) and one that’s more fabled in pop culture than any other (the Secret Service). The story that broke two weeks ago about the lavish Las Vegas conference held by the GSA two years ago will be fodder for no fewer than four hearings in the next three days — starting at 1:30 in House Oversight and Government Reform, where Chairman Darrell Issa is sure to have a highly covered field day lambasting the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up excesses that GSA bureaucrats even took the time to put on film. (The organizer of the conference, Jeff Neely, will invoke the Fifth Amendment when he testifies.) House Transportation’s John Mica will take his own shots tomorrow, while a pair of Senate Democratic chairmen, Barbara Boxer and Dick Durbin, will wait until Wednesday to chime in on the GSA’s $800,000 boondoggle. And by the end of the day, it’s a sure bet that Issa, House Homeland Security Chairman Pete King and probably a couple of Senate chairmen will announce hearings as well into the revelations this weekend that Secret Service agents hired prostitutes after finishing their advance work obligations for the Cartagena summit.

But it’s tough to predict that anything substantive will come from such hearings. Issa and the Republicans will work hard to tie both the bureaucrats’ and agents’ misbehavior to one of their favorite narratives — which is that Obama and the Democrats are all to willing to turn a blind eye to governmental waste and abuse. But the Democrats will be ready with a worthy rebuttal, which is that the people and their misdeeds are about as apolitical as it gets in the government, and that such patterns of misbehavior cannot readily be linked to this president’s policies. In fact, it’s a reasonable assumption that the same sort of advantage-taking went on long before Obama took office, including during the eight years of his GOP predecessor. (In fact, GSA spending on conferences looks to have increased steadily during the George W. Bush years.)

The best possible outcome, then, is that both parties agree that there’s a longstanding and trans-administration pattern of loose spending on professional development events and “conferences” at all manner of agencies — and that, similarly, maybe some lax oversight by both sides has allowed the Secret Service to take a little too much advantage of its rock-ribbed reputation for probity. But even a congressional agreement on that much, and a shared Republican and Democratic decision to do a little wing-clipping, is probably too much to expect at this year’s Capitol.


QUOTES OF NOTE: “I’m going to probably eliminate for high-income people the second-home mortgage deduction” while pushing to close HUD and dramatically shrink the Education Department, Mitt Romney told donors at a Palm Beach fundraiser last night — his uncharacteristically specific ideas broadcast so they could be heard by reporters on a nearby beach. Ann Romney, who turns 63 today, characterized last week’s “never worked a day in her life” comments from Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen this way: “It was my early birthday present from someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it.”


David Hawkings

dailybriefing@cqrollcall.com