BLET Wisconsin State Legislative Board

Friday, March 8, 2013

THE PRESIDENT: Obama met with senior advisers this morning and is now gathering with faith leaders to discuss ways to overhaul immigration policy. Also this morning, Biden led the swearing-in of John Brennan as head of the CIA in a ceremony in the Roosevelt Room.

The president officially sent the Senate the nominations of EPA insider Gina McCarthy to replace Lisa Jackson as head of the agency and MIT scientist Ernest Moniz to take over as Energy secretary from Steven Chu.

THE SENATE: Not in session.

THE HOUSE: Ditto.

DOUBLE SEVENS: There was quick and rare bipartisan agreement this morning that the February jobs numbers — a burst of 236,000 new payroll positions created, and the unemployment rate down by two-tenths of a point, to a four-year low of 7.7 percent — was good but not great news, and shouldn’t be hailed as a sign the economy is out of the woods. What the White House and the House GOP leadership didn’t agree on was what should be done to make that happen.

While the Labor Department’s numbers are evidence the recovery is “gaining traction,” top White House economist Alan Krueger said, he noted that all the data was collected before the sequester took effect — and so the job losses that the administration has been warning about (not federal employee furloughs as much as contractor layoffs and the trickle-down effect from them) won’t start to get noticed for another month or longer. And so Kreuger used his monthly commentary on the jobs numbers to advocate for a “grand bargain” as soon as possible to replace the $85 billion in across-the-board cuts for this year (and comparable amounts every year for the next decade) with a package of entitlement curbs, alternative spending cuts and new limits on tax breaks designed to raise revenue. (Obama himself has been telling all his recent GOP congressional dining companions that he wants to push for such a bargain by July, when the need to raise the debt ceiling will pose the next fiscal deadline once the CR is enacted later this month.)

Boehner, meanwhile, said all that needed to be done to goose the economy to a faster pace of improvement was to reduce federal spending even more sharply, and he reiterated his commitment to winning the House’s blessing week after next for a budget that balances the federal books in a decade without raising taxes. But Cantor, in a departure from his practice of the past year, made no mention of the budget wars in his reaction to Labor’s announcement. Instead, he said it was time for Congress to focus on helping the “too many people who want to work, but can’t find jobs that match their skills” and the “too many college graduates who can’t find jobs in their field of study.” (To that end, the House is ready next week to pass one of the majority leader’s top goals — a bill, known as the Skills Act, to reauthorize a Clinton-era workforce investment statute and also consolidate dozens of federal job-training programs. Senate Democrats, meanwhile are looking for ways to entice the GOP to buy into an increase in the minimum wage.)

The good news was that the job gains were in an array of areas — except state and local government, which lost 10,000 jobs, mostly in education. The construction industry added 48,000 jobs, health care added 32,000, retailers added 24,000, the media business created 20,000 new jobs and manufacturing gained 14,000. But, in not-so good-news, the report showed the number of adults in the labor force (people who have or are seeking jobs) edging down 0.1 point, to 63.5 percent. That was because 130,000 people stopped looking for work, which is one reason the unemployment rate dropped as much as it did.

SHOTS TAKEN: Yesterday was one of those days when Republican leaders on both sides of the Capitol were reminded that being the congressional face of your party is a lot harder when the White House belongs to the other guys. For McConnell, it meant facing criticism about where he stood on Rand Paul’s filibuster of CIA nominee John Brennan. Paul acknowledged that he didn’t give advance notice of his talkathon, but once it had started, McConnell’s tea party critics were hardly satisfied with the minority leader’s level of involvement. (Reid’s job, by contrast, was a little easier. The onus was, in effect, on the White House to figure out a way to overcome Paul’s questions about the legal reach of the drone program.) Boehner, meanwhile, was faced with questions arising from a tell-all book by a former lawmaker, Bob Ney, who said the speaker offered him some sort of lucrative gig if he resigned quickly during the Jack Abramoff scandal. Boehner’s office rejected the claim and pointed out that Ney was convicted of felonies in that case. It’s the kind of thing that becomes all that much more interesting when you’re the top elected official on your side of the aisle. (As does your interaction with a lawmaker like Republican Tom Cole, whose off-the-cuff remarks about conservatives have many in the caucus wondering whether he’s a de facto mouthpiece for Boehner’s frustrations with his rank-and-file.)

