CQ Roll Call Daily Briefing: This Looks Like a Job For...
Friday, May 25, 2012
Today In Washington
THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama’s being briefed now on the latest that American intelligence agencies have gleaned about all the world’s conflicted hot spots and terrorist threats. It’s the only event on his schedule for the start of Memorial Day weekend.
THE HOUSE: Convened at 10 for a 4-minute pro forma meeting; its next legislative session is Wednesday afternoon, when the FDA reauthorization will be the main business.
THE SENATE: Convenes at 2:30 for its own pro forma meeting; its next legislative session is in 10 days — on Monday, June 4. (The next vote — on whether to begin debating a Democratic bill that would make it easier for women to press wage discrimination lawsuits — will be the following afternoon.)
LOAN RANGERS: It sounded like a throwaway line, but McConnell may have genuinely latched on to a good idea yesterday when he suggested the Senate give the job of cutting a student loan deal to just two colleagues: Tom Harkin and Mike Enzi.
“They just successfully negotiated a bipartisan FDA bill; let’s see if they can do the same on this,” the minority leader said yesterday — soon after the Democratic chairman and top Republican on the HELP Committee secured a 96-1 vote for their bill to bring the federal review process for new medicines and medical devices in line with the new era of drug shortages, biotechnology breakthroughs and generic upstarts. If the pair could come up with a complicated package that Big Pharma, consumer groups and the FDA are all willing to live with for the next five years, in other words, surely they can come up with a winning formula for financing a simple one-year extension of the 3.4 percent Stafford student loan rate.
Iowa’s Harkin, a populist with a wide streak of pragmatism who’s been cutting deals since 1985, and Wyoming’s Enzi, who’s been finding solutions that make both sides “only 80 percent happy” since 1997, would seem up to the task. Their committee has jurisdiction over education policy, for starters. Both are well versed in the range of offset options available for generating the $6 billion required for this project. And both are well respected enough at their own ends of the ideological spectrum that if Harkin tells Obama and the liberal Democratic base he's secured the best deal available, and Enzi tells Boehner he’s done the same on behalf of tea party conservatives, then what they propose should have no trouble winning 70 votes in the Senate and 300 in the House.
Obama, Romney and almost all their congressional colleagues are eager to keep the student loan rate as it is, because neither party wants to take the blame from more than 7 million young voters if they’re required to take on an average $1,000 in additional college debt. And both congressional camps are also willing to come up with some sort of offset. In fact, the only two that are off the table — as yesterday’s back-to-back Senate roll calls showed — are the versions each side seized on as opening bids. For the Democrats, it’s eliminating a tax benefit for “S corp” small-business owners; for Republicans, it’s eliminating a preventive-care fund created under the health care overhaul.
The deadline for legislation to prevent a doubling of the rate is five weeks from today – when both the House and Senate are set to break for a coordinated July Fourth recess. Whether Harkin and Enzi (or anybody else) can find a straightforward middle ground in that time will stand as the most memorable, easily explained story about the state of congressional functionality in 2012.
PAIR DEAL: Reid offered his own version of a simple idea for compromise on the Senate’s getaway Thursday: Pair the reappointment of one of the Republican commissioners on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Kristine Svinicki) with the confirmation of Obama’s nominee to become the new chairman (Allison Macfarlane).
The package deal sounds like it should be equally palatable to both sides. But, in the end, the majority leader would end up the bigger winner. Although Reid cannot stand Svinicki (he’s labeled her a liar, among other things) and had the power to bottle up a vote on her until after her term expires next month, he is willing to come across as magnanimous for a simple reason: His plan would allow the majority leader to quickly replace his former aide Gregory Jaczko, who announced his resignation this week, with someone who is just as emphatically opposed as he was to using Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as the nation’s nuclear garbage dump — and whose views on atomic safety are comparable to Jaczko’s, as well.
Look for the tradeoff to be executed with relative ease in a couple of weeks. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the relevant committee and had been on Reid’s side, says she’s willing to go along. And so does the main industry lobbying group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, meaning the Republican mainstream will quickly fall in line.
TRAIL TIPS: (Texas) David Dewhurst’s final ad before Tuesday’s open-seat Senate primary is a clear effort to sweep up just enough super-conservative support to get above the 50 percent threshold that allows him to avoid a July runoff against Ted Cruz, the state’s former top appellate lawyer and a darling of the insurgent conservative movement. (Polling has consistently given Dewhurst 40 percent or a bit more and Cruz about 10 points less.) The spot is a testimonial from Mike Huckabee, who calls the lieutenant governor and self-made millionaire the race’s “only proven conservative.” The aim is to take some votes away from the candidate mired in third place, former Dallas mayor and businessman Tom Leppert. Yesterday Cruz won Rick Santorum’s endorsement, while Houston state legislator and conservative talk show host Dan Patrick threw in with Dewhurst. (He also has the aggressive backing of another GOP presidential aspirant, Gov. Rick Perry). The ultimate winner is destined to take Kay Bailey Hutchison’s place; the last Democrat to win statewide in the state was 16 years ago.
(Texas) Silvestre Reyes remains the only House incumbent in the delegation in any danger of losing his primary next week. The eight-term Democrat is being opposed by former El Paso city councilman Beto O’Rourke, who has the backing of the anti-incumbent Campaign for Primary Accountability and has been emphasizing his political independence. The primary campaign — which is tantamount to election in the westernmost district in the state — has turned intensely negative in its final days. O’Rourke’s most recent ad recounts the circumstances of a $200 million, no-bid federal border fence contract awarded to IMC, a company that employed Reyes’ children and donated to his campaign. The congressman’s most recent ad is about his challenger’s 15-year-old drunken driving conviction. Reyes appears to have figured out the insanity of the challenge in time to rebut it; early voting has been big, a sign the incumbent’s organization operation is at work.
(Missouri) Claire McCaskill will launch a weeklong, $200,000 statewide ad buy on Memorial Day with a spot emphasizing her record on veterans’ issues — particularly legislation she's pushed to address the recently exposed mismanagement at Arlington National Cemetery, where unmarked and mismarked graves have gained national attention and millions in spending is unaccounted for. The senator is in a tossup race for a second term no matter which Republican wins the Aug. 7 primary: former state Treasurer Sarah Steelman, self-funding businessman John Brunner or Rep. Todd Akin. The NRSC chastised McCaskill’s efforts to “use the gravesites of our fallen heroes to help advance” an effort to obscure her record of backing Obama’s agenda.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Today, Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota (52) and Republican Rep. Ed Whitfield of Kentucky (69); tomorrow, Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina (59), Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois (68) and GOP Rep. Rich Nugent of Florida (61).
PUBLISHING SCHEDULE: Monday is Memorial Day and the lights will be off in both congressional chambers Tuesday, so the next Daily Briefing will be Wednesday, May 30.
— 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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