History > 2012 > USA > Politics > Senate (I)

A Tepid Fiscal Agreement

December 31, 2012

The New York Times

For the first time since President George W. Bush began the country’s long slide into debt by cutting taxes in 2001, an agreement was reached late Monday in the Senate to raise income taxes on the rich. That’s what makes the deal significant: assuming it is approved by the House, it begins to reverse the ruinous pattern of dealing with Washington’s fiscal problems only through spending cuts.

Nonetheless, this deal is a weak brew that remains far too generous to the rich and fails to bring in enough revenue to deal with the nation’s deep need for public investments. Given that the Bush-era tax cuts expire on Jan. 1, Republicans were forced to give ground on their philosophical opposition to higher taxes, but they made it impossible to reach a farsighted agreement that truly grappled with government’s role in fostering improvements to education, transportation and manufacturing.

The deal, hammered out by the Obama administration and Senate Republican leaders, raises income taxes to Clinton-era levels on families making more than $450,000 a year and individuals making $400,000. That’s a far cry from the $250,000 threshold that Mr. Obama said defined the upper range of the middle class in the campaign.

But White House officials said they had to compromise on that number to win renewal of important provisions that would otherwise have expired: unemployment insurance for three million people, tax credits for low-income working families, and a reduction in the impact of the alternative minimum tax on many middle-class families. Republicans cynically used those vital measures as bargaining chips. (What was not a point of contention was allowing the payroll tax to go back up by 2 percentage points.)

The higher income threshold isn’t the only price the White House wound up paying. The estate tax on the nation’s biggest inheritances is going up slightly but not nearly enough (estates of more than $5 million would be taxed at 40 percent, up from the current 35 percent) in a big and unnecessary giveaway to the very richest families. Significantly, the estate tax rate would be made permanent, while the credits for low-income families would expire in five years. Capital gains and dividend tax rates go up to 20 percent from the current 15 percent, but again, only for families making more than $450,000 a year.

The White House argues that it achieved 85 percent of its revenue goals, raising $600 billion over a decade, a third of which comes by phasing out exemptions and deductions for people with incomes greater than $250,000 a year. And Republicans achieved none of the draconian spending cuts they wanted.

But that battle is far from over. Negotiators have yet to work out a deal to stop the arbitrary spending cuts known as the sequester, which are scheduled to slash $110 billion from the defense and domestic budgets beginning this week. And Republicans are waiting for the Treasury to hit its debt limit in a few weeks, hoping to once again extort more spending cuts.

President Obama has ruled out any negotiations over the debt ceiling, and, on Monday, he vowed that revenue increases must match any further spending cuts. But as this deal shows, he often compromises at the last minute, and, in this case, it was Senate Democrats who undercut him on both the estate tax and the income tax threshold, making it hard to remain adamant.

The fiscal-cliff agreement could still be blown up by the House, which would not be out of character. But a cleareyed look at the deal’s limitations shows how much Republicans have gotten for their intransigence.

    A Tepid Fiscal Agreement, NYT, 31.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/opinion/a-tepid-agreement-on-the-fiscal-cliff.html

Tentative Deal Is Reached to Raise Taxes on the Wealthy

December 31, 2012
The New York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN

WASHINGTON — Furious last-minute negotiations between the White House and the Senate Republican leadership on Monday secured a tentative agreement to allow tax rates to rise on affluent Americans, but not in time for Congress to meet its Dec. 31 deadline for averting automatic tax increases and spending cuts deemed a threat to the economy.

While the Senate moved toward a vote on legislation to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, the House was not going to consider any deal until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest, meaning that a combination of tax increases and spending cuts would go into effect as 2013 began. If Congress acts quickly and sends the legislation to President Obama, the economic impact could still be very limited.

Under the agreement, tax rates would jump to 39.6 percent from 35 percent for individual incomes over $400,000 and couples over $450,000, while tax deductions and credits would start phasing out on incomes as low as $250,000, a clear win for President Obama, who campaigned on higher taxes for the wealthy.

“Just last month Republicans in Congress said they would never agree to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans,” Mr. Obama said at a hastily arranged news briefing, with middle-income onlookers cheering behind him. “Obviously, the agreement that’s currently being discussed would raise those rates and raise them permanently.”

Democrats also secured a full year’s extension of unemployment insurance without strings attached and without offsetting spending cuts, a $30 billion cost.

As negotiators tied up the last points of dispute, officials said that the two top Democrats on Capitol Hill — Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California — had signed off on the agreement. In an effort to win over other Democrats uneasy with the proposal, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who had bargained directly with Republican leaders, traveled to the Capitol on Monday night for a 90-minute meeting with his former Senate colleagues.

“I feel very, very good,” Mr. Biden said after the meeting. “I think we’ll get a very good vote.”

In one final piece of the puzzle, negotiators agreed to put off $110 billion in across-the-board cuts to military and domestic programs for two months while broader deficit reduction talks continue. Those cuts begin to go into force on Wednesday, and that deadline, too, might be missed before Congress approves the legislation.

To secure votes, Mr. Reid also told Democrats the legislation would cancel a pending congressional pay raise — putting opponents in the politically difficult position of supporting a raise — and extend an expiring dairy policy that would have seen the price of milk double in some parts of the country.

Anticipating Senate approval of the deal, Speaker John A. Boehner late Monday said the House would “honor its commitment to consider the Senate agreement if it is passed. Decisions about whether the House will seek to accept or promptly amend the measure will not be made until House members — and the American people — have been able to review the legislation.”

The nature of the deal ensured that the running war between the White House and Congressional Republicans on spending and taxes would continue at least until the spring. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner formally notified Congress that the government reached its statutory borrowing limit on New Year’s Eve. Through some creative accounting tricks, the Treasury Department can put off action for perhaps two months, but Congress must act to keep the government from defaulting just when the “pause” on pending cuts is up. Then in late March, a law financing the government expires.

And the new deal does nothing to address the big issues that Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner hoped to deal with in their failed “grand bargain” talks two weeks ago: booming entitlement spending and a tax code so complex that few defend it anymore.

Though the tentative deal had a chance of success if put to a vote, it landed with a thud on Capitol Hill. Republicans accused the White House of “moving the goal posts” by demanding still more tax increases to help shut off across-the-board spending cuts beyond the two-month pause. Democrats were incredulous that the president had ultimately agreed to around $600 billion in new tax revenue over 10 years when even Mr. Boehner had promised $800 billion. But the White House said it had also won concessions on unemployment insurance and the inheritance tax among other wins.

Still, Democrats openly worried that if Mr. Obama could not drive a harder bargain when he holds most of the cards, he will give up still more Democratic priorities in the coming weeks, when hard deadlines will raise the prospects of a government default first, then a government shutdown. In both instances, conservative Republicans are more willing to breach the deadlines than in this case, when conservatives cringed at the prospects of huge tax increases.

“I just don’t think Obama’s negotiated very well,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa.

But as night fell on New Year’s Eve, senators seemed worn down and resigned. “Everybody by this time is angry, but sooner or later this has to be resolved,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee.

Even House Republicans signaled that enough of them, in combination with Democrats, could most likely pass the legislation, just weeks after Republicans shot down Mr. Boehner’s proposal to raise taxes only on incomes over $1 million.

“I don’t want to say where I am until I read the legislation, but it is certainly better than the alternative,” said Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania.

With a deal agonizingly close, official Washington still prepared for the worst. The Defense Department prepared to notify all 800,000 of its civilian employees that some of them could be forced into unpaid leave without a deal on military cuts. The Internal Revenue Service issued guidance to employers to increase withholding from paychecks beginning Tuesday to match new tax rates at every income level.

“No deal is the worse deal,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, rejecting the assertions of liberal colleagues that no deal would be better than what they would see as a bad deal.

However, new wrenches were gumming up the machinery. Democrats put out late word that Republicans wanted the threshold at which inherited estates would be taxed to be indexed to inflation, a nonstarter for them. Republicans said they needed to see what cuts would pay for the $24 billion needed to put off across-the-board spending cuts.

But with Republicans and Democrats grumbling, it was clear that a deal hashed out through intense talks between Mr. Biden and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, had given both sides provisions to cheer and to jeer.

Under the deal, tax rates on dividends and capital gains would also rise, to 20 percent from 15 percent, on income over $400,000 for single people and $450,000 for couples. The deal would reinstate provisions to tax law, ended by the Bush tax cuts of 2001, that phase out personal exemptions and deductions for the affluent. Those phaseouts, under the agreement, would begin at $250,000 for single people and $300,000 for couples.

The estate tax would also rise, but considerably less than Democrats had wanted. The value of estates over $5 million would be taxed at 40 percent, up from 35 percent. Democrats had wanted a 45 percent rate on inheritances over $3.5 million.

Under the deal, the new rates on income, investment and inheritances would be permanent, as would a provision to stop the alternative minimum tax from hitting middle-class families.

Jennifer Steinhauer and Robert Pear contributed reporting.

    Tentative Deal Is Reached to Raise Taxes on the Wealthy, NYT, 31.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/us/politics/tentative-deal-is-reached-to-raise-taxes-on-the-wealthy.html

Senate Leaders Set to Work on a Last-Minute Tax Agreement

December 28, 2012
The New York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — At the urging of President Obama, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate set to work Friday night to assemble a last-minute tax deal that could pass both chambers of Congress and avert large tax increases and budget cuts next year, or at least stop the worst of the economic punch from landing beginning Jan. 1.

After weeks of fruitless negotiations between the president and Speaker John A. Boehner, Mr. Obama turned to Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader — two men who have been fighting for dominance of the Senate for years — to find a solution. The speaker, once seen as the linchpin for any agreement, essentially ceded final control to the Senate and said the House would act on whatever the Senate could produce.

“The hour for immediate action is here. It is now,” Mr. Obama said in the White House briefing room after an hourlong meeting with the two Senate leaders, Mr. Boehner and Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader. He added, “The American people are not going to have any patience for a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy, not right now.”

Senate Democrats want Mr. McConnell to propose an alternative to Mr. Obama’s final offer and present it to them in time for a compromise bill to reach the Senate floor on Monday and be sent to the House. Absent a bipartisan deal, Mr. Reid said Friday night that he would accede to the president’s request to put to a vote on Monday Mr. Obama’s plan to extend tax cuts for all income below $250,000 a year and to renew expiring unemployment compensation for as many as two million people, essentially daring Republicans to block it and allow taxes to rise for most Americans.

Bipartisan agreement still hinged on the Senate leaders finding an income level above which taxes will rise on Jan. 1, most likely higher than Mr. Obama’s level of $250,000. Quiet negotiations between Senate and White House officials were already drifting up toward around $400,000 before Friday’s White House meeting. The two sides were also apart on where to set taxes on inherited estates.

But senators broke from a long huddle on the Senate floor with Mr. McConnell on Friday night to say they were more optimistic that a deal was within reach. Mr. McConnell, White House aides and Mr. Reid were to continue talks on Saturday, aiming for a breakthrough as soon as Sunday.

“We’re working with the White House, and hopefully we’ll come up with something we can recommend to our respective caucuses,” said Mr. McConnell, who has played a central role in cutting similar bipartisan deals in the past.