GOT SOME WORK TO DO: The advance word was that Sally Jewell had done pretty well in her private meet-and-greets with Republican senators leading up to her confirmation hearing yesterday in Senate Energy and Natural Resources. But everything changes when the cameras are on, of course, and the hearing exposed some areas where Jewell will have to defend herself while she waits for the Senate leadership to schedule a floor debate on her nomination. Some of the panel’s prominent Republicans — including John Barrasso and Lisa Murkowski — said Jewell would face a steep learning curve, if confirmed, about what the department does. Her resume and overall knowledge base aren’t an issue, however; she was an engineer in the oil industry, worked in the banking sector and most recently was the top executive at outdoor-gear retailer REI. (“How’d you get appointed by this administration?” joked Republican Lamar Alexander.) If anything, there haven’t been any obvious filibuster threats on her nomination.

TRAIL TIPS: (Michigan) Each party has at least one House member who could go all-in to replace Carl Levin, who said yesterday that he’ll retire at the end of the 113th Congress. Gary Peters, a Democrat, has said he’s keeping his options open for 2014. On the GOP side, Mike Rogers and Candice Miller have been talked about in the past as potential statewide candidates, and could be in the mix again. And state GOP insiders say tea party favorite Justin Amash is considering a run. It could be an uphill climb for any Republican candidate in the general election. Obama won the state by 9 points last year despite Mitt Romney’s long history in Michigan, and only one Republican, Spencer Abraham in 1994, has been elected to a Senate term from the state since the early ’70s.

(Illinois) The GOP thinks it has a shot in the suburban-Chicago 11th District, where Democrat Bill Foster won election to the House by 17 points last year. National and local Republicans think state Rep. Darlene Senger is their best potential candidate in the district, and Senger herself says she’s seriously thinking about a run. The idea is that in non-presidential-election years, suburban Chicago is more up for grabs, even a seat like the 11th, which was redrawn recently to be more Democratic.

(California) Freshman Democrat Ami Bera could face a challenge for his Sacramento-area seat from a Republican former House member — but not the one he’s used to facing. Doug Ose, who served four terms as a representative through 2004, hasn’t ruled out a run against Bera, who defeated Ose’s successor, Dan Lungren, last year by about 3 points. Bera had lost to Lungren in 2010, and the district was redrawn after that. State Sen. Ted Gaines is another potential Republican candidate for the seat, which national Democrats are including in their incumbent-retention program.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Freshman Democratic Rep. Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach, Calif. (72).  

Thursday, March 7, 2013

THE PRESIDENT: Obama has invited the two leaders of the House Budget Committee — Chairman Paul Ryan and ranking Democrat Chris Van Hollen — to a private dining room at the White House for lunch today. This isn’t the first time Obama and the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate have talked in recent days; Ryan recently was on the receiving end of one of the many phone calls that the president has made to Republicans as he tries to reset his relationship with the congressional GOP. Ryan’s plan to balance the budget within a decade, which he will release next week as part of the process of drawing up a fiscal 2014 budget resolution, will probably be Topic A.

Shortly before 2, the president will sign the Violence Against Women Act in a ceremony at the Department of the Interior. Obama and Biden will both speak, and they’ll be joined by lawmakers and representatives of advocacy groups, women’s organizations, law enforcement officials and tribal leaders. (The Interior Department oversees federal relations with tribes; the bill’s main point of contention with Republicans was language giving American Indian tribes greater authority over domestic-violence crimes committed by non-Indians.)

THE SENATE: John Brennan will probably be confirmed to lead the CIA sometime before Sunday, but the specifics of the vote remain up in the air, even though the Republican filibuster of the nomination has effectively petered out. Democrats filed for cloture this morning, which means that votes on the nomination would have to happen at least by sometime on Saturday, but it’s possible that McConnell could accede to some sort of deal that allows for votes today. Reid says he’ll speak at 3 on the Senate floor about the way forward.

THE HOUSE: Convenes at noon for a pro forma session, but is otherwise done for the week after sending members home early amid yesterday’s storm, which was snowiest in the Virginia ’burbs. The chamber is expected to be fully back in session on Tuesday.

SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY: Rand Paul’s 12 hours and 52 minutes of old-school speechifying, which ended at 12:39 this morning, turned into such a social media sensation that it could actually presage a what’s-old-is-new-again shift in the way the Senate operates. Democratic leaders and some of the more influential junior senators in their caucus have become quickly annoyed at how little their “reform” deal with McConnell has done to curb Republican interest in stopping bills and confirmations with only the threat of endless delay. And those Democrats may have found an unlikely champion in Paul, one of the tea party movement’s stars and a probable 2106 presidential aspirant.

