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
Showing posts with label Ginger White. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ginger White. Show all posts
Monday, April 16, 2012
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
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
Become a Facebook fan at facebook.com/DavidHawkingsDC. Or follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/davidhawkings.
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
Become a Facebook fan at facebook.com/DavidHawkingsDC. Or follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/davidhawkings.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
CQ ROLL CALL: Daily Briefing--November 30, 2011
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Today In Washington
THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is leaving his office at 12:40 for an afternoon pitching the payroll tax break in swing-state Pennsylvania and an evening of fundraising in big-money New York.
After a photo op with a family in Scranton, the president will take the podium at a high school at 2:45 to make his case for extending and expanding the payroll tax holiday. He’s sure to mention a Treasury report, released this morning, with state-by-state estimates of how many taxpayers benefited from this year’s 2 percentage point reduction in the Social Security tax — including 6.7 million Pennsylvanians who are sharing a $4.7 billion tax cut this year.
After arriving at JFK at 5, Obama will attend three fundraisers: at a private residence where tickets begin at $10,000; at the Gotham Bar and Grill in Greenwich Village ($35,800 a seat) and at the Sheraton Hotel ($1,000). He’ll also attend a reception celebrating the six-month anniversary of New York’s gay marriage law. He’s due back in the family quarters half an hour after midnight.
THE SENATE: Convened at 10 and is voting to limit debate and restrict amendments to the defense authorization bill. The cloture move puts senators on course to pass the measure Friday. The leaders of Armed Services, Carl Levin and John McCain, are working to limit the range and roster of amendments that will require roll calls in the next three days — but their effort to circumscribe the rest of the debate with a sweeping package deal came up short this morning.
THE HOUSE: Convened at 10, will start legislating at noon and will be done for the day around sundown, after voting along party lines to advance the next piece of the Republican deregulatory agenda — legislation that would overrule changes to union election rules proposed by the National Labor Relations Board. (The measure is a dead letter in the Democratic Senate.) Lawmakers will also vote to name one of the biggest meeting rooms in the Capitol Visitor Center in memory of Gabe Zimmerman, the Tucson district aide who was killed in the Gabby Giffords shooting melee.
CHECKS AND BALANCES: As the president heads out to campaign on the issue, another day of maneuvering over the future of the payroll tax has made clear that this year’s break on employee pay stubs will surely be extended through 2012. But there’s only a coin-flip chance, at best, for a new reduction in what businesses put toward their workers’ Social Security benefits.
McConnell essentially sealed the deal yesterday, when he blew past his principal deputy, Jon Kyl, and declared that Republicans would not be trumped by Democrats when it comes to supporting a popular tax break. And at the same time, the White House made it more clear than ever that the president isn’t concerned about the effect his payroll plan would have on the deficit.
What’s looking to happen is that the extension of last year’s nearly one-third cut (from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent) will end up happening relatively easily, and without any offsets, and then the debate in the coming weeks will be over what sort of pay-for might be embraced to theoretically finance the expansion to help employers. (Doing both would cost $265 billion.) Since even the smallest and most symbolic tax hike for millionaires is going to be rejected out of hand — the next test vote proving that will come Friday — the Democrats who favor that approach are essentially stepping aside and telling the Republicans to come up with their own way of paying to help the business community, if they want to. And the Senate GOP leadership is going to reply as soon as this afternoon that, yes, they do want to. Their initial offer looks to be to embrace one or both of the two most frequently adopted offsetting revenue raisers in the GOP arsenal: Selling the rights to use more of the broadcast spectrum to the wireless industry, and raising the fees imposed on people who pass through airports and board commercial flights.
If the Democrats don’t choose to deride those ideas, the payroll tax fight could end sooner than it looked like only yesterday — and maybe even be a springboard into an easy decision by the GOP to acquiesce in an extension of unemployment insurance benefits for the long-term jobless. (Their decision to put off the defense sequester fight until next year — when they’ll try to shift more of the automatic spending cuts to domestic programs — suggests the Republicans may be choosing to ratchet back their fighting instincts for a little while.)