The emerging path to a possible resolution, at least on Friday, appeared to mirror the end of the protracted stalemate over the payroll tax last year. In that conflict, House Republicans refused to go along with a short-term extension of the cut, but Mr. McConnell reached an agreement that permitted such a measure to get through the Senate, and the House speaker essentially forced members to accept it from afar, after they had left forChristmas recess.

This time, the consequences are more significant, with more than a half-trillion dollars in tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts just days from going into force, an event most economists warn would send the economy back into recession if not quickly mitigated. With the House set to return to the Capitol on Sunday night, Mr. Boehner has said he would place any Senate bill before his chamber and let the vote proceed and the chips fall. The House could also change the legislation and return it to the Senate.

If the Senate is able to produce a bill that is largely bipartisan, there is a strong belief among House Republicans that the same measure would easily pass the House, with a large number of Republicans. While Mr. Boehner was unable to muster enough votes for his alternative bill that would have protected tax cuts for income under $1 million, that was because the measure lacked Democratic support, and was roughly a few dozen votes shy of passage with Republicans alone.

“I’ve got a positive feeling now,” said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, who said a burst of deal-making talk broke out as soon as the leaders returned to the Capitol.

Despite the new optimism, it was clear that any deal in the next three days would only alleviate the worst aspects of the “fiscal cliff” while leaving big decisions on taxes and spending to the next showdown, most likely by February when Congress must raise the government’s debt limit. A Republican aide briefed on the meeting said the speaker told the other negotiators that House Republicans would not turn off $100 billion in automatic military and domestic spending cuts in 2013 without equivalent cuts elsewhere. Also likely to be left out of a deal is any agreement to raise the debt limit.

But Mr. Boehner appeared to recognize that he was no longer dictating terms. According to the aide, the speaker said repeatedly, “Let us know what you come up with, and we’ll consider it — accept it or amend it.”

Even before the meeting, Senator Max Baucus of Montana, chairman of the Finance Committee, said “things are starting to gel” around a deal. According to aides familiar with the talks, the plan, in its early stages, centered on a deal that would extend all the expiring Bush income tax cuts up to $400,000 in income.

Some spending cuts would pay for a provision putting off a sudden reduction in payments to medical providers treating Medicare patients. The deal would also prevent an expansion of the alternative minimum tax to keep it from hitting more of the middle class. It would extend a raft of already expired business tax cuts, like the research and development credit, and would renew tax cuts for the working poor and the middle class included in the 2009 stimulus law.

Democrats from high-tax, high-wealth states have pressed the White House and their leaders to accept a threshold higher than the president’s $250,000, but they appear ready to accept anything that can pass.

“I have a very practical standard to apply: whatever threshold we need to avoid the fiscal cliff,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Democrat turned independent from Connecticut.

After the meeting, Mr. Obama and officials at the White House appeared visibly optimistic. The president was cheerful with his aides before he walked into the Brady Press Briefing Room to deliver his remarks before assembled reporters. A person briefed on the meeting described a “give and take” atmosphere.

“They could have just sat there,” said the person, who was not authorized to discuss the negotiations publicly. “But they didn’t; they were going back and forth, which is a pretty good sign.”

In an effort to keep the pressure on, Mr. Obama, for the second time in his presidency, has agreed to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, giving him a forum to push for a deal and to provide his view of the state of the negotiations.

Hoping to stave off the expiration of dozens of farm programs and the carrying out of a 1949 farm law that could double the price of milk, Senate and House leaders were also working on legislation to extend the current farm bill. The most recent farm bill, passed in 2008, expired on Sept. 30. If a new farm bill is not passed or the current one extended, farm programs would lose billions in financing and revert to the 1949 law.

The old law would reintroduce higher government price supports for milk, corn, rice, wheat and other crops and could lead to higher consumer prices and federal spending.

Helene Cooper and Ron Nixon contributed reporting.

    Senate Leaders Set to Work on a Last-Minute Tax Agreement, NYT, 28.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/us/politics/key-meeting-looms-as-scaled-back-fiscal-deal-is-explored.html

Federal Power to Intercept Messages Is Extended

December 28, 2012
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — Congress gave final approval on Friday to a bill extending the government’s power to intercept electronic communications of spy and terrorism suspects, after the Senate voted down proposals from several Democrats and Republicans to increase protections of civil liberties and privacy.

The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 73 to 23, clearing it for approval by President Obama, who strongly supports it. Intelligence agencies said the bill was their highest legislative priority.

Critics of the bill, including Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, and Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican, expressed concern that electronic surveillance, though directed at noncitizens, inevitably swept up communications of Americans as well.

“The Fourth Amendment was written in a different time and a different age, but its necessity and its truth are timeless,” Mr. Paul said, referring to the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. “Over the past few decades, our right to privacy has been eroded. We have become lazy and haphazard in our vigilance. Digital records seem to get less protection than paper records.”

The bill, which extends the government’s surveillance authority for five years, was approved in the House by a vote of 301 to 118 in September. Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill in the next few days.

Congressional critics of the bill said that they suspected that intelligence agencies were picking up the communications of many Americans, but that they could not be sure because the agencies would not provide even rough estimates of how many people inside the United States had had communications collected under authority of the surveillance law, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The inspector general of the National Security Agency told Congress that preparing such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office.

The chief Senate supporter of the bill, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said the proposed amendments were unnecessary. Moreover, she said, any changes would be subject to approval by the House, and the resulting delay could hamper the government’s use of important intelligence-gathering tools, for which authority is set to expire next week.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was adopted in 1978 and amended in 2008, with the addition of new surveillance authority and procedures, which are continued by the bill approved on Friday. The 2008 law was passed after the disclosure that President George W. Bush had authorized eavesdropping inside the United States, to search for evidence of terrorist activity, without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, said that he and Mr. Wyden were concerned that “a loophole” in the 2008 law “could allow the government to effectively conduct warrantless searches for Americans’ communications.”

James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Congress, “There is no loophole in the law.”

By a vote of 52 to 43, the Senate on Friday rejected a proposal by Mr. Wyden to require the national intelligence director to tell Congress if the government had collected any domestic e-mail or telephone conversations under the surveillance law.

The Senate also rejected, 54 to 37, an amendment that would have required disclosure of information about significant decisions by a special federal court that reviews applications for electronic surveillance in foreign intelligence cases.

The amendment was proposed by one of the most liberal senators, Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and one of the most conservative, Mike Lee, Republican of Utah.

The No. 2 Senate Democrat, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said the surveillance law “does not have adequate checks and balances to protect the constitutional rights of innocent American citizens.”

“It is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence,” Mr. Durbin said, “but the reality is that this legislation permits targeting an innocent American in the United States as long as an additional purpose of the surveillance is targeting a person outside the United States.”

However, 30 Democrats joined 42 Republicans and one independent in voting for the bill. Three Republicans — Mr. Lee, Mr. Paul and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted against the bill, as did 19 Democrats and one independent.

Mr. Merkley said the administration should provide at least unclassified summaries of major decisions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“An open and democratic society such as ours should not be governed by secret laws,” Mr. Merkley said, “and judicial interpretations are as much a part of the law as the words that make up our statute.”

Mrs. Feinstein said the law allowed intelligence agencies to go to the court and get warrants for surveillance of “a category of foreign persons,” without showing probable cause to believe that each person was working for a foreign power or a terrorist group.

Mr. Wyden said these writs reminded him of the “general warrants that so upset the colonists” more than 200 years ago.

“The founding fathers could never have envisioned tweeting and Twitter and the Internet,” Mr. Wyden said. “Advances in technology gave government officials the power to invade individual privacy in a host of new ways.”

    Federal Power to Intercept Messages Is Extended, NYT, 28.12.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/us/politics/senate-votes-to-extend-electronic-surveillance-authority-under-fisa.html

Democrats Deliver String of Stinging Defeats in Senate

November 6, 2012
The new York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN

Democrats snatched Republican Senate seats in Indiana and Massachusetts on Tuesday, averted what once were considered likely defeats in Missouri and Montana, and held control of the Senate, handing Republicans a string of stinging defeats for the second campaign season in a row.

The final balance of power depended on the results of tight races in Nevada and North Dakota, but it was clear that Democrats would maintain a majority and could even add to the 53 seats that they and their independent allies control. Senate leaders declared that their strong showing must be a signal to Republicans to come to the table to deal with the nation’s intractable problems, including the “fiscal cliff” facing Congress in January.

“Now that the election is over, it’s time to put politics aside and work together to find solutions,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. “The strategy of obstruction, gridlock and delay was soundly rejected by the American people. Now they are looking to us for solutions.”

In Indiana, Representative Joe Donnelly did what had seemed impossible by taking a Senate seat for the Democrats in a heavily Republican state, just weeks after his opponent, State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, said conception by rape was God’s will.

In Wisconsin, Representative Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay candidate to secure a Senate seat with her defeat of former Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican.

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a Democrat once considered the Senate’s most endangered incumbent, beat Representative Todd Akin, who seemingly sank his campaign when he said women who are victims of “legitimate rape” would not get pregnant.

In Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor, swept from power Senator Scott P. Brown, a Republican whose surprise victory in January 2010 heralded the coming of the Tea Party wave. In Virginia, former Gov. Tim Kaine triumphed over another former governor, George Allen.

Democrats also scored a narrow victory in Montana, as Senator Jon Tester — one of the party’s most endangered incumbents — beat Representative Denny Rehberg, in what was believed to be the most expensive race in the state’s history.

Those Democratic triumphs followed quick wins in Connecticut, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, all states where Republicans had harbored ambitions of victory that would propel them to a Senate majority for the first time since 2006.

Republicans lost another state when former Gov. Angus King Jr. of Maine, an independent, won his race to succeed Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a moderate who is retiring. Mr. King has yet to say which party he will caucus with next year, but he had warned Republicans and Democrats that his treatment during the campaign would bear on that decision. National Republicans and their “super PAC” allies responded by pummeling him with negative advertisements that did little to shake his lead.

“We said we’d defend all of our seats and would put half of their seats in play,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who took that job last year when others had refused it.

“No one believed me,” she said, “but we did just that.”

The Senate campaigns of 2012 will be remembered for the sudden salience of rape as a destructive political subject and a Democratic surge in a year once expected to be the party’s Waterloo. Two years after Tea Party-backed candidates in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada fumbled away Republican chances at Senate control, a new crop of conservatives appeared to do the same thing. That will surely raise new questions about the failure of Washington Republicans to control a right flank in their grass roots.

“They’re going to have to decide whether they want to be in the majority or the minority,” Senator Snowe said. “It simply doesn’t make sense if Republicans decide they’re going to drive an ideological agenda as opposed to a practical agenda that is aligned with the principles of our roots.”

Representative Christopher S. Murphy fended off the deep-pocketed campaign of the former wrestling executive Linda McMahon to win a Senate seat in Connecticut, and Senator Bill Nelson of Florida easily defeated his Republican challenger, Representative Connie Mack.

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio held off Josh Mandel, the Republican state treasurer, weathering an onslaught of negative advertising from outside groups to keep a seat for Democrats in a presidential battleground that Republicans were counting on.

In New York, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat, cruised to re-election. Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, was also easily re-elected.

The results suggested that for the second consecutive election cycle, Republicans’ high hopes for a takeover of the Senate were dashed in large part by their own candidates. In 2010 and 2012, the disappointment could be laid at the feet of a very conservative Republican primary electorate that was determined to sweep out the party’s centrists.