The most dramatic proposal for restraining the use of dilatory tactics that remains under serious discussion is to make senators do what Paul did: Actually engage in the behavior that’s supposed to define the world’s greatest deliberative body — by publicly explaining why he would raise the bar for Senate action from “majority rules” to “supermajority required.” His case for blocking John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director, at least until Obama promises he’ll never order a drone to kill an American citizen on American soil, was an expansive, passionate, often compelling but occasionally muddy articulation of the civil liberties principals that are where the political far left and far right often find common cause. And — because of the nationally televised theatrics involved — it went viral in ways no op-ed or speech ever could. What all this means is that both sides may soon decide that, if the slow pace of business is inevitable (and 60 votes is the new normal), then telegenic talkathons are the best way possible to fill the void.

SOME WON’T MAKE IT: Although the Senate wants to alter the fiscal 2013 stopgap spending bill to allow more agencies to have flexibility with the next six months of sequester-affected spending, not every corner of the government will see it. Agencies covered by the annual Financial Services appropriations measure seem least likely to see line-by-line adjustments, because adding such provisions would allow amendments related to the implementation of the Dodd-Frank law, which Republicans want to weaken. And you can probably forget about Labor-HHS-Education spending, because that huge bill always offers numerous opportunities for social-policy controversies. Interior-Environment — which includes another favorite target of Republicans, the EPA — also seems unlikely.

The odds are probably best for Homeland Security, which falls under the rubric of national security — an area where the House version of the CR already has line-by-line spending via the Defense and Military Construction-VA bills. Not too far behind are the Commerce-Justice-Science and Agriculture measures, because the House and Senate have nearly negotiated final versions in recent years, and there don’t seem to be any serious objections popping up. Somewhere in the middle are Energy-Water, Transportation-HUD and State-Foreign Operations.

QUOTE OF NOTE: “As an avid golfer, the president knows that one of the most important parts of the swing is the follow-through. The same holds true here as well,” said Mike Johanns, one of the Republican senators with whom Obama had dinner last night as part of his efforts to reach out to rank-and-file members of the GOP.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Freshman Democratic Rep. Juan Vargas of San Diego (52).

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

THE HOUSE: Convened at 10 while most of official Washington was closed in preparation for a storm that so far had dumped more rain than snow on central D.C. The chamber is expected to pass a $984 billion continuing resolution for fiscal 2013 sometime around 1, which will wrap up its work for the week. Although the floor was active, some committees postponed meetings as leadership sought to get members and aides home early. (There was more snow than rain in the suburbs.)

THE SENATE: Convened at 9:30 and voted against ending debate on the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to serve on the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The 51-41 tally, short of the 60 needed to invoke cloture, is the second successful filibuster of Halligan’s nomination; the other was  in 2011. Conservatives say she’s too liberal on a range of issues, but her downfall this time was her involvement in New York state’s legal actions against gun manufacturers while she was state solicitor general. Democrats have said her efforts should be seen as work on behalf of clients, not necessarily representations of her personal views.

Reid said he and Republican leaders were discussing ways to hold a confirmation vote today on John Brennan to lead the CIA. There are Republicans who want to hold up the vote because of questions related to the Obama administration’s drone strike policies and its response to the Benghazi, Libya, attack. But it’s highly possible that Reid has the 60 votes needed to move ahead. (Minority Whip Dick Durbin said today that he thinks it might be time to revisit the Senate’s filibuster rules, given how slow-going the process has been for several prominent nominees this year.)

THE PRESIDENT: Obama and Biden will spend a good portion of the day together at the White House, receiving briefings, sharing lunch and meeting at 3 with new Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. Weather permitting, the president will have dinner tonight with an unspecified group of Senate Republicans.

ON THEIR TURF: Rank-and-file Republican senators have been getting more phone calls from the president lately as the 2012 campaign recedes and 2013’s legislative challenges pile up. The president’s outreach — including that dinner with some Republican senators tonight — will intensify next week, when he attends a policy lunch with the entire caucus on March 14. McConnell’s office said the White House requested the meeting yesterday. (There’s also word that the president might gather next week with House Republicans, too.) The last time Obama came to a Republican lunch was in May of 2010, when the BP oil spill was at the top of the news and both parties were already highly aware of the 2012 election cycle. By most accounts, that gathering was more tense than cordial. (The health care law had been enacted a couple of months before, but Dodd-Frank was still in the works.) This time around, Obama is looking for a “caucus of common sense” that includes Republicans he might be able to count on during this year’s fiscal-policy debates, and he’s already singled out some potential members. Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, Rob Portman and Bob Corker — all of whom are known for legislating with some combination of pragmatism and independence — have taken calls from the Oval Office. John McCain has been in the mix, too; he and Graham met last week at the executive mansion with Obama on immigration.

