CQ Roll Call Daily Briefing: Get Out Your Glasses
Friday, April 27, 2012
Today In Washington
THE HOUSE: Convened at 9 and will begin a weeklong recess within the hour, after voting mostly along party lines for legislation maintaining the 3.4 percent interest rate on Stafford loans until July 2013. Democrats will vote “no” because the $5.9 billion loss to the Treasury would be offset by eliminating an “Obamacare” public health and prevention fund. “This is a politically-motivated proposal and not the serious response that the problem facing America’s college students deserves,” the White House said in a statement this morning threatening a veto.
The House is also about to pass the IT security and research and development pieces of the GOP’s cybersecurity legislative package.
THE SENATE: Not in session; its recess began last night and continues until 2 on Monday, May 7. (There won’t even be pro forma sessions, because the White House promised McConnell there were no plans for recess appointments.)
THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is at Fort Stewart in Georgia, where he and the first lady are meeting with soldiers from the 3rd Infantry who served in Iraq and Afghanistan before a speech at 12:35. That’s when the president will discuss an executive order he’s signing today to crack down on diploma mills that survive on the federal education benefits of veterans. Most notably, he’s proposing a trademark for “GI Bill,” hoping the move helps curb fraudulent marketing and recruiting practices by the for-profit colleges and technical schools that often set up shop just outside military bases.
The president will be back in town for a pair of evening fundraisers, first at 5 at the Washington Convention Center and then in a local (undisclosed) top donor’s home.
GROWTH CHARTS: The nation’s economy grew for an 11th consecutive quarter in the first three months of the year — but at only a 2.2 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department reported this morning, which was a notable drop from the 3 percent growth at the end of last year and a bit less than what economists expected. The mixed messages about the state of the economy three years after the depth of the Great Recession (and six months before Election Day) prompted a predictable “glass half full” proclamation from Democrats and an equally predictable “glass half empty” lamentation from Republicans.
“While the continued expansion of the economy is encouraging, additional growth is needed to replace the jobs lost in the deep recession,” said Alan B. Krueger, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, who noted that household purchases increased 2.9 percent (exceeding the most optimistic projection), auto production surged and homebuilding grew 19 percent, the fastest in almost two years.
“While I am thankful that the economy continues to expand, the damage being done by the Obama administration’s policies have produced a weak recovery,” said Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, who emphasized that business investment declined 2.1 percent (the first drop since the end of 2009). Businesses also restocked their shelves more slowly than in the final quarter of last year, while government spending fell at an annual rate of 3 percent — mainly because of a sharp drop in defense spending.
Neither side noted a truism about the GDP fever line, which is that it tends to be at its flattest in January, February and March. Many economists predict growth will strengthen in the second half of this year — albeit too late to be noticed by government economists or the electorate before Nov. 6 — on the assumption that hiring will continue to improve. (The next jobs numbers are in a week.) Job growth pushed the unemployment rate down to 8.2 percent in March, from 9.1 percent in August. But 12.7 million people remain unemployed — a number big enough that it will take sustained growth of 4 percent or more for an entire year to get the jobless rate down by a full percentage point.
SOUTHERN STRATEGY: The replacement farm bill produced by Senate Agriculture is notable on several fronts — not the least of which is that it won a solid 16-5 endorsement yesterday, an important bipartisan milestone especially because it happened fully five months before the current law lapses.
Farm and food policy makers nonetheless will need every day of that time to get legislation under Obama’s pen. The debate on the Senate floor (maybe before Memorial Day) is sure to be long and convoluted — not for the usual election-year reasons of partisan posturing, but because of a good old-fashioned regional fight, with Democrats and Republicans from the South going all out against efforts to end the decades-old subsidy system and replace it with payments based on crop insurance and risk management. The Southern senators say the switch would hurt their rice and peanut farmers more than anyone else.
And, if and when the bill gets through the Senate, it faces a potentially higher hurdle in the House. Southerners hold even more sway there than in the Senate, and House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas of Oklahoma has labeled the Senate’s ideas about commodity payments a non-starter. Beyond that, the House GOP majority wants to go further in cutting both food stamps (which take up about 80 percent of farm bill spending) and farm programs than the Senate’s $4.5 billion, 1 percent reduction. Overall, the Senate bill would cut $23 billion from the overall red ink projection for the coming decade.
TRAIL TIPS: (Indiana) The Senate seat he’s held for 36 years is slipping out of reach for Dick Lugar, if a poll released yesterday (and paid for by Citizens United, which is backing Richard Mourdock) is to be believed. The survey put the state Treasurer at 44 percent and the senator at 39 percent, with 17 percent undecided less than two weeks before the May 8 Republican primary. (Lugar had spent $5.4 million to Mourdock’s $2 million by the middle of the month, but the challenger has benefited from two-thirds of the $3.5 million in independent expenditures to date.) Among self-described tea party conservatives, who comprise two-fifths of the primary electorate, Mourdock was ahead by a whopping 63 percent to 24 percent. And Lugar’s favorability rating has slid to 44 percent, a 9-point drop since the last Wenzel survey six weeks ago.
(New Hampshire) Both the state’s House members, Republicans Frank Guinta and Charlie Bass, are narrowly behind their Democratic challengers in a WMUR poll released yesterday — and both are far short of the 50 percent threshold because so many voters remain undecided, even though in both cases the 2012 races are rematches of 2010. Guinta is trailing former Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, 44 to 39 percent, while Bass is trailing attorney Ann McClane Kuster by only a single percentage point, 40 to 39, well within the margin of error.
(Blue Dogs) Two days after a pair of Pennsylvanians (Jason Altmire and Tim Holden) lost their primaries, the Blue Dog Coalition caucus of fiscally conservative Democrats announced endorsements of three candidates in relative longshot bids to reclaim House seats for the party: former Indiana state Rep. Dave Crooks, who’s the favorite to win the May 8 primary to take on freshman Larry Bucshon in the state’s southwest corner; former state Rep. Pam Gulleson, who’s the likely Democratic candidate for North Dakota’s open and singular seat; and former state Rep. Gary McDowell, who’s readying for a rematch against GOP freshman Dan Benishek in northernmost Michigan.
QUOTE OF NOTE: “A picture may be worth a thousand words. And perhaps moving pictures bear an even higher value,” federal Judge James Boasberg wrote yesterday, rejecting Judicial Watch’s appeal of a Pentagon decision to block release of pictures from the Abbottabad raid last May 2. “Yet, in this case, verbal descriptions of the death and burial of Osama bin Laden will have to suffice, for this court will not order the release of anything more.”
HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Today, Democratic Rep. G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina (65) and GOP Rep. Dan Webster of Florida (63); tomorrow, GOP Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma (also 63).
— David Hawkings, editor
Become a Facebook fan at facebook.com/DavidHawkingsDC. Or follow me on Twitter @davidhawkings.
More congressional campaign coverage is on Roll Call’s At the Races politics blog.
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