Democrats started the cycle with 23 seats to defend and the Republicans 10, an imbalance produced by the Democratic sweep of 2006. With only a three-seat majority for the Democrats, including two independents who caucused with them, holding on to control of the chamber seemed like an impossible task.

To defend some of the seats in heavily Republican states where Democrats were retiring, the party recruited talented candidates like Heidi Heitkamp, a former North Dakota secretary of state. They also pulled in strong candidates in Arizona, Indiana and Massachusetts, forcing the Republicans to defend seats across a broader map in a year that was supposed to be all offense.

More important, the Tea Party wave that began in 2010 kept rolling early this year, again threatening the Republicans’ chances for a majority. In 2010, primary voters in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada selected Tea Party-backed conservatives, who may have wrecked the party’s hopes.

This time, conservatives defeated Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a Republican veteran who was expected to walk to re-election. Instead, they nominated Indiana’s far more conservative treasurer, Mr. Mourdock, turning the general election into a fight.

Republican primary voters in Missouri chose Mr. Akin, the most conservative candidate in the field, to challenge Ms. McCaskill.

Republican fights between grass-roots conservatives and party-backed candidates led to prolonged and expensive primaries in Arizona and Wisconsin as well. In both cases, the party’s preferred candidate prevailed but emerged battered and broke.

Michael N. Castle, a moderate Republican and former congressman from Delaware, pointed to Ted Cruz, the Tea Party-backed Republican in Texas who coasted to victory in the race for the Senate seat being vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison. “They can do that in Texas — that’s fine,” said Mr. Castle, who lost a Senate primary in 2010 to Christine O’Donnell, who was backed by the Tea Party and then lost in the general election. “But it gets a lot tougher in Indiana or Delaware.”

He added, “The Republican Party as a whole needs to be more understanding about what can fit into the different pockets of a diverse country.”

    Democrats Deliver String of Stinging Defeats in Senate, NYT, 6.11.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/us/politics/senate-races.html

Murphy Defeats McMahon

After Bitter U.S. Senate Race in Connecticut

November 6, 2012
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME

HARTFORD — Christopher S. Murphy, a 39-year-old three-term Connecticut congressman, defeated the former wrestling executive Linda E. McMahon on Tuesday to win the United States Senate seat held since 1989 by Joseph I. Lieberman, who is retiring.

Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, defeated Ms. McMahon, a Republican, amid heavy turnout to cap a meteoric political rise. Mr. Murphy, a lawyer, first won a seat in the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1988 at age 25 and in 2006 defeated a 24-year incumbent, Nancy Johnson, to represent Connecticut’s Fifth District. He will be the youngest member of the Senate.

The race was long and bitter, dominated by a media barrage by Ms. McMahon, 64, who also lost a bid for the Senate in 2010 against Richard Blumenthal. Over the two races, she spent nearly $100 million, almost all of it her own. In this race, she tried to reach out to women, with whom she performed poorly last time, by softening her image. She also tried to paint Mr. Murphy as a career politician who had been careless about his personal finances.

But Mr. Murphy hit back on traditional Democratic themes, particularly women’s issues, and performed strongly in the candidates’ four debates. And Ms. McMahon, who over the two races spent more of her own money to win a Senate seat than anyone in history, was bucking a stiff Democratic tide in a state that President Obama carried easily and where Democrats hold all the state offices and control both houses of the Legislature. They held on to all five United States House seats in voting Tuesday.

“Tonight we proved that what matters most in life is the measure of your ideas, the measure of your determination, the measure of your friends, not the measure of your wallet,” Mr. Murphy told an exultant crowd here.

He was introduced by Senator Blumenthal, who clearly remembered his own brutal race against Ms. McMahon and relished the outcome of both.

“In Connecticut, we have elections, not auctions,” he said.

In Stamford, Ms. McMahon thanked her supporters and asked them to stay involved with the issues she raised.

“Everyone listen to me,” she said. “Charge them, challenge them to do what we say, because they work for us. If we forget that, shame on us.”

With 72 percent of the vote reporting early Wednesday, Mr. Murphy had won about 53 percent of the vote, with 45 percent for Ms. McMahon.

Exit polls indicated that more than two-thirds of voters said that which party controlled the Senate was a very important part of their vote, a clear advantage for Mr. Murphy.

Ms. McMahon’s background as the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment — which she used to describe herself as a successful businesswoman, and which her opponents used to portray her as a purveyor of crass entertainment — was not as prominent a part of the campaign as it was in 2010. Still, according to exit polls, roughly 4 in 10 voters said Ms. McMahon’s wrestling background played a role in their vote, and of those, 9 to 1 went for Mr. Murphy.

And, despite advertisements aimed at softening her image, slightly more than half of voters said Mr. Murphy had high ethical standards, while only 4 in 10 said that about Ms. McMahon. Mr. Murphy won the women’s vote by about 15 percentage points.

And, as in 2010, it appeared there were limits to what Ms. McMahon’s advertising artillery could accomplish.

Mark Gudim, 31, a home inspector from Brookfield, said he was an unaffiliated voter and was undecided until a few weeks ago when “I couldn’t take the advertisements anymore.”

“I drive a lot every day for work, and every time I turned on the radio, there she was,” he said. “It wasn’t about what she was going to do, it was always bashing Chris Murphy. It definitely got old.”

Mr. Murphy’s election capped a night on which Democrats were poised to control all six Senate seats in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. In New York, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, who was appointed by Gov. David A. Paterson and then won a special election in 2010 to serve out Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate term, defeated her Republican opponent, Wendy E. Long.

In New Jersey, the incumbent, Robert Menendez, defeated Joe Kyrillos, a Republican state senator and a close ally of Gov. Chris Christie.

The Connecticut race was the most contested of the three and gained considerable national attention as Ms. McMahon’s aggressive, well-financed campaign put Mr. Murphy on the defensive and brought the race to a dead heat in several polls before the four debates last month. But national Democrats and outside groups threw some money into the race on Mr. Murphy’s behalf, and Ms. McMahon began drawing heat for remarks she made in April proposing provisions that would allow the reconsideration of Social Security and for refusing to provide specifics on programs like Social Security and Medicare until after the election.

Elizabeth Maker contributed reporting.

    Murphy Defeats McMahon After Bitter U.S. Senate Race in Connecticut, NYT, 6.11.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/us/politics/Christopher-S-Murphy-Linda-E-McMahon-Connecticut-Senate-Race.html

Democrats Grab Senate Seats in Massachusetts and Indiana

November 6, 2012
The New York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN

Democrats snatched Republican Senate seats in Indiana and Massachusetts on Tuesday, averted what was once considered a likely defeat in Missouri and held control of the Senate, handing Republicans a string of stinging defeats for the second campaign season in a row.

The final balance of power depended on the results of tight races in Montana, Nevada and North Dakota, but it was clear that Democrats would maintain a majority and could even add to the 53 seats that they and their independent allies control. Senate leaders declared that their strong showing must be a signal to Republicans to come to the table to deal with the nation’s intractable problems, including the “fiscal cliff” facing Congress in January.

“Now that the election is over, it’s time to put politics aside and work together to find solutions,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. “The strategy of obstruction, gridlock and delay was soundly rejected by the American people. Now they are looking to us for solutions.”

In Indiana, Representative Joe Donnelly did what had seemed impossible by taking a Senate seat for the Democrats in a heavily Republican state, just weeks after his opponent, State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, said conception by rape was God’s will.

In Wisconsin, Representative Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay candidate to secure a Senate seat with her defeat of former Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican.

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a Democrat once considered the Senate’s most endangered incumbent, beat Representative Todd Akin, who seemingly sank his campaign when he said women who are victims of “legitimate rape” would not get pregnant.

In Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor, swept from power Senator Scott P. Brown, a Republican whose surprise victory in January 2010 heralded the coming of the Tea Party wave. In Virginia, former Gov. Tim Kaine triumphed over another former governor, George Allen.

Those Democratic triumphs followed quick wins in Connecticut, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, all states where Republicans had harbored ambitions of victory that would propel them to a Senate majority for the first time since 2006.

Republicans lost another state when former Gov. Angus King Jr. of Maine, an independent, won his race to succeed Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a moderate who is retiring. Mr. King has yet to say which party he will caucus with next year, but he had warned Republicans and Democrats that his treatment during the campaign would bear on that decision. National Republicans and their “super PAC” allies responded by pummeling him with negative advertisements that did little to shake his lead.

“We said we’d defend all of our seats and would put half of their seats in play,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who took that job last year when others had refused it.

“No one believed me,” she said, “but we did just that.”

The Senate campaigns of 2012 will be remembered for the sudden salience of rape as a destructive political subject and a Democratic surge in a year once expected to be the party’s Waterloo. Two years after Tea Party-backed candidates in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada fumbled away Republican chances at Senate control, a new crop of conservatives appeared to do the same thing. That will surely raise new questions about the failure of Washington Republicans to control a right flank in their grass roots.

“They’re going to have to decide whether they want to be in the majority or the minority,” Senator Snowe said. “It simply doesn’t make sense if Republicans decide they’re going to drive an ideological agenda as opposed to a practical agenda that is aligned with the principles of our roots.”

Representative Christopher S. Murphy fended off the deep-pocketed campaign of the former wrestling executive Linda McMahon to win a Senate seat in Connecticut, and Senator Bill Nelson of Florida easily defeated his Republican challenger, Representative Connie Mack.

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio held off Josh Mandel, the Republican state treasurer, weathering an onslaught of negative advertising from outside groups to keep a seat for Democrats in a presidential battleground that Republicans were counting on.

In New York, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat, cruised to re-election. Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, was also easily re-elected.

The results suggested that for the second consecutive election cycle, Republicans’ high hopes for a takeover of the Senate were dashed in large part by their own candidates. In 2010 and 2012, the disappointment could be laid at the feet of a very conservative Republican primary electorate that was determined to sweep out the party’s centrists.

Democrats started the cycle with 23 seats to defend and the Republicans 10, an imbalance produced by the Democratic sweep of 2006. With only a three-seat majority for the Democrats, including two independents who caucused with them, holding on to control of the chamber seemed like an impossible task.

To defend some of the seats in heavily Republican states where Democrats were retiring, the party recruited talented candidates like Heidi Heitkamp, a former North Dakota secretary of state. They also pulled in strong candidates in Arizona, Indiana and Massachusetts, forcing the Republicans to defend seats across a broader map in a year that was supposed to be all offense.

More important, the Tea Party wave that began in 2010 kept rolling early this year, again threatening the Republicans’ chances for a majority. In 2010, primary voters in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada selected Tea Party-backed conservatives, who may have wrecked the party’s hopes.

This time, conservatives defeated Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a Republican veteran who was expected to walk to re-election. Instead, they nominated Indiana’s far more conservative treasurer, Mr. Mourdock, turning the general election into a fight.

Republican primary voters in Missouri chose Mr. Akin, the most conservative candidate in the field, to challenge Ms. McCaskill.

Republican fights between grass-roots conservatives and party-backed candidates led to prolonged and expensive primaries in Arizona and Wisconsin as well. In both cases, the party’s preferred candidate prevailed but emerged battered and broke.