Debates over the tax extenders, and the annual “patches” for the alternative minimum tax and the Medicare doctor payment formula, are still far away from ready-for-prime-time. (The delay, at least, affords more time for those senators with visions of grand bargains in their heads to continue their search for the sort of deficit reduction formula that so readily eluded the supercommittee.)
SENATE’S TURN: Reid has laid out the plans for Senate votes next month on two versions of a balanced-budget amendment. Neither has a shot at getting the required two-thirds to advance in the face of significant Democratic opposition. (Majority Whip Dick Durbin is driving that point home at a Judiciary hearing he arranged for this morning titled “The Perils of Constitutionalizing the Budget Debate.”)
Ben Nelson, Jon Tester, Claire McCaskill and perhaps a few others also running for re-election will back the proposal by fellow Democrat Mark Udall, which is a bit looser than the one the House rejected this month because it would keep Social Security receipts and outlays off the budget-balancing ledger. But it would take 20 members of that caucus to join all 47 Republicans to assure adoption, and that’s not remotely close to happening. Beyond that, no Democrats will back the language the Republican leadership plans to put to a vote. It would cap federal spending at 18 percent of GDP and require a two-thirds majority vote to increase taxes.
THE ‘E’ WORD: The votes will also come, curiously enough, just as lawmakers are deciding whether to fish or cut bait on the overdue completion of the new budget year’s appropriations process — in which a subtext of the deliberations over a comprehensive package or another stopgap CR will be the future of dozens of don’t-call-them-earmarks — parochial or otherwise narrowly drawn provisions. A decision to press ahead with the line-by-line omnibus for dictating the $800 billion in spending would bring intense pressure for the Senate, especially, to at least cast a vote for the binding earmark ban legislation being unveiled today by McCaskill and Pat Toomey. It would not pass, but at least then it would afford a veneer of cover for so many of the lawmakers who see every other special project as a bedeviling earmark – except their own.
HINCKLEY HEARINGS: John Hinckley won’t testify on his own behalf during the eight days of hearings that began this morning before federal Judge Paul Friedman, who will decide (probably early next year) whether the man who came within an inch of killing Ronald Reagan is mentally healthy enough to spend most of next year living with his 85-year-old mother.
Hinckley lawyer Barry Levine says his client won’t take the stand unless he’s shielded from cross-examination, and federal prosecutors say they won’t agree to that. So the hearing will be mostly conflicting testimony from teams of psychiatrists. The doctors at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital say Hinckley — a patient since he was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982 — is well enough to be discharged for good, assuming all goes well in a supervised series of eight visits of 17 to 24 days each to Jo Ann Hinckley’s home in Williamsburg. Prosecutors maintain that Hinckley, now 56, remains capable of and inclined toward more violent behavior. What’s not legally an issue is whether the would-be presidential assassin should ever be released from federal custody.
‘HUMILIATED, EMBARRASSED’: “The funny thing about Herman Cain is that never in a million years did he probably think I would speak out on this,” Ginger White said today on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in describing her version of their 13-year affair — which she said included regular gifts and money from him (but "not sex for cash”) and even a date to see Mike Tyson fight Evander Holyfield in Las Vegas (not clear if it was the famous ear-biting one).
“I came out being very honest and so far I have been absolutely humiliated, embarrassed,” she said, because of the GOP candidate’s decision to deny their relationship. (Before telling his top team that he was “reassessing” his presidential bid yesterday, Cain described White as a “troubled Atlanta businesswoman” in a letter to supporters that declared “this woman’s story is completely false.”) For her part, White said she did not think Cain would be a good president but declined to join those thinking he should get out of the race, saying: “That’s something that he has to look himself into the mirror and ask himself.”
— David Hawkings, editor
Become a Facebook fan at facebook.com/DavidHawkingsDC. Or follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/davidhawkings.
dailybriefing@cqrollcall.com
Copyright 2011 CQ Roll Call Inc.
Today In Washington
THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is leaving his office at 12:40 for an afternoon pitching the payroll tax break in swing-state Pennsylvania and an evening of fundraising in big-money New York.