MOVING RIGHT ALONG: The current back-and-forth about the CR seems more like a series of nudges and not the pattern of blunt take-it-or-leave-it offers that have become the norm in fiscal debates. There won’t be many Democratic votes for the House GOP bill this afternoon, and liberal groups are decrying its combination of flexibility for military and veterans programs and straight-up sequestration for most domestic programs. But today’s action probably won’t be the defining moment for the legislation. A leading Senate Republican appropriator, Roy Blunt, left open the possibility yesterday that some domestic chunks — particularly those that made good progress last year in negotiations by both chambers, like Agriculture and Homeland Security spending — could be addressed differently by the Senate. While the nudges continue, the thing to keep in mind is that nobody expects the CR, which has been scored at about $984 billion, to grow in size or halt the sequester. The debate is mostly about how each agency will be able to adjust to the new normal.

BACK WHERE IT STARTED: The Senate’s vote on Halligan was not the only stage today for the gun control debate. Gabby Giffords and husband Mark Kelly will return today to the scene of the 2011 shooting in Tucson that essentially ended her congressional career and took the lives of several bystanders. At 12:30 D.C. time in front of the Safeway on North Oracle Road, they’ll call for increased gun control, particularly the Democrat-sponsored measures that Senate Judiciary is planning to mark up soon. Giffords’ and Kelly’s super PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions, is running TV ads in two states with prominent members of the Senate committee: Arizona, which is home to Republicans John McCain and Jeff Flake, and Iowa, which is represented by Republican Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin. The NRA, meanwhile, is planning some high-profile speeches by two of its leaders — David Keene and Wayne LaPierre — at next week’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

A BOYCOTT: Democrats walked out a House Education and the Workforce markup this morning of a bill that would overhaul the Workforce Investment Act, which authorizes federal job-training programs. Ranking Democrat George Miller and others say the Republican bill would indiscriminately cut programs, and that the GOP hasn’t made an effort to move it in a bipartisan way. The legislation would consolidate 35 programs into a Workforce Investment Fund, and money would be offered to states via block grants.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: No incumbent members, but former Speaker Tom Foley (84) and current D.C. Councilman Marion Barry (77).

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

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THE SENATE: Convened at 10 and will be done for the day in time for the weekly caucus lunches, after endorsing a housekeeping measure that trims committee budgets back to $62 million for the rest of this fiscal year. (The only amendment, which will be rebuffed just after noon, would carry out Rand Paul’s effort to close down the 14-year-old National Security Working Group, a bipartisan panel of 20 senators that monitors presidential arms control and trade negotiations.)

THE HOUSE: Convenes at noon and will be done by 3 after passing two bills. One would require presidential budgets to include a deficit-per-taxpayer calculation. The other would apply federal cigarette trafficking laws to the Pacific territories.

THE PRESIDENT: Obama has a series of senior team meetings, including his first one-on-one with Hagel since his confirmation. His only public appearance will be a trip to Walter Reed (departing at 2, back before 4:30) to visit soldiers and marines wounded in Afghanistan.

DOCUMENTS INCOMING: Senate Intelligence will vote this afternoon to approve John Brennan’s nomination to lead the CIA, and it appears now that at least one hurdle to holding a floor vote on confirmation has been overcome. Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said this morning that the White House will provide the committee access to all Office of Legal Counsel opinions related to the targeted killing of Americans “in a way that allows members to fulfill their oversight responsibilities.” A Democrat on the panel, Ron Wyden of Oregon, had threatened to hold up a floor vote on Brennan if the Obama administration didn’t offer more information about attacks on American citizens overseas who are suspected of being top al-Qaida officials.

At least two other roadblocks were still possible as of this morning: A familiar pocket of Republicans — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte — wants more answers about why the administration’s talking points after the Benghazi attack where initially shaky. And Republican Rand Paul wants a public answer from the White House about whether it can do drone strikes on U.S. soil.