Michael N. Castle, a moderate Republican and former congressman from Delaware, pointed to Ted Cruz, the Tea Party-backed Republican in Texas who coasted to victory in the race for the Senate seat being vacated by Kay Bailey Hutchison. “They can do that in Texas — that’s fine,” said Mr. Castle, who lost a Senate primary in 2010 to Christine O’Donnell, who was backed by the Tea Party and then lost in the general election. “But it gets a lot tougher in Indiana or Delaware.”

He added, “The Republican Party as a whole needs to be more understanding about what can fit into the different pockets of a diverse country.”

    Democrats Grab Senate Seats in Massachusetts and Indiana, NYT, 6.11.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/us/politics/senate-races.html

The Battle for the Senate

November 5, 2012
The New York Times


For Republicans intent on unraveling President Obama’s accomplishments, electing Mitt Romney has been only one part of the equation. Almost as important was installing a Republican majority in the United States Senate, where 50 votes (plus the vice president) would be necessary to repeal much of health care reform, roll back tax increases on the rich and gut social welfare programs.

The party’s hopes, however, have been severely damaged in recent weeks. Republican candidates who are crucial to regaining a majority in the Senate have tumbled, according to a variety of polls, and Democrats are now considered likely to retain control. The reason for this is clear: Primary voters chose several unappealing or ideologically driven candidates who repelled general-election voters once they began speaking their minds.

In a country facing enormous economic and international challenges, for example, it is stunning that two Midwestern Democrats are leading their races solely because their Republican opponents explained in shocking detail why they oppose a rape exception to a ban on abortion. Neither Richard Mourdock of Indiana nor Representative Todd Akin of Missouri felt any need to hold back, because their beliefs are central to why they were nominated.

Mr. Akin, who is running against Senator Claire McCaskill, has long opposed abortion in all cases, and, in August, he announced that it was not really an issue because, in cases of “legitimate rape,” the female body shuts down the conception process. Mr. Mourdock, who is running against Representative Joe Donnelly, a Democrat, said last month that pregnancy resulting from rape was “something that God intended to happen.” Both candidates could still win in their conservative states, but, for now, their insensitive rigidity has left them behind.

In Wisconsin, Representative Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, has benefited from the comments of her opponent, former Gov. Tommy Thompson. He said he would come up with programs “to do away with Medicaid and Medicare.” Josh Mandel, a Republican who is challenging Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, has a tissue-thin résumé and no fixed position on a variety of issues. In Florida, Representative Connie Mack IV, a Republican who is challenging Senator Bill Nelson, has been crippled by revelations that he did marketing work on behalf of Hooter’s and has a history of barroom brawling and road rage.

Republicans in two relatively liberal northeastern states are fighting a huge Democratic headwind stirred up by the presidential race. Most polls in Massachusetts have shown Senator Scott Brown either tied with his Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren, or behind. (Ms. Warren’s solid agenda on behalf of consumers and against economic inequality has won her enthusiastic support.) In Connecticut, Linda McMahon’s enormously expensive, self-financed Republican campaign has not bought her a lead in the polls against Representative Christopher Murphy, so now she is committing a laughable party heresy by urging voters to support both her and Mr. Obama.

The House is likely to remain in Republican hands, so keeping Democrats in control of the Senate is the best way to fight off savage budget cuts like those endorsed by Mr. Romney and Representative Paul Ryan. That effort has been made a lot easier by Republican Senate candidates displaying their true colors.

    The Battle for the Senate, NYT, 5.11.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/opinion/the-battle-for-the-senate.html

With Control of Senate at Stake,

Last-Minute Money Pours Into Races

November 4, 2012
The New York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN and DEREK WILLIS

PAINESVILLE, Ohio — A torrent of outside money has dropped into this state in the closing days of the campaign to try to unseat Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, part of a late onslaught across the country that Republicans hope will salvage a respectable showing in Senate races they once had high hopes for.

In Ohio, Arizona, Indiana and even Missouri, once thought to be an uneven contest, a last-minute rush of money on both sides suggests that neither party believes that the balance of power in the next Senate is set.

In Virginia, George Allen, a Republican, has latched on to Mitt Romney, hoping that the top of the ticket can still lift him back to the Senate seat he lost six years ago. In Nevada, Representative Shelley Berkley, a Democrat, has reached into her own wallet, lending her Senate campaign a quarter of a million dollars for the last stretch.

But the hopes of the Republican Party for at best a tie in the Senate now seem to rest on the slender shoulders of Josh Mandel, a baby-faced 35-year-old Ohio state treasurer who concedes that he looks 19. With just one day to go, Republicans are in danger of losing Senate seats in Indiana, Maine and Massachusetts. If they did, they would need to sweep all of the contests in which they either lead or are nearly tied — in Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Virginia and Wisconsin — and then hope that Mr. Mandel can pull out a victory.

“We started off this race down 17. By Thanksgiving, we were down 15. By the Super Bowl, we were down 12. Spring training, down 10. About a month ago, we were down 7,” Mr. Mandel told a packed house of young door-knockers and phone bank volunteers at the Lake County Republican Party headquarters on Saturday night, many of them from out of state. “And a new poll came out this morning that has us tied, 48-48.”

That poll was something of an outlier. Most other surveys have given Mr. Brown a lead larger than the one President Obama has over Mr. Romney in Ohio. But the Republican Party’s deep-pocketed allies are determined to give him a late surge.

Since Oct. 17, the beginning of the final reporting period, 40 groups have spent $13.9 million on the Senate race in Ohio, 43 percent of the $32.7 million spent since the primaries. Of that late rush, nearly 9 of every 10 dollars have been spent on behalf of Mr. Mandel.

Mr. Brown has treated his younger rival with dismissive contempt, suggesting that outside money is the only reason there is a race here.

But Mr. Brown and his allies have played the game as well, using negative advertising to paint Mr. Mandel as a brat who stocked the treasurer’s office with friends and cronies while not bothering to show up for work.

“Sherrod Brown likes to complain and play holier than thou when it comes to independent expenditures,” Mr. Mandel said in an interview here. “We’re not complaining. I’m a grown man, and I have no problem with people running attack ads against me. I understand it’s part of the political process.”

At this point, he said, even his wife records the television shows she wants to watch so that she can skip over the political ads.

Mr. Brown said: “I’m not whining about the money. I’m just saying there’s never been this much outside money in any Senate campaign anywhere. It’s why there’s a race.”

The ad barrage in the state is having an impact. John Carson, a 54-year-old mathematician in Findlay, Ohio, and a Republican, said he still had not decided whom to vote for in the presidential election. But as Mr. Mandel prepared another visit to his town, nicknamed Flag City, he had stronger feelings about the Senate race.

“I have a real bad feeling about Mandel,” he said. “It’s really the advertising, his and Brown’s. He’s a slick politician just out for himself.”

Allies of both parties are hoping minds are not completely made up in several states. In the past two weeks, $22 million has poured into the Senate race in Virginia. Outside groups have dumped $17.2 million into Wisconsin, $12.7 million into Arizona, $11.3 million into Indiana, $8.6 million into Montana and $8.5 million into Nevada.

In some of those states, like Wisconsin and Nevada, groups supporting Democratic candidates have outspent the Republican groups. In most of the others, the Democratic groups are not far behind. Only in Ohio are the numbers so lopsided, reflecting the stakes Republicans see in that race and the confidence they have in their private polling. It also shows the certitude among Democrats that they have it won.

Mr. Mandel said his campaign’s internal polling had the race tied, but, he said, he has at least a two-percentage-point lead with Ohio’s most enthusiastic voters. A poll released Sunday by The Columbus Dispatch showed Mr. Obama with 50 percent and Mr. Romney with 48 percent, which was within the poll’s margin of sampling error of two points, and had Mr. Brown ahead of Mr. Mandel by six points, 51 percent to 45 percent, exceeding the margin of error.

Mr. Mandel has had to suffer some indignities in his quest for the Senate. Over the weekend, he played the sidekick to the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, who barnstormed the state with Mr. Mandel but always played the top act of the show. In Painesville on Saturday night, Mr. Mandel gave brief remarks from his stump speech and then introduced Mr. Boehner, who promptly forgot his name.

“I’ve got to tell you, I’m proud of our ticket. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan,” Mr. Boehner said. “Uh, we’ve got, uh, he was just here. I’m going brain-dead. Josh Mandel!”

Mr. Mandel shrugged it off. “Listen,” he said, “he’s third in line to be president. This is one of most important and powerful leaders we have in this country. He’s a lot more important guy than I am.”

The late rush to help Mr. Mandel may reflect the narrowing of the Senate playing field. The toughest races to handicap do not really include Ohio. In Montana, a freshman Democratic senator, Jon Tester, is nearly tied with the state’s only House member, Denny Rehberg, a Republican. Of the $8.5 million in outside money spent on the Senate race in that state, 39 percent has come in the last two weeks, most of it for Mr. Rehberg.

In Wisconsin, polls have given leads to both former Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, a Republican, and his Democratic opponent, Representative Tammy Baldwin. Of the $17.2 million spent so far by outside groups in that race, 45 percent has come in since Oct. 17, but in this case, Ms. Baldwin, who would be the first openly lesbian senator, has benefited from a national network of supporters who have outspent Mr. Thompson’s allies.

Outside of Ohio, nowhere is the last-ditch spending spree more prominent than in Indiana, where Republican groups are rushing to try to salvage the campaign of the state treasurer, Richard E. Mourdock, who may have doomed the prospects of a Republican Senate seat by saying that conception from rape is God’s will. Forty-seven percent of the outside money spent on the Indiana Senate race has been spent in the last 18 days. Of that, $6.6 million has been spent on Mr. Mourdock’s behalf, versus $4.7 million for his opponent, Representative Joe Donnelly, a Democrat.

Even Representative Todd Akin of Missouri, largely written off in his attempt to unseat Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, has made a move. National Republicans had sworn they would not back Mr. Akin after he commented that conception would not result from “legitimate rape.”

But coordinated spending between his campaign and the Missouri Republican Party topped $1.1 million in the race’s final week, a figure higher than either group has on hand. That has led to speculation that the National Republican Senatorial Campaign is shifting money to the state party. Officials of the N.R.S.C. have refused to comment on the move.

The final days of the Missouri race have included a $2 million ad blitz on behalf of Mr. Akin, who has been vastly outspent by Ms. McCaskill throughout the race. Ms. McCaskill has continued to put her own pressure on Mr. Akin, a six-term member of the House, releasing a new ad that used a clip from an interview in which Mr. Romney called for Mr. Akin to drop out of the race.

Indiana, Montana and Wisconsin could determine whether Republicans can at least gain seats in the Senate, instead of leaving the Democrats’ 53-seat majority intact or even augmented. Ms. Baldwin, who is from Madison, a liberal bastion, and has one of the most left-leaning voting records in the House, would appear to be an unlikely powerhouse.

And it is not that she is doing incredibly well in a state where Republicans dominated the 2010 elections and fended off attempts to recall a conservative governor a few months ago. Those “too liberal” attacks being hurled at her seem to be effective, said Charles Franklin, the poll director at Marquette University.

What is perhaps more surprising, he said, is that Mr. Thompson, a popular four-term governor of the state, has his own negatives that appear to be just as strong.

“Both of these ad campaigns have been effective, and they’ve been sticky,” Mr. Franklin said, adding that both candidates are seen more unfavorably than favorably by Wisconsin voters. “They’ve stuck to the candidates that they’ve been directed toward.”