After a photo op with a family in Scranton, the president will take the podium at a high school at 2:45 to make his case for extending and expanding the payroll tax holiday. He’s sure to mention a Treasury report, released this morning, with state-by-state estimates of how many taxpayers benefited from this year’s 2 percentage point reduction in the Social Security tax — including 6.7 million Pennsylvanians who are sharing a $4.7 billion tax cut this year.
After arriving at JFK at 5, Obama will attend three fundraisers: at a private residence where tickets begin at $10,000; at the Gotham Bar and Grill in Greenwich Village ($35,800 a seat) and at the Sheraton Hotel ($1,000). He’ll also attend a reception celebrating the six-month anniversary of New York’s gay marriage law. He’s due back in the family quarters half an hour after midnight.
THE SENATE: Convened at 10 and is voting to limit debate and restrict amendments to the defense authorization bill. The cloture move puts senators on course to pass the measure Friday. The leaders of Armed Services, Carl Levin and John McCain, are working to limit the range and roster of amendments that will require roll calls in the next three days — but their effort to circumscribe the rest of the debate with a sweeping package deal came up short this morning.
THE HOUSE: Convened at 10, will start legislating at noon and will be done for the day around sundown, after voting along party lines to advance the next piece of the Republican deregulatory agenda — legislation that would overrule changes to union election rules proposed by the National Labor Relations Board. (The measure is a dead letter in the Democratic Senate.) Lawmakers will also vote to name one of the biggest meeting rooms in the Capitol Visitor Center in memory of Gabe Zimmerman, the Tucson district aide who was killed in the Gabby Giffords shooting melee.
CHECKS AND BALANCES: As the president heads out to campaign on the issue, another day of maneuvering over the future of the payroll tax has made clear that this year’s break on employee pay stubs will surely be extended through 2012. But there’s only a coin-flip chance, at best, for a new reduction in what businesses put toward their workers’ Social Security benefits.
McConnell essentially sealed the deal yesterday, when he blew past his principal deputy, Jon Kyl, and declared that Republicans would not be trumped by Democrats when it comes to supporting a popular tax break. And at the same time, the White House made it more clear than ever that the president isn’t concerned about the effect his payroll plan would have on the deficit.
What’s looking to happen is that the extension of last year’s nearly one-third cut (from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent) will end up happening relatively easily, and without any offsets, and then the debate in the coming weeks will be over what sort of pay-for might be embraced to theoretically finance the expansion to help employers. (Doing both would cost $265 billion.) Since even the smallest and most symbolic tax hike for millionaires is going to be rejected out of hand — the next test vote proving that will come Friday — the Democrats who favor that approach are essentially stepping aside and telling the Republicans to come up with their own way of paying to help the business community, if they want to. And the Senate GOP leadership is going to reply as soon as this afternoon that, yes, they do want to. Their initial offer looks to be to embrace one or both of the two most frequently adopted offsetting revenue raisers in the GOP arsenal: Selling the rights to use more of the broadcast spectrum to the wireless industry, and raising the fees imposed on people who pass through airports and board commercial flights.
If the Democrats don’t choose to deride those ideas, the payroll tax fight could end sooner than it looked like only yesterday — and maybe even be a springboard into an easy decision by the GOP to acquiesce in an extension of unemployment insurance benefits for the long-term jobless. (Their decision to put off the defense sequester fight until next year — when they’ll try to shift more of the automatic spending cuts to domestic programs — suggests the Republicans may be choosing to ratchet back their fighting instincts for a little while.)
Debates over the tax extenders, and the annual “patches” for the alternative minimum tax and the Medicare doctor payment formula, are still far away from ready-for-prime-time. (The delay, at least, affords more time for those senators with visions of grand bargains in their heads to continue their search for the sort of deficit reduction formula that so readily eluded the supercommittee.)
SENATE’S TURN: Reid has laid out the plans for Senate votes next month on two versions of a balanced-budget amendment. Neither has a shot at getting the required two-thirds to advance in the face of significant Democratic opposition. (Majority Whip Dick Durbin is driving that point home at a Judiciary hearing he arranged for this morning titled “The Perils of Constitutionalizing the Budget Debate.”)