THE QUESTION IS HOW: The easiest way to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month would be for the Senate to pass, straight up, whatever CR the House produces this week. But the fiscal 2013 measure coming to the House floor on Thursday is a big document with a lot of line-items intended to give flexibility, to military and veterans’ affairs programs in particular. Members and aides in both chambers will be looking those over closely today and tomorrow. That fact alone could be enough to guarantee that the Senate, if it decides to simply take up whatever the House passes, will make its own series of tweaks. And if that happens, some sort of bicameral negotiations — or at least one more vote in the House on the Senate’s counter-tweaks — will be needed to get a bill to the president before current funding runs out March 27. One thing is all but certain: With neither party willing to risk a government shutdown at this point, the bill will cap spending for the year at about $982 billion, a number that reflects an acceptance of the sequester.

While the fiscal 2013 debate plays out, the fiscal 2014 process is taking shape. The budget resolutions in each chamber — which are non-binding but nonetheless carry weight in tax and spending decisions — could break significantly with recent behavior patterns. The House plan would aim to balance the budget in 10 years, erasing the deficit in a shorter time frame than in the previous two GOP majority budget resolutions. The Senate Democratic proposal, meanwhile, will be the first to be marked up in the Budget Committee since 2010 and the first to be considered on the Senate floor since 2009.

CUT RATE: With the sequester’s true agency-by-agency effects still very unclear, the USDA’s ability to protect the food supply was the primary focus on the Hill today. The answer from that corner of the government was basically “maybe not quite as bad as we thought, but still pretty bad.” Secretary Tom Vilsack told House Agriculture members that furloughs of meat and poultry inspectors probably will be 11 or 12 days instead of the initial estimate of 15 — and they probably won’t kick in for months. When pressed by Republicans about how to avoid the furloughs, Vilsack said more money in the CR would help. GOP members said it wasn’t an option.

TRAIL TIPS: (Democrats) The DCCC today released what amounts to its list of the most vulnerable Democrats for the 2014 cycle. Twenty-six of the party’s House incumbents will fall under the DCCC’s Frontline Program, which helps not only with money, but also with messaging, management and the campaign ground game. The list includes some veteran members that Frontline assisted during the 2012 cycle, including Utah’s Jim Matheson, North Carolina’s Mike McIntyre, Georgia’s John Barrow of Georgia and California’s Lois Capps.

(Florida) Another name on the DCCC’s Frontline list, 29-year-old freshman Patrick Murphy, instantly became one of the GOP’s top targets after defeating Allen West by fewer than 2,000 votes in one of 2012’s hardest-fought House races. The latest Republican to discuss a potential run in the 18th District, which covers a significant chunk of the state’s Atlantic coast, is St. Lucie County Commissioner Tod Mowery. He joins a list that includes state Rep. Gayle B. Harrell, state Sen. Joe Negron and businessman Gary Uber.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: No sitting lawmakers, but former House members include two who have just left the Pennsylvania delegation — defeated-in-his-primary Democrat Tim Holden (56) and retired-after-six-terms Republican Todd Platts (51).

Monday, March 4, 2013

THE PRESIDENT: “I hope the Senate will confirm these as soon as possible, because we’ve got a lot of work to do and we cannot afford to wait,” Obama said in announcing the three newest people he wants in his Cabinet, each of whom would add some demographic diversity to the senior team.

To run the White House budget office he’s nominating Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who was a senior Clinton administration official during the budget wars of the 1990s and is now in charge of Wal-Mart’s philanthropic arm. To direct the EPA he wants to promote the agency’s air quality chief, Gina McCarthy, who came to Washington after a decade setting two states’ environmental policies under five GOP governors (including Mitt Romney). For Energy secretary he’s chosen Ernie Moniz, an Azores-American physicist who runs MIT’s energy research programs and also worked in the Clinton administration. (All three will probably be auditing the Cabinet meeting the president has called for 1, mainly to discuss implementation of the sequester.)

THE SENATE: Convenes at 2 and will vote at 5:30 to make federal judges out of two longtime assistant U.S. attorneys, Katherine Failla in Manhattan and Pamela Chen in Brooklyn (who will become the first Asian-American lesbian on the federal bench.)

THE HOUSE: Convenes at noon and will vote at 6:30 to renew and tinker with a collection of federal programs — many of them created as part of Project BioShield after Sept. 11 — to help develop countermeasures to chemical, biological and radioactive weapons of mass destruction.

THE SUPREME COURT: The justices ruled unanimously that civilians may occasionally sue for mistreatment at the hands of government doctors. They revived a Guam veteran’s claim of battery against the Navy, because a surgeon performed a cataract operation (which didn’t go well) nine years ago after the patient had withdrawn his consent. But the court said the man’s claim of medical malpractice wasn’t allowed because of the broad government immunity from such litigation.