In Montana, each Senate candidate has been crisscrossing from the ski towns and pristine parks in the west to the oil-rich plains in the east, stopping in tiny towns to press for support from handfuls of voters at cafes and gas stations. Windshield time, it is called. Mr. Tester kept up a punishing schedule through the weekend, while Mr. Rehberg laid low and let the advertising speak for him. That included a direct-to-camera plea from Mr. Romney.

“It’s all going to come down to voter turnout,” Mr. Tester said in a phone interview as he rolled across the state.

Indiana could prove to be the 2012 equivalent to Nevada and Delaware during the 2010 Senate races, when Republicans looked poised to easily take Democratic seats only to nominate Tea Party-backed candidates who proved too conservative for the general electorate. But outside groups seem determined to keep Mr. Mourdock in the game.

Jonathan Weisman reported from Painesville, Ohio, and Derek Willis from Washington. John Eligon contributed reporting from St. Louis, Jack Healy from Denver and Steven Yaccino from Chicago.

    With Control of Senate at Stake, Last-Minute Money Pours Into Races, NYT, 4.11.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/us/politics/last-minute-money-pours-into-senate-races.html

Groundwork Meets Charm Offensive

in Massachusetts Senate Race

November 4, 2012
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

BOSTON — Even in the darkest days of Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign, when she was being pummeled for claiming Native American ancestry, her team expressed optimism that she would win in November. Why? Because, they said, she would have a superior ground game that would turn out the vote when it mattered most, on Election Day.

That assertion is now being put to the test. Her campaign officials say they expect to have 24,000 volunteers working for them on Tuesday roughly 10 in each of the state’s 2,174 precincts to get her supporters to the polls. That would be by far a record number in Massachusetts. In the days before the election, they expect to knock on one million doors and make two million phone calls.

Her army on the ground is clearly one of Ms. Warren’s strength in her hard-fought attempt to unseat Senator Scott P. Brown. But what Mr. Brown, as a Republican in a deep blue state, may lack in ground organization, he makes up for on the stump as a natural-born campaigner who makes a personal connection with voters.

“I’m from here, O.K.?” Mr. Brown said from the stage at a boisterous rally Thursday night in Wakefield, where he grew up. “I married a local Waltham girl. My kids were born here. I know this town like the back of my hand.” Huge cheers erupted from the packed hall.

Ms. Warren is greeted like a rock star. A rally in Boston on Saturday with Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil rights icon, brought down the house. And Mr. Brown has some organization, his team says it has quadrupled the strength of any previous Republican campaign in the state. Recent polls have shown Ms. Warren with a very slim advantage, though all have been within the margin of sampling error.

“It’s widely recognized that the Democrats here have the edge in terms of numbers, and that’s the real danger for Brown,” said Peter Ubertaccio, a political scientist at Stonehill College. “But Brown has been able to blunt the Democratic knocking-on-door strategy through sheer force of personality, and that’s what has kept this race so close.”

The Warren campaign has been tilling the fields for months.

It has 48 field offices and 74 paid field organizers, including several veterans of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. On Saturday alone, they made more than 370,000 phone calls and knocked on more than 123,000 doors; those knocking included Michael S. Dukakis, the former governor and Democratic presidential candidate.

“The ground game is the only thing that matters in the end,” said John Walsh, chairman of the state Democratic Party. On Election Day itself, he said, Team Warren will be joined by thousands of members of unions and groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Workers from Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s machine in Boston have already been folded in.

They intend to start at 5 in the morning by hanging a card on the front doors of likely Warren voters, reminding them to vote. Warren workers at the polls will keep track of who has voted.

Ms. Warren’s closing television ad presents her as a fighter for the middle class. “Know this,” she says directly to the camera. “My fight is for you. Always has been. And I won’t back down, no matter how long the odds or how powerful the opposition.”

On the stump, she fires up her supporters with a reminder that Mr. Brown has voted against equal pay for women, coverage for birth control and a Supreme Court nominee who supports abortion rights. If she wins, Ms. Warren will become the first woman in state history elected to the Senate. Polling shows she has lopsided support among women while Mr. Brown has lopsided support among men.

Mr. Brown’s get-out-the-vote effort cannot match Ms. Warren’s, since the Republican Party has little institutional history in the state. But the party said that Mr. Brown’s 2010 election had given it a base on which to build.

“We are running by far the largest volunteer field organization in our party’s history,” said Tim Buckley, a spokesman for the state Republican Party.

Still, Brown supporters are trying to turn their field disadvantage into a strength. At a Brown rally here on Sunday, former Gov. William F. Weld, a Republican, cast the race as a showdown between “man versus machine.” He said that just as a machine was working to get Ms. Warren elected, a machine would tell her how to vote. “The machine never rests,” he said.

Voter mobilization for Mr. Brown relies less on foot soldiers and more on a personal, down-home appeal as he and his camera-ready family barnstorm across the state in a bright blue bus.

“It is about whose side you’re on,” Mr. Brown said at the Wakefield rally, co-opting a phrase from Ms. Warren as he cast her as a non-compromiser. “She’ll have a message of division, us versus them, haves and the have-nots, men versus women,” he said. “I mean, come on. How about somewhere in the middle? How about ‘maybe’? How about ‘together’? How about sitting down and having a beer and a pizza and solving our problems?”

His closing television ad is a 60-second montage of upbeat images backed by swelling music as Mr. Brown says, “I’ve kept my promise to be an independent voice.” It also features a clip of him with President Obama.

His party label, and his party’s presidential standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, have been airbrushed out of his campaign. At his rallies, Mr. Brown leads his audiences in chants of his slogan, “people over party.”

One of the biggest wild cards in this race is the presidential election. Mr. Obama leads Mr. Romney here by double digits, but this has not translated into a corresponding lead for Ms. Warren. It does suggest that Mr. Brown has won over plenty of Obama voters; the question is whether he can win enough of them.

    Groundwork Meets Charm Offensive in Massachusetts Senate Race, NYT, 4.11.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/us/politics/massachusetts-senate-race-appears-close.html

A Prairie Liberal, Trounced but Never Silenced

October 21, 2012
The New York Times
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM

George McGovern, the United States senator who won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1972 as an opponent of the war in Vietnam and a champion of liberal causes, and who was then trounced by President Richard M. Nixon in the general election, died early Sunday in Sioux Falls, S.D. He was 90.

His death was announced in a statement by his family. He had been moved to hospice care in recent days after being treated for several health problems in the last year. He had a home in Mitchell, S.D., where he had spent his formative years.

In a statement, President Obama called Mr. McGovern “a champion for peace” who was a “statesman of great conscience and conviction.”

To the liberal Democratic faithful, Mr. McGovern remained a standard-bearer well into his old age, writing and lecturing even as his name was routinely invoked by conservatives as synonymous with what they considered the failures of liberal politics.

He never retreated from those ideals, however, insisting on a strong, “progressive” federal government to protect the vulnerable and expand economic opportunity, while asserting that history would prove him correct in his opposing not only what he called “the tragically mistaken American war in Vietnam” but also the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A slender, soft-spoken minister’s son newly elected to Congress — his father was a Republican — Mr. McGovern went to Washington as a 34-year-old former college history teacher and decorated bomber pilot in World War II. He thought of himself as a son of the prairie as well, with a fittingly flat, somewhat nasal voice and a brand of politics traceable to the Midwestern progressivism of the late 19th century.

Elected to the Senate in 1962, Mr. McGovern left no special mark in his three terms, but he voted consistently in favor of civil rights and antipoverty bills, was instrumental in developing and expanding food stamp and nutrition programs, and helped lead opposition to the Vietnam War in the Senate.

The war was the cause he took into the 1972 election, one of the most lopsided in American history. Mr. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia and won just 17 electoral votes to Nixon’s 520.

The campaign was the backdrop to the burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington and to the Nixon organization’s shady fund-raising practices and sabotage operations, later known as “dirty tricks,” which were not disclosed until after the election.

The Republicans portrayed Mr. McGovern as a cowardly left-winger, a threat to the military and the free-market economy and someone outside the mainstream of American thought. Whether those charges were fair or not, Mr. McGovern never lived down the image of a liberal loser, and many Democrats long accused him of leading the party astray.

Mr. McGovern resented that characterization mightily. “I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2005 in his home in Mitchell. “My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I’m what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.

“But we probably didn’t work enough on cultivating that image,” he added, referring to his presidential campaign organization. “We were more interested in ending the war in Vietnam and getting people out of poverty and being fair to women and minorities and saving the environment.

“It was an issue-oriented campaign, and we should have paid more attention to image.”

The 1972 Nomination

Mr. McGovern was 49 years old and in his second Senate term when he won the 1972 Democratic nomination, outdistancing a dozen or so other aspirants, including Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, the early front-runner; former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, the nominee in 1968; and Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, a populist with a segregationist past who was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt in Maryland during the primaries.

Mr. McGovern benefited from new party rules that he had been largely responsible for writing, and from a corps of devoted young volunteers, including Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, who took time off from Yale Law School to work on the campaign in Texas.

The nominating convention in Miami was a disastrous start to the general election campaign. There were divisive platform battles over Vietnam, abortion, welfare and court-ordered busing to end racial discrimination. The eventual platform was probably the most liberal one ever adopted by a major party in the United States. It advocated an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for war resisters, the abolition of the draft, a guaranteed job for all Americans and a guaranteed family income well above the poverty line.

Several prominent Democrats declined Mr. McGovern’s offer to be his running mate before he chose Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri.

Mr. McGovern’s organization was so disorganized that by the time he went to the convention rostrum for his acceptance speech, it was nearly 3 a.m. He delivered perhaps the best speech of his life. “We reject the view of those who say, ‘America, love it or leave it,’ ” he declared. “We reply, ‘Let us change it so we can love it more.’ ”

The delegates loved it, but most television viewers had long since gone to bed.

The convention was barely over when word got out that Mr. Eagleton had been hospitalized three times in the 1960s for what was called nervous exhaustion, and that he had undergone electroshock therapy.

Mr. McGovern said he was behind his running mate “a thousand percent.” But less than two weeks after the nomination, Mr. Eagleton was dropped from the ticket and replaced by R. Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy in-law and former director of the Peace Corps.

The campaign never recovered from the Eagleton debacle. Republicans taunted Mr. McGovern for backing everything a thousand percent. Commentators said his treatment of Mr. Eagleton had shown a lack of spine.

In the 2005 Times interview, Mr. McGovern said he had handled the matter badly. “I didn’t know a damn thing about mental illness,” he said, “and neither did anyone around me.”

With a well-oiled campaign operation and a big financial advantage, Nixon began far ahead and kept increasing his lead. When Mr. McGovern proposed deep cuts in military programs and a $1,000 grant to every American, Nixon jeered, calling the ideas liberalism run amok. Nixon, meanwhile, cited accomplishments like the Paris peace talks on Vietnam, an arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, a prosperous economy and a diplomatic opening to China.

On election night, Mr. McGovern did not bother to call Nixon. He simply sent a telegram offering congratulations. Then, he said, he sat on his bed at the Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls and wrote his concession speech on hotel stationery.

In his book on the campaign, “The Making of the President 1972,” Theodore H. White wrote that the changes Mr. McGovern had sought abroad and at home had “frightened too many Americans.”