Ben Nelson, Jon Tester, Claire McCaskill and perhaps a few others also running for re-election will back the proposal by fellow Democrat Mark Udall, which is a bit looser than the one the House rejected this month because it would keep Social Security receipts and outlays off the budget-balancing ledger. But it would take 20 members of that caucus to join all 47 Republicans to assure adoption, and that’s not remotely close to happening. Beyond that, no Democrats will back the language the Republican leadership plans to put to a vote. It would cap federal spending at 18 percent of GDP and require a two-thirds majority vote to increase taxes.
THE ‘E’ WORD: The votes will also come, curiously enough, just as lawmakers are deciding whether to fish or cut bait on the overdue completion of the new budget year’s appropriations process — in which a subtext of the deliberations over a comprehensive package or another stopgap CR will be the future of dozens of don’t-call-them-earmarks — parochial or otherwise narrowly drawn provisions. A decision to press ahead with the line-by-line omnibus for dictating the $800 billion in spending would bring intense pressure for the Senate, especially, to at least cast a vote for the binding earmark ban legislation being unveiled today by McCaskill and Pat Toomey. It would not pass, but at least then it would afford a veneer of cover for so many of the lawmakers who see every other special project as a bedeviling earmark – except their own.
HINCKLEY HEARINGS: John Hinckley won’t testify on his own behalf during the eight days of hearings that began this morning before federal Judge Paul Friedman, who will decide (probably early next year) whether the man who came within an inch of killing Ronald Reagan is mentally healthy enough to spend most of next year living with his 85-year-old mother.
Hinckley lawyer Barry Levine says his client won’t take the stand unless he’s shielded from cross-examination, and federal prosecutors say they won’t agree to that. So the hearing will be mostly conflicting testimony from teams of psychiatrists. The doctors at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital say Hinckley — a patient since he was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982 — is well enough to be discharged for good, assuming all goes well in a supervised series of eight visits of 17 to 24 days each to Jo Ann Hinckley’s home in Williamsburg. Prosecutors maintain that Hinckley, now 56, remains capable of and inclined toward more violent behavior. What’s not legally an issue is whether the would-be presidential assassin should ever be released from federal custody.
‘HUMILIATED, EMBARRASSED’: “The funny thing about Herman Cain is that never in a million years did he probably think I would speak out on this,” Ginger White said today on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in describing her version of their 13-year affair — which she said included regular gifts and money from him (but "not sex for cash”) and even a date to see Mike Tyson fight Evander Holyfield in Las Vegas (not clear if it was the famous ear-biting one).
“I came out being very honest and so far I have been absolutely humiliated, embarrassed,” she said, because of the GOP candidate’s decision to deny their relationship. (Before telling his top team that he was “reassessing” his presidential bid yesterday, Cain described White as a “troubled Atlanta businesswoman” in a letter to supporters that declared “this woman’s story is completely false.”) For her part, White said she did not think Cain would be a good president but declined to join those thinking he should get out of the race, saying: “That’s something that he has to look himself into the mirror and ask himself.”
— David Hawkings, editor
Become a Facebook fan at facebook.com/DavidHawkingsDC. Or follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/davidhawkings.
dailybriefing@cqrollcall.com
Copyright 2011 CQ Roll Call Inc.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
DC CALLER: Do we finally have Cainfirmation?
We now have a second Herman Cain accuser with a specific accusation, and the first to be named like a Bond girl. TheDC's Jeff Poor reports:
"A woman identified as Ginger White went public Monday with allegations that she had an affair with GOP presidential contender Herman Cain. 'I'm not proud,' White told Atlanta station WAGA-TV. 'I didn't want to come out with this. I did not.' She had no qualms with admitting the affair was inappropriate. 'It was pretty simple,' White said. 'It wasn't complicated and I was aware that he was married. And I was also aware I was involved in a very inappropriate situation, relationship.' White said the relationship was an escape from everyday life."
Cain is denying it, as TheDC's Alex Pappas reports:
"Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain told supporters at a fundraising event Monday night that fresh allegations that he had an extended 13-year affair with a woman in Georgia are untrue. Washington, D.C. attorney Mary Brett, who attended the event, told The Daily Caller that Cain swore to supporters that if he had a Bible, he'd put his hand on it and vow that the allegations are false. 'He said you're probably going to hear — if you didn't before you got here — another allegation about a 13-year affair and it's absolutely not true,' Brett, who lives in Reston, recalled as she left the Hilton hotel where the event was held."