MOVING RIGHT ALONG: The sequester is so three days ago. For the next three weeks that only-in-Washington term is going to be replaced on the capital’s collective lips by another: the CR. And top-flight drama has already been drained from the next deadline-fueled chapter in the budget wars.

There will be no government shutdown at the end of March, because Obama has already told his Democratic allies in the Senate to stop threatening one (in the hope that it might force Republicans to back out of the $85 billion in cuts between now and the end of September). There’s no chance the tactic would work, so that grand total looks very close to being absolutely positively locked down. The main mystery remaining now is how many agencies and departments will see their across-the-board reductions replaced with other marching orders — some that would make their lives easier, some that would make their budgets worse — by a Congress still interested in picking winners and losers rather than allowing the ax to fall indiscriminately. (The secondary mystery is how many days before the March 27 deadline the continuing resolution for the rest of this fiscal year will get finished. The answer is probably five, because March 22 is when lawmakers are supposed to be set free for their two-week spring-Passover-Easter break.)

There will be a minor kerfuffle starting this afternoon, when Republicans will announce their plans for their opening bid for the coming CR — which would restore $7 billion to the armed forces accounts for operations and maintenance  while keeping the overall sequester reductions in place. (It’s not clear yet which other Pentagon programs would suffer extra-deep whacks in order to plump up those accounts, which defense hawks say are the key to maintaining a semblance of military readiness.) That bill will get passed by the House, probably right along party lines, by Thursday. Senate Democrats will come back next with a plan that would leave the overall cut in place while adding or subtracting for dozens of agencies beyond Defense, with a particular focus on the domestic side of the cuts. And then the third week will be spent cutting a deal and getting it to Obama’s desk — in time for the congressional recess to begin, and before the furlough notices going out this week to thousands of federal workers actually take effect.

The only real way this order-out-of chaos process could unravel would be if one side moves to reopen the 50-50 split between the defense cuts and the domestic cuts. But neither party seems to be itching for that sort of fight. Obama, Boehner and all the other leaders in both camps seem genuinely ready to take a break from all the brinkmanship — until at least the end of the summer, when the debt ceiling will once again need to be raised, and some tea party conservatives may make new noise about holding the borrowing limit hostage. That four-month breather from the fiscal melodrama would allow other issues — gun control and immigration, mainly — to take their unrivaled turns on Washington’s center stage, and would afford the normal budget process a little room to try a return to regular order.

The Obama budget proposal for the next fiscal year, already a month later, is now probably going to come out at the very end of March or the beginning of April, right after the CR is signed and puts the finishing touches on the current year’s budget. That timetable would theoretically allow Sylvia Matthews Burwell to get confirmed in time so that the name could be printed on the title page of OMB’s budget books. Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray endorsed her nomination even before it became official this morning, suggesting her hearing would be scheduled quickly. (Burwell was OMB’s deputy director from 1998 until the end of the Clinton administration — a time, the White House will point out as often as possible, when the federal books were in the black; before that she was a White House deputy chief of staff and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin’s staff director. In her time out of government she spent a decade at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, rising to be COO before taking over the Walmart Foundation two years ago.)

A SAFE ENVIRONMENT: The initial view is that both Gina McCarthy and Ernie Moniz are sufficiently committed to an “all of the above” energy policy that they can win relatively quick and stress-free confirmation. Both have looked like front-runners for their new jobs for the past several weeks, and presumably the White House has already sussed out the level of GOP antipathy to both, each of whom was chosen over more high-profile political types — former Govs. Christine Gregoire and Jennifer Granholm and former Sen. Byron Dorgan.

McCarthy looks to have potentially more trouble getting through the Senate without some histrionics, especially if Republicans decide to use her hearings and floor debate as a forum for articulating their disdain of Obama’s climate change policies. She’s already had a big role in shaping those as head of the EPA’s air quality office, which wants to write regulations setting new greenhouse gas emissions limits on things like car and truck tailpipes, power plant smoke stacks.