“Richard M. Nixon,” Mr. White wrote, “convinced the Americans, by more than 3 to 2, that he could use power better than George McGovern.”

Mr. McGovern offered his own assessment of the campaign. “I don’t think the American people had a clear picture of either Nixon or me,” he said in the 2005 interview. “I think they thought that Nixon was a strong, decisive, tough-minded guy, and that I was an idealist and antiwar guy who might not attach enough significance to the security of the country.

“The truth is, I was the guy with the war record, and my opposition to Vietnam was because I was interested in the nation’s well-being.”

His staff, he said, urged him to talk more about his war experience, but like many World War II veterans at the time, he was reluctant to do so.

How long, he was asked, did it take to get over the disappointment of losing? “You never fully get over it,” he replied. “But I’ve had a good life. I’ve enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.”

Humble Beginnings

George Stanley McGovern was born on July 19, 1922, in a parsonage in Avon, S.D., a town of about 600 people where his father, Joseph, was the pastor of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. A disciplinarian, his father, who was born in 1868, tried to keep his four children from going to the movies and playing sports. His mother, the former Frances McLean, was a homemaker about 20 years her husband’s junior.

The family moved to Mitchell, in southeastern South Dakota, when George was 6. He went to high school and college there, enrolling at Dakota Wesleyan University in 1940. After Pearl Harbor, Mr. McGovern joined the Army Air Corps. In 1943 he married Eleanor Stegeberg, who had grown up with an identical twin on a South Dakota farm. They had met at Dakota Wesleyan.

Mr. McGovern was trained to fly the B-24 Liberator, a four-engine heavy bomber, and he flew dozens of missions over Austria, Germany and Italy.

On his 30th mission, his plane was struck by enemy fire. Lieutenant McGovern crash-landed the plane on an island in the Adriatic. He earned a Distinguished Flying Cross for the exploit.

After his discharge, Mr. McGovern returned to Mitchell — his father had recently died — and resumed his studies at Dakota Wesleyan. He graduated in 1946 and went to Northwestern University for graduate studies in history.

With a master’s degree, he returned to Dakota Wesleyan, a small university, to teach history and political science. “I was the best historian in a one-historian department,” he said in an interview in 2003. During summers and in his free time, he continued his graduate work and received a Ph.D. in history from Northwestern in 1953.

Mr. McGovern left teaching to become executive secretary of the South Dakota Democratic Party, and almost single-handedly revived a moribund operation in a heavily Republican state.

Month after month, he drove across South Dakota in a beat-up sedan, making friends and setting up county organizations. In 1956, gaining the support of farmers who had become New Deal Democrats during the Depression, he was elected to Congress himself, defeating an overconfident incumbent Republican. He became the first Democratic congressman from his state in more than 20 years.

Mr. McGovern left the House after two terms to run for the Senate and was soundly beaten by the sitting Republican, Karl E. Mundt. He then became a special assistant to the newly elected president, John F. Kennedy, and the director of Kennedy’s Food for Peace program, an effort to provide food for the hungry in poor countries.

In 1962, Mr. McGovern ran for the Senate again, and this time he won, by 597 votes. He defeated Joseph H. Bottum, a Republican serving out the term of Senator Francis H. Case, who had died in office.

In the Senate, Mr. McGovern became a reliable vote for Democratic initiatives and a leader on food and hunger issues as a member of the Agriculture Committee. But he was more interested in national politics than in legislation.

After Robert F. Kennedy, fresh from his victory in the California presidential primary, was assassinated in Los Angeles in June 1968, the Kennedy camp encouraged Mr. McGovern to enter the race as an alternative to Humphrey and Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota. Mr. McGovern did so but was unable to catch up to Humphrey.

Almost from the moment the 1968 campaign ended, Mr. McGovern began running for the 1972 nomination. He traveled the country, recording on index cards the names of potential supporters he met. He also became the chairman of a Democratic Party commission on delegate selection, created after the fractious 1968 national convention to give the rank and file more say in picking a presidential nominee.

What became known as the McGovern commission rewrote party rules to ensure that more women, young people and members of minorities were included in delegations. The influence of party leaders was curtailed. More states began choosing delegates on the basis of primary elections. And the party’s center of gravity shifted decidedly leftward.

Though the rules were not written specifically to help Mr. McGovern win the nomination, they had that effect.

After he was crushed by Nixon in the 1972 election, Mr. McGovern returned to the Senate and began campaigning for re-election in 1974. At the Gridiron Club’s annual dinner in 1973, he told the assembled Washington elite, “Ever since I was a young man, I wanted to run for the presidency in the worst possible way — and I did.”

Mr. McGovern was re-elected to the Senate in 1974, a landslide year for Democrats after Watergate. He defeated Leo K. Thorsness, a novice politician.

It proved to be Mr. McGovern’s last success in elective politics. As the conservative movement gained force, Mr. McGovern’s popularity dropped.

In 1980, he was defeated by James Abdnor, a plain-spoken Republican congressman who had clung to Ronald Reagan’s coattails and was helped by anti-McGovern advertisements broadcast by the National Conservative Political Action Committee.

Mr. McGovern ran for the Democratic presidential nomination again in 1984, but withdrew after winning only 23 convention delegates, most of them in Massachusetts.

Unlike some of his peers, Mr. McGovern did not become wealthy in office, and he said he had no interest in lobbying afterward. Instead, he earned a living teaching, lecturing and writing. He briefly owned a motor inn in Stratford, Conn., and a bookstore in Montana, where he owned a summer home. But neither investment proved profitable.

What he called “the big tragedy of my life” occurred in 1994. His daughter Teresa J. McGovern, who had suffered from alcoholism and mental illness, froze to death, acutely intoxicated, in a parking lot snowbank in Madison, Wis., at the age of 45.

His eyes welled up as he talked about it 11 years later. “That just about killed me,” he said. “I had always had a very demanding schedule. I didn’t do everything I could as a father.”

As therapy, Mr. McGovern researched and wrote a book, “Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle With Alcoholism,” published in 1997. (An addiction-treatment center named after her was established in Madison.)

That year, President Bill Clinton appointed Mr. McGovern ambassador to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. He moved to Rome, and he worked on plans for delivering food to malnourished people around the world. In 2000, Mr. Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Returning Home

After four years in Rome, Mr. McGovern and his wife moved back to Mitchell, where they lived in a ranch-style house owned by Dakota Wesleyan and helped raise money for a university library that was named after them. The university is also home to the McGovern Center for Leadership and Public Service, a research and educational institution founded in 2006. The McGoverns also had a home in St. Augustine, Fla.

Eleanor McGovern died in 2007 at 85. A son, Steven, who had also struggled with alcoholism, died in July at 60.

Mr. McGovern’s survivors include three daughters, Ann, Susan and Mary; 10 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Mr. McGovern remained robust in old age. To celebrate his 88th birthday, he sky-dived in Florida. Last fall, he was hospitalized twice, once after falling and hitting his head outside the Dakota Wesleyan library before a scheduled C-Span interview, and another time for fatigue after completing a lecture tour. But he rebounded and resumed making public appearances this year.

Mr. McGovern remained a voice in public affairs, notably in 2008, when, in an op-ed article in The Washington Post, he called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for their prosecution of the war in Iraq.

He published books regularly, on history, the environment and other subjects. In “Out of Iraq” (2006), written with William R. Polk, he argued for a phased withdrawal from Iraq, to end in 2007. In his final book, “What It Means to Be a Democrat,” released last November, he despairs of an “insidious” political atmosphere in Washington while trying to rally Democrats against “extremism” in the Republican ranks.

“We are the party that believes we can’t let the strong kick aside the weak,” Mr. McGovern wrote. “Our party believes that poor children should be as well educated as those from wealthy families. We believe that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes and that everyone should have access to health care.”

With the country burdened economically, he added, there has “never been a more critical time in our nation’s history” to rely on those principles.

“We are at a crossroads,” he wrote, “over how the federal government in Washington and state legislatures and city councils across the land allocate their financial resources. Which fork we take will say a lot about Americans and our values.”

David E. Rosenbaum, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times,

died in 2006. William McDonald contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 21, 2012

An earlier version of this obituary contained these errors: Mr. McGovern was 49, not 50,

when he won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1972.

His wife’s maiden name was Stegeberg, not Stageberg.

The navigator when Mr. McGovern crash-landed his bomber did not die on that flight;

he was killed on another mission, when Mr. McGovern was not flying the plane.

    A Prairie Liberal, Trounced but Never Silenced, NYT, 21.10.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/us/politics/
    george-mcgovern-a-democratic-presidential-nominee-and-liberal-stalwart-dies-at-90.html

Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Senator, Is Dead at 82

October 14, 2012
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — Arlen Specter, the irascible senator from Pennsylvania who was at the center of many of the Senate’s most divisive legal battles — from the Supreme Court nominations of Robert H. Bork and Clarence Thomas to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton — only to lose his seat in 2010 after quitting the Republican Party to become a Democrat, died Sunday morning at his home in Philadelphia. He was 82.

The cause was complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his son Shanin said. Mr. Specter had previously fought Hodgkin’s disease and survived a brain tumor and heart bypass surgery.

Hard-edged and tenacious yet ever the centrist, Mr. Specter was a part of American public life for more than four decades. As an ambitious young lawyer for the Warren Commission, he took credit for originating the theory that a single bullet, fired by a lone gunman, struck both President John F. Kennedy and Gov. John B. Connally of Texas. Seconds later, Kennedy was struck by a fatal shot to the head from the same gunman, the commission found.

In the Senate, where he was long regarded as its sharpest legal mind, he led the Judiciary Committee through a tumultuous period that included two Supreme Court confirmations, even while battling Hodgkin’s disease in 2005 and losing his hair to chemotherapy.

Yet he may be remembered best for his quixotic party switch in 2009 and the subsequent campaign that cost him the Senate seat he had held for almost 30 years. After 44 years as a Republican, Mr. Specter, who began his career as a Democrat, changed sides because he feared a challenge from the right. He wound up losing in a Democratic primary; the seat stayed in Republican hands.

“Arlen Specter was always a fighter,” President Obama said in a statement issued Sunday, calling Mr. Specter “fiercely independent” and citing his “toughness and determination” in dealing with his personal health struggles.

One of the few remaining Republican moderates on Capitol Hill at a time when the party had turned sharply to the right, Mr. Specter confounded fellow Republicans at every turn. He unabashedly supported Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal, and championed biomedical and embryonic stem cell research long before he received his cancer diagnosis.

When he made a bid for the White House in 1995, he denounced the Christian right as an extremist “fringe” — an unorthodox tactic for a candidate trying to win votes in a Republican primary. The campaign was short-lived; Mr. Specter ended it when he ran out of cash. Years later, he said wryly of the other candidates, “I was the only one of nine people in New Hampshire who wanted to keep the Department of Education.”

He enjoyed a good martini and a fast game of squash, and he was famous for parsing his words to wiggle out of tight spots. During Mr. Clinton’s impeachment on charges of perjury and obstruction, Mr. Specter, objecting to what he called a “sham trial” without witnesses, signaled that he would vote to acquit.

But a simple “not guilty” vote would have put him directly at odds with Republicans; instead, citing Scottish law, Mr. Specter voted “not proven,” adding, “therefore not guilty.”