And as ABC News reports, Ginger White might be every bit as credible as Sharon Bialek: "Like one of his earlier accusers, the latest woman to accuse Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain of sexual misconduct has a history of financial trouble, with a threat of eviction for non-payment of rent just two weeks ago. Ginger White, who claimed in an interview with Atlanta Fox News affiliate WAGA to have had a 13-year-affair with Cain, has liens and civil judgments in Kentucky and Georgia dating back to 1994. Eleven of those liens have been filed since 2009, with nine in 2011. The owners of her apartment complex in Dunwoody, Georgia have sued her for non-payment of rent nearly every month since the beginning of the year... While living in Louisville, Kentucky, she worked at Recruitment Plus, LLC. According to WAGA, she filed a sex harassment claim against an employer ten years ago, and the case was settled. The station also found a bankruptcy filing from the late 1980s. In January, there is a scheduled court date in an unrelated civil suit filed against her by a former business partner, Kimberly Vay, who alleges that White stalked and harassed her and had sought a protective order. A judge has entered a default judgment in Vay's favor."
None of which means she's lying, of course. Two points in Ginger White's favor so far: She says she's got phone records of numerous calls from Cain, and she's not represented by Gloria Allred.
http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/28/im-not-proud-says-woman-claiming-adulterous-relationship-with-herman-cain/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=TheDC+Morning&utm_campaign=TheDC+Morning+&utm_term=1__29+Do+we+finally+have+Cainfirmation_3F
"A woman identified as Ginger White went public Monday with allegations that she had an affair with GOP presidential contender Herman Cain. 'I'm not proud,' White told Atlanta station WAGA-TV. 'I didn't want to come out with this. I did not.' She had no qualms with admitting the affair was inappropriate. 'It was pretty simple,' White said. 'It wasn't complicated and I was aware that he was married. And I was also aware I was involved in a very inappropriate situation, relationship.' White said the relationship was an escape from everyday life."
Cain is denying it, as TheDC's Alex Pappas reports:
"Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain told supporters at a fundraising event Monday night that fresh allegations that he had an extended 13-year affair with a woman in Georgia are untrue. Washington, D.C. attorney Mary Brett, who attended the event, told The Daily Caller that Cain swore to supporters that if he had a Bible, he'd put his hand on it and vow that the allegations are false. 'He said you're probably going to hear — if you didn't before you got here — another allegation about a 13-year affair and it's absolutely not true,' Brett, who lives in Reston, recalled as she left the Hilton hotel where the event was held."
And as ABC News reports, Ginger White might be every bit as credible as Sharon Bialek: "Like one of his earlier accusers, the latest woman to accuse Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain of sexual misconduct has a history of financial trouble, with a threat of eviction for non-payment of rent just two weeks ago. Ginger White, who claimed in an interview with Atlanta Fox News affiliate WAGA to have had a 13-year-affair with Cain, has liens and civil judgments in Kentucky and Georgia dating back to 1994. Eleven of those liens have been filed since 2009, with nine in 2011. The owners of her apartment complex in Dunwoody, Georgia have sued her for non-payment of rent nearly every month since the beginning of the year... While living in Louisville, Kentucky, she worked at Recruitment Plus, LLC. According to WAGA, she filed a sex harassment claim against an employer ten years ago, and the case was settled. The station also found a bankruptcy filing from the late 1980s. In January, there is a scheduled court date in an unrelated civil suit filed against her by a former business partner, Kimberly Vay, who alleges that White stalked and harassed her and had sought a protective order. A judge has entered a default judgment in Vay's favor."
None of which means she's lying, of course. Two points in Ginger White's favor so far: She says she's got phone records of numerous calls from Cain, and she's not represented by Gloria Allred.
http://dailycaller.com/2011/11/28/im-not-proud-says-woman-claiming-adulterous-relationship-with-herman-cain/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=TheDC+Morning&utm_campaign=TheDC+Morning+&utm_term=1__29+Do+we+finally+have+Cainfirmation_3F
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