QUOTE OF NOTE: “I look at what’s happening right now, I wish I were there. It kills me not to be there, not to be in the White House doing what needs to be done,” was the central point of Mitt Romney’s four-months-isn’t-long-enough-to-get-over-it interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: New Jersey’s Chris Smith (60) and Oklahoma’s Jim Lankford (45) today, and two other House Republicans yesterday, California freshman Paul Cook (70) and Arizona’s Dave Schweickert (51).           Casmir Pulaski’s 258th

Friday, March 1, 2013

THE PRESIDENT: Obama convened his first sequester séance at 10 with everyone heading into the Oval — Biden, Boehner, Reid, McConnell and Pelosi — totally aware they were not going to be able to summon a substitute in time. The meeting lasted 56 minutes. The president now has until a minute before midnight to sign the paperwork ordering the across-the-board spending cuts to commence, at a rate of $400.4 million each day for the final 213 days of this fiscal year.

 “Dumb, arbitrary cuts to things that businesses depend on” are now a certainty, the president said in opening a news conference after the Hill leaders left in four separate black SUVs. “The good news is the American people are strong and they’re resilient. They fought hard to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and we will get through this as well.”

THE SUPREME COURT: The justices are meeting for a closed conference to consider potential new appeals and to take a first pass at deciding cases argued this week — the challenge to the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act (or at least the use of voter suppression evidence from the 1970s to curtail nine states’ ability in the 2010s to set election laws without federal oversight).

THE SENATE: Not in session; next convenes at 2 on Monday with plans to do no more than confirm two more federal trial judges in New York.

THE HOUSE: Not in session; next convenes at noon on Monday, but that day’s legislative agenda isn’t firmed up.

HAPPY TO TAKE THE PLUNGE: The certainty that the country would get a substantive of what Washington dysfunction feels like was locked down even before this morning’s ceremonial stare-down session got started.  

Obama last night, and McConnell at breakfast time this morning, issued statements emphasizing the calcification of their bargaining positions. “I’m happy to discuss other ideas to keep our commitment to reducing Washington spending,” the most experienced bipartisan negotiator in today’s GOP said about his expectations for his time in the West Wing. “But there will be no last-minute, back-room deal and absolutely no agreement to increase taxes.” The president lambasted the Republicans for their willingness “to let the entire burden of deficit reduction fall squarely on the middle class,” and said they’d have little to talk about until the other side expressed a willingness to talk revenue, because “That’s how our democracy works, and that’s what the American people deserve.”

Put another way, all that predictable rhetoric underscores how both sides have become eager for today’s deadline to be busted, and for the showdown to continue for the next three weeks — by which time they’ll find a way to paper it over, with almost all the $85 billion in savings locked down, but the across-the-board aspect of sequester abandoned. In other words, half the sequester’s anticipated pain (from the meat cleaver approach) will be blocked, but the other half (the overall deep reduction) won’t. The official deadline is March 27, when the current spending law expires; the real and more important deadline is the weekend of March 22, when the congressional spring recess is to begin. Neither the most emphatic tea party hard-liner nor the most bleeding-hearty social-spending liberal can afford to leave D.C. for two weeks without enacting another CR, which otherwise means a partial government shutdown right after they arrive home. Until then, though, the Republicans will be happy to watch the spending restraint they’ve been dreaming of start to materialize, and the Democrats will be happy to watch for their predictions of public anger at the cuts to bubble up (and to see the Pentagon trimmed by at least $6 billion.)

BARGAINING CHIPS: What neither side has mentioned – and hasn’t, really, for several weeks – is that they’re fully aware that ever-expanding Medicare and Medicaid, mainly, but also the other social program entitlements are the principal drivers of the long-term red-ink problem. In part, that’s because the ultimately bipartisan decision of 2011 to set up the sequester process included the decision to hold those programs almost entirely harmless in the far-fetched (surprise!) eventuality that Washington would decide the fiscal-straitjacket-that-was-too-unpleasant-to-consider was in fact going to be tried on for a while. Beyond that, though, there’s a passive but bipartisan consensus that it’s not possible for now to achieve any sort of deal to rein in government health care costs — given the bilious air both at the Capitol and surrounding the public’s view of the capital.

Which is why the talk at the White House turned quickly this morning to the discretionary (appropriations) part of the budget. The debate will be turning in the next week almost entirely toward these questions: How much of a sliver — 10 percent at most — should be taken off the grand total as a bargaining victory for Obama? Might it be replaced with just one “revenue enhancement” that the president could label a new tax on the rich but the Republicans might label as something more euphemistic?  How much can the regular-order appropriations process — or what passes for that these days — be revived in time to give the agencies an alternative road map for picking winners and losers among their programs for the next seven months?