He relished the decades he spent on the Judiciary Committee. He enraged conservatives in 1987 by helping to derail Judge Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court and then delighted them four years later by backing Justice Thomas. The Thomas confirmation nearly cost Mr. Specter his Senate seat; even now, millions of American women remain furious with him for his aggressive questioning of Anita F. Hill, a law professor who had accused Justice Thomas of sexual harassment when they worked together at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

If he had any regrets, Mr. Specter rarely admitted them.

“I’ve gone back and looked at every frame of the videos on Professor Hill, and I did not ask her one unprofessional question,” he said in a 2004 interview with The New York Times. Of the Bork and Thomas confirmations, he said, “I may be wrong, but I’m satisfied with what I did in both those cases.”

Brash confidence and outsize ego were characteristic of Mr. Specter, a man so feared by his own aides and so brusque with colleagues that he earned the nickname Snarlin’ Arlen on Capitol Hill. In 1992, when Mr. Specter’s Senate seat was in danger after the Thomas hearings, Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement, campaigned for him. His rationale was expressed in a statement he made to fellow conservatives, as quoted by the conservative magazine National Review.

“Arlen Specter is a jerk,” he was said to have remarked, “but he’s our jerk.”

Those close to Mr. Specter say there was a softer side to him, but no one denied that as a lawmaker he was all business, with little patience for the false pleasantries of politics.

G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., who followed Mr. Specter’s career, once described how the senator would conduct constituent meetings: “He’ll say, ‘I’m delighted to be here,’ and give his standard 10- or 15-minute opening. Then he’ll say, ‘I’ll take questions now; whoever has a question, put up their hands.’ He will count the hands — 1, 2, 3, 4, to 20. And when 20 is over, he’s out of there.”

Arlen Specter was born on Feb. 12, 1930, in Wichita, Kan., the fourth and youngest child of Harry and Lillian Specter. Harry Specter, a Jewish émigré from the Ukraine, then part of Russia, moved his family back and forth between the East Coast and the Midwest seeking work before settling in Kansas as a peddler. By the time Arlen was 5, he too was peddling, selling cantaloupes door to door by his father’s side.

When scrap metal became salable during World War II, the Specters moved to the small Kansas town of Russell, coincidentally the hometown of another person who would become a prominent Republican senator, Bob Dole. There, the elder Specter opened a junkyard; when tornadoes blew through, he sent his son into the oil fields with a torch to cut up the toppled derricks.

Carl Feldbaum, a friend and a former chief of staff to the senator, traced Mr. Specter’s gruffness to those days.

“There’s a hard-bitten quality that came out of being an immigrant,” Mr. Feldbaum said, “of being the only Jewish family in a small Midwestern town and living through the Depression, war era.”

The Specters later moved to Philadelphia — “so my sister could meet and marry a nice Jewish boy,” Mr. Specter explained — where he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1951, served in the Air Force and then earned a law degree from Yale in 1956. By 1959, he was an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, prosecuting union racketeers and attracting the attention of some leaders in Washington.

His parents were Democrats, and so was he, until he tried to run for Philadelphia district attorney in 1965. As Mr. Specter recalled, the local Democratic chairman told him that the party did not want a “young Tom Dewey as D.A.,” a reference to the former New York governor and racket-buster Thomas E. Dewey, a Republican. So Mr. Specter ran on the Republican ticket as a Democrat. He switched his party registration after he won.

Thus began what Mr. Specter liked to call “the continuing effort I have made to pull the Republican Party to the center.”

He won his first election to the Senate in 1980 and, as he recounted in his 2000 autobiography, “Passion for Truth,” immediately began courting Senator Strom Thurmond, the deeply conservative South Carolina Republican who was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, seeking a seat on the panel.

In the Senate, Mr. Specter, putting his prosecutor’s skills to use, was a relentless interrogator in judicial confirmations. Tom Korologos, a former ambassador and a lobbyist who was often called upon by Republican presidents to shepherd their nominees through the Senate, said that no matter how much information a nominee provided, Mr. Specter wanted more — “the Ph.D. treatment,” in Mr. Korologos’s words.

Never was that more true than during the Bork hearings.

“Bork, I have said many times, was the Einstein of the law,” Mr. Korologos said, “and Specter was the Einstein of the Senate, and they used to talk past each other like two trains. Specter would ask these long, convoluted questions, and Bork would give these long, convoluted answers.”

The Senate rejected the nomination, and conservatives never forgave Mr. Specter. Judge Bork, in an interview with The Times in 2004, called him “generally a bit shifty.” Likewise, women’s groups, who had considered Mr. Specter an ally, never forgave him for accusing Ms. Hill of perjury. Ultimately, Mr. Specter expressed contrition, saying he had come to understand why Ms. Hill’s complaint of sexual harassment had “touched a raw nerve among so many women.”

But the remark, coming in 1992 when Mr. Specter was facing a tough re-election campaign, rang hollow with his critics and even some admirers, who said it was another example of how he did whatever it took to save his political career.

“He would always seem to walk up to the edge, the abyss politically, and find a way to extricate himself from the problem,” Professor Madonna said. “He could pull the rabbits out of more hats.”

But the rabbit-pulling came to an abrupt end in 2010 for Mr. Specter, the longest-serving senator in Pennsylvania history. The year before, as the Tea Party gained strength, Mr. Specter candidly declared his Republican-to-Democrat conversion a matter of political survival.

“I am not prepared to have my 29-year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate — not prepared to have that record decided by that jury,” he said.

Republicans were knocked off stride; many had no warning from Mr. Specter. At first, it seemed that he might have an easy ride to the Democratic nomination. But even with the endorsement of Mr. Obama, he failed to attract support from Democrats. Many were annoyed by the alliance he had forged years earlier with another Pennsylvania senator, the conservative Republican Rick Santorum.

Mr. Specter lost his primary race with just 46 percent of the vote — an outcome that left him looking drained and shocked. In a memoir published last year, “Life Among the Cannibals,” he denounced the partisanship that has enveloped Washington.

“The fringes have displaced tolerance with purity tests,” he wrote.

Besides his son Shanin, Mr. Specter is survived by his wife of 59 years, Joan; a sister, Shirley Kety; another son, Stephen; and four grandchildren.

Though Mr. Specter was known mostly for his contributions to domestic policy — along with Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, he successfully fought to double the budget of the National Institutes of Health for medical research during the Clinton years — he dipped into foreign policy as well. Mr. Feldbaum, Mr. Specter’s former chief of staff, recalled a trip they made to Baghdad in 1990 to meet Saddam Hussein.

Mr. Specter took a camera along — “out of caution, he wanted us to have our own pictures,” Mr. Feldbaum said — but palace guards wrested it out of Mr. Feldbaum’s hands. When Mr. Hussein arrived, the senator demanded his camera back.

“It wasn’t the camera; it was the principle,” Mr. Feldbaum said. “It wasn’t only that he was a United States senator and a representative of the United States of America. He was Arlen Specter.”

    Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Senator, Is Dead at 82, NYT, 14.10.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/us/politics/arlen-specter-senator-dies-at-82.html

Congress Heads for Home With Rancor Still Evident

September 21, 2012
The New York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN

WASHINGTON — The Senate gave final passage early Saturday morning to a stopgap spending measure that will ensure the government’s lights stay on through March, and then closed the doors of one of the least productive Congresses in generations until after the November elections.

The final vote on the spending bill, 62-30, was gaveled shut at 1:16 a.m., the comfortable tally belying the rancor that led up to it. The 112th Congress lurched to the exits the way it started — amid partisan acrimony and backbiting even within the parties.

House Democrats marched to the House steps Friday, chanted, “work, work, work,” and demanded lawmakers stay in town to finish unfinished business like a farm bill to take the place of agriculture laws that expire at the end of the month. They said no Congress since 1960 had recessed this early for the campaign season.

Then they headed home.

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio growled that they should have protested on the Senate steps, where House bills have gone to die since the Republicans took control. The last House bill to pass was much like many others, a largely partisan measure to thwart Obama administration efforts, delicately named the “Stop the War on Coal Act.” It too will die in the Senate.

In that body, the war was as much within the Republican Party as it was between the opposing camps. That was because Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, had succeeded in going around his leadership and forcing a vote on legislation to cut off foreign aid to Pakistan, Egypt and Libya until the countries prove they are working constructively with the United States.

Senators from both parties, backed by the Obama administration, voted it down 20 minutes after midnight Saturday, 10-81, saying it would be detrimental to United States foreign policy as Washington tries to steer the new governments of the Arab Spring toward democratic pluralism. One particular provision of the Paul legislation would have mandated the cutoff of foreign aid to any country where a United States embassy is attacked, an invitation to terrorists to attack American diplomatic posts in friendly countries like Israel, said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.

But with foreign aid less popular than ever and feelings raw over the recent diplomatic attacks, no one wanted to take a vote many constituents would not like.

“People aren’t too happy with me right now,” Mr. Paul conceded. But, he added, the leaders of countries like Pakistan and Egypt “laugh at us and snigger and turn away and say, ‘fools.’ What we need in this country is an American Spring.”

The Senate did pass a nonbinding resolution expressing its opposition to allowing Iran to attain nuclear arms, 90-1. Mr. Paul, the lone “no” vote, denounced the measure as committing the country to pre-emptive war with the Islamic Republic.

With the exit signs beckoning, Senate Republicans bowed to Democratic demands that the Senate’s last vote before the campaign season be to take up legislation to increase access for recreational hunting and fishing, particularly on federal lands, build up habitat conservation and open up financing for the creation and maintenance of shooting ranges, among other things. The sportsmen’s package was drafted by Senator Jon Tester of Montana, and openly pushed to the Senate floor to help his tough re-election fight against Representative Denny Rehberg, a Republican who had pushed a similar package through the House.

Republican opposition to that nakedly political move had kept the Senate from completing its work on Thursday and almost forced senators to stay for a final vote Sunday morning. But the lure of the exits was ultimately greater than the desire to protect Mr. Rehberg’s senatorial aspirations. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, made one last effort to substitute Mr. Rehberg’s version for Mr. Tester’s. The Democrats objected, and the Tester bill will be the pending matter when the Senate returns in November.

The main order of business for the final round of predawn votes was the stopgap spending legislation to keep the government running on autopilot into next year. When Republicans took control of the House, they eschewed such measures and promised to fund the government through carefully drafted spending bills that would reshape the government in a conservative direction.

In the end, both parties were more interested in avoiding a debilitating showdown that might have shut the government down just before the election. The spending bill finances the government through March at an annual rate of $1.047 trillion, $4 billion higher than spending for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. Total spending, including emergency, disaster and war spending, would be at an annualized rate of $1.15 trillion, $26.5 billion less than this fiscal year, but most of that savings would come from lower war costs.

The level corresponds with the cap set in the Budget Control Act of 2011 that resolved the impasse over the federal debt ceiling, but it is $19 billion higher than the budget drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, and passed by the House this spring.

Barring a burst of productivity in the lame-duck session in November and December, the 112th Congress is set to enter the Congressional record books as the least productive body in the post-World War II era. It had passed a mere 173 public laws as of last month. That was well below the 906 enacted from January 1947 through December 1948 by the body President Harry S. Truman referred to as the “do-nothing” Congress, and far fewer than many prior Congresses have passed in a single session.