The CR the House will push through along party lines next week would give the Pentagon and the VA that privilege, but none of the domestic departments — and would do nothing to back away from the $85 billion in cuts apportioned comparably to both butter and guns. The new Senate Appropriations chairwoman, Barbara Mikulski, says she’ll respond with an omnibus that knits together all of the 12 bills her panel worked on last year, and would hew to the grand total of $1.043 trillion — but also without language to avoid the sequester’s haircut to that number. For today, neither party on either side of the Capitol is talking any more about insisting (the GOP’s word) or allowing (some Democrats’ words) Obama to apportion the cuts as he thinks best. And — maybe most importantly — Democratic leaders are sending louder and louder signals that they’re giving up on their talk about allowing a government shutdown unless the sequester is turned off. That won’t happen unless Obama threatens to veto a CR that keeps the sequester in place, and he’s not making even a feint in that direction. In fact, he just told reporters he could imagine almost no scenario under which he would do so.

EMERGENCY PLAN: The most important-but-overlooked official document so far in the sequester showdown is a memo from OMB Controller Danny Werfel, offering both more severe estimates about the depth of the cuts but also guidance to all federal agencies suggesting that implementation in many cases won’t be nearly as problematic as Obama and his senior team have been describing.

For the past several weeks, most lawmakers and administration officials have been describing the effect of the sequester as a 5 percent cut from domestic programs and an 8 percent cut from defense programs — citing as their source an estimate a couple of weeks ago from CBO. But those numbers are too low, the White House budget official warned, because they reflect the apportioning of the reductions across this entire fiscal year, when in fact all $85.3 billion in reductions are to be carried out over the next seven months. And so, Werfel says, the better numbers to use are a 9 percent cut from domestic agency budgets and a 13 percent cut to the military.

Nonetheless, he signaled clearly in a memo dated Wednesday but made public yesterday, bureaucrats have much more discretion and flexibility in meting out the pain than the president and his Cabinet (Holder, Duncan, LaHood and Napolitano most prominently) have been describing as both imminent and unavoidable. “Agencies’ planning efforts must be guided by the principle of protecting the agency’s mission to serve the public to the greatest extent practicable,” he wrote – and he encouraged agencies to do whatever they could to keep from filling vacant positions, abandon promised employee bonuses, cancel performance award programs and scratch training, conferences and travel before thinking about cuts to core services. “Planning efforts should be done with sufficient detail and clarity to determine the specific actions that will be taken to operate under the lower level of budgetary resources required by sequestration,” he said.

“A slow grind that will intensify with each passing day,” was the way Obama described the effects of the sequester at his news conference a few minutes ago — a ratcheting back of his dramatic predictions of immediate pain, which even some of his agency directors have been distancing themselves from in recent days. (The GAO, Smithsonian, SBA and Agency for International Development all say they can live with the cuts without furloughs, and IRS says it won’t consider laying people off until after the rush of tax season climaxes in April.)

UNEXPECTED VOTES: Almost all the Republicans in the House who are considering 2014 Senate campaigns voted against the Violence Against Women Act revival and expansion — a decidedly curious outcome given that the bill was allowed to clear yesterday with mostly Democratic support in large measure so the GOP might start shedding its “war on women” problem with plenty of time before the next midterm.

Not only did Paul Broun, who’s already declared for Georgia’s open seat, vote “no,” but so did the four others in the delegation who may join him: Phil Gingrey, Jack Kingston, Tom Price and Tom Graves. So did Tom Cotton, who’s being recruited to take on Mark Pryor in Arkansas; Steve King, who now looks like the front-runner for the nomination for Iowa’s open seat as soon as he declares; Renee Elmers, who’s being recruited to take on Kay Hagan in North Carolina; and two of the three members mulling their chances against Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, John Fleming and Bill Cassidy. The one declared Senate candidate on the roster of 87 Republicans who voted for the bill was Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. So did Charles Boustany of Louisiana and Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who may end up running for the Senate, and Aaron Schock, who’ll likely run if Dick Durbin retires. (The most prominent party leaders in the “yes” column where Whip Kevin McCarthy and potential 2016 presidential aspirant Paul Ryan.)

At the same time, it’s also worth noting that three of the four Senate Democrats who are in the most re-election trouble at the moment (having effectively committed to running) all went against the grain on yesterday’s other key vote: Landrieu, Pryor and Hagan (but not Mark Begich of Alaska) cast the only three “no” votes from their caucus on the Democratic sequester plan, clearly unwilling to go on record so early in the cycle in favor of new tax increases and farm subsidy cuts.