    Congress Heads for Home With Rancor Still Evident, NYT, 21.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/us/politics/lawmakers-going-home-with-rancor-still-evident.html

A Budget Crisis Averted, for Now

August 1, 2012
The New York Times

Members of Congress used to be embarrassed when they could not perform their basic job of passing spending bills and instead had to finance the government with a series of short-term resolutions. But such patchwork has now become commonplace, and it is a sign of Washington’s profound dysfunction that the short-term agreement reached on Tuesday came as a relief to both sides.

House and Senate leaders settled on a deal to keep the government running through March, preventing it from shutting down when the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. With Congress polarized and paralyzed by the coming election, no regular appropriations bills have been enacted, and none will be before the deadline.

The prospect of a shutdown was a real one because House Republicans broke an agreement that they had reached with the Senate last year on the size of the federal budget for the 2013 fiscal year. In settling the debt-ceiling crisis last year, the two chambers passed a measure setting discretionary spending at $1.047 trillion for 2013. But to make one of its periodic points about excessive spending, the House recklessly chopped $20 billion off that amount in March, much of which would have come out of Head Start, Pell grants and state aid.

At the time, many House conservatives said that they relished a confrontation with the Senate, hoping the threat of a shutdown would give them the cuts they wanted. After all, it worked the year before when Republicans cynically used the deadline to wring nearly $40 billion in cuts from the 2012 budget. The withdrawal of that much spending helped neutralize the stimulative effects of the previous year’s payroll tax cut, keeping the economy stagnant.

The difference this year is the November election. Wiser Republican leaders knew that a shutdown crisis in September would leave a bad taste with voters, many of whom (correctly) tend to blame these kinds of things on their party. So the lawmakers agreed on a continuing resolution that will keep the spending limit at $1.047 trillion — far lower than it should be when the economy needs a boost, but at least it’s not making things worse. The White House signed on, and the resolution is supposed to be passed after the August recess.

Both parties are hoping the outcome of the election will give them an advantage when the agreement has to be renegotiated next year. But stalemate is still the most likely outcome as long as voters keep electing Republican lawmakers who are unwilling to compromise on spending and taxes. Representative Steven LaTourette of Ohio, one of the few moderate Republicans left in the House, made that clear on Tuesday when he said he couldn’t take it anymore and would not seek re-election after nine terms.

“There are people on the right and the left who think that if you compromise you’re a coward, you’re a facilitator, you’re an appeaser,” he said, adding that “people are more interested in fighting with each other than they are in getting the no-brainers done and governing.”

That kind of common sense will be missed.

    A Budget Crisis Averted, for Now, NYT, 1.8.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/opinion/after-budget-deal-no-government-shutdown-this-year.html

A Bad Amendment Defeated

March 1, 2012
The New York Times

Only one Senate Republican — Olympia Snowe of Maine, who is retiring — voted against a truly horrible measure on Thursday that would have crippled the expansion of preventive health care in America. The amendment, which was attached to a highway bill, was defeated on a narrow 48-to-51 vote. But it showed once again how far from the mainstream Republicans have strayed in their relentless efforts to undermine the separation of church and state, deny women access to essential health services and tear apart President Obama’s health care reform law.

The amendment, which was enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, would have allowed any employer or insurance company to refuse coverage for any activity to which they claim a religious or moral objection.

That would have meant that any employer who objects to cervical-cancer vaccines could have refused to provide health insurance that covers them. The same goes for prenatal sonograms for unmarried mothers, or birth control, H.I.V. screening or mammograms.

Health care reform, for the first time, required virtually all insurance policies to cover a package of preventive services without co-payments, including flu shots, pap smears and prenatal care. In August, after an Institute of Medicine recommendation, the Obama administration expanded that list to include birth control and screening for H.I.V. and cervical cancer, among other services.

Churches were exempted on religious grounds from covering birth control. And, last month, Mr. Obama announced a plan to let church-related institutions, like hospitals and universities, shift the cost of this coverage to their insurance companies. But that still wasn’t enough for Republicans.

If churches are exempted on religious grounds, they said, why shouldn’t any employer be allowed to refuse coverage if they have objections? Imposing this mandate, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah said Thursday, constitutes “tyranny,” a bullying of the little guy by President Obama at the behest of his “feminist allies.”

But the real bullies are those who would allow any employer to arbitrarily cut off access to services recommended by the Institute of Medicine. Individual employers can no more claim exemptions from important public health requirements than they can to paying taxes for government policies they oppose.

Republicans claimed the issue was about religious freedom. But it was really about denying consumers — and particularly women — the right to make their own medical decisions and keeping up the antigovernment and anti-President Obama drumbeat.

Naturally, the party’s presidential candidates support it, having based their campaigns on the canard that Mr. Obama is using government to control people’s lives or trample on their religious beliefs. But most Americans support free access to contraception. Few people want their bosses or their insurance companies to tell them how to live their lives.

The good news is that the amendment was defeated. And, by championing it, the Republicans may well help inform more people about the popular benefits of health care reform — and about the extremism of one party that seems determined to take them away.

    A Bad Amendment Defeated, NYT, 1.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/opinion/a-bad-amendment-defeated.html

Senate Rejects Step Targeting Coverage of Contraception

March 1, 2012
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday upheld President Obama’s birth control policy, voting to kill a Republican effort to let employers and health insurance companies deny coverage for contraceptives and other items they object to on religious or moral grounds.

The 51-to-48 vote illustrated a sharp divide between the parties and brought to the Congressional forefront the social issues that have roiled the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Over four days of debate, Democrats accused Republicans of infringing on women’s rights and focusing on issues long settled while Republicans accused Democrats of threatening religious freedom and violating the Constitution.

“The Senate will not allow women’s health care choices to be taken away from them,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington.

The politically charged fight heated up last month after the Obama administration unveiled its policy requiring health insurance plans to offer free contraceptives for women — a rule that provoked furious criticism from Roman Catholic institutions and some other religious groups. The administration quickly offered a revision that would force the health insurers — not the institutions — to bear the cost.

Still, Senate Republicans tried to seize on the uproar surrounding the administration rule and offered a Senate proposal that would allow a broad exemption for employers, framing it as a matter of conscience as much as contraception.

“The president is trampling on religious freedom,” said Senator Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska.

Democrats saw the issue tilting politically in their favor in recent days and forced the Senate vote even as some Republicans indicated unease about pressing the matter. One Republican, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, joined 48 Democrats and two independents in opposing the plan, days after she announced she was retiring from the Senate. Three Democratic senators — Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Ben Nelson of Nebraska — voted for the proposal, along with 45 Republicans. Mr. Casey and Mr. Manchin are up for re-election this year. Mr. Nelson is retiring.

Despite the vote, Congress is not done with the contraception debate. Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday that House Republicans also wanted to protect religious employers who object to the requirement for contraceptive coverage.

“It’s important for us to win this issue,” Mr. Boehner said. He did not offer any details about a legislative path forward, but hinted that it would differ from the one tried by Senate Republicans.

Illustrating the political power of the issue, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, moved quickly on Wednesday to clarify a comment that he was against the Republican plan by Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri. Mr. Romney said that he had misunderstood the question and that he supported Mr. Blunt’s proposal. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. weighed in on the issue during a visit to Iowa State University on Thursday, saying that the administration plan was “screwed up in the first iteration” but that the compromise was the correct approach.

In the Senate, Democrats, defending the new health care law, said the Republican proposal went far beyond contraception and would allow employers to deny coverage for other items and services to which they objected.

Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, said Republicans were attacking women’s health care as part of “a systematic war against women.”

Mr. Blunt offered the proposal as an amendment to a highway bill. Under the proposal, health insurance plans and employers could refuse to provide or pay for coverage of “specific items or services” if the coverage would be “contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer or other entity offering the plan.”

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, urged the Senate to reject the proposal. “The Obama administration believes that decisions about medical care should be made by a woman and her doctor, not a woman and her boss,” Ms. Sebelius said.

Republicans had hoped that the Senate debate would highlight what they say is the coercive nature of Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul, approved by Congress in 2010 without any Republican votes.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said: “The president’s health care law empowers bureaucrats here in Washington to decide which tenets religious institutions can and cannot adhere to. If they don’t get in line, they’ll be penalized.”

Democrats argued that Republicans were trying to turn back the clock on women’s rights and pursuing an extreme right-wing social agenda that should scare voters in this election year.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said Republicans were “reviving the culture wars.”

“The Blunt amendment would allow any employer or insurer to deny coverage for virtually any treatment for virtually any reason,” Mr. Reid said.

Mr. Blunt, a former president of Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Mo., which objects to the administration policy, said: “This amendment does not mention any procedure of any kind. The word ‘contraception’ is not in there because it’s not about a specific procedure. It’s about a faith principle that the First Amendment guarantees.”

The 2010 health care law requires most insurers to cover preventive services without co-payments or deductibles. Under the administration policy, these services include all contraceptive drugs and devices approved by the Food and Drug Administration, as well as sterilization procedures.

Churches and other houses of worship would be exempt. In February, after protests from the Roman Catholic Church and others, Mr. Obama announced what he described as “an accommodation” for church-affiliated schools, universities, hospitals and charities. They would not have to provide or pay for contraceptive coverage, but their female employees could obtain such coverage directly from the employers’ insurance companies at no cost.

Republicans called this an accounting gimmick and said that religious employers would eventually bear the cost, in higher premiums.

Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, disagreed. “When insurers provide birth control, they save money,” she said. “It’s not only life-saving, it is cost-saving.”

Dr. Hal C. Lawrence III, executive vice president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, opposed the Blunt amendment and affirmed the value of contraception, saying it “improves and saves babies’ lives, improves maternal health and can be life-saving for women with serious medical problems.”

The lobbying arm of the American Cancer Society also opposed the Blunt amendment, saying it would allow employers to deny coverage of life-saving preventive services like mammograms and smoking cessation programs, based on “undefined religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

    Senate Rejects Step Targeting Coverage of Contraception, NYT, 1.3.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/us/politics/senate-kills-gop-bill-opposing-contraception-policy.html

Senate Approves Ban on Insider Trading by Congress

February 2, 2012
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The Senate passed a sweeping new ethics bill on Thursday that would ban insider trading by members of Congress and require prompt disclosure of stock transactions by lawmakers and by thousands of officials in the executive branch of government.

The 96-to-3 vote followed three days of impassioned debate in which senators tried to outdo one another in proclaiming their support for ethics in government.

President Obama called for passage of such legislation in his State of the Union address last week. More than half of House members, including at least 100 Republicans, have signaled support for it, and House Republican leaders said Thursday that they would schedule consideration of the Senate-passed bill on the House floor next week.

A handful of lawmakers have tried for years to enact restrictions on stock dealing by members of Congress. Their efforts drew little support until new attention to the practice last year — coupled with election anxiety — prompted a flood of backing for the idea and support from Mr. Obama.

Senators of both parties said the bill was desperately needed to restore trust in Congress at a time when its public approval rating had sunk below 15 percent.

Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York and an architect of the bill, said its purpose was simple: “to make sure that members of Congress play by the exact same rules as everyone else.”

The bill would prohibit members of Congress from trading stocks and other securities on the basis of confidential information they receive as lawmakers. It says explicitly that they are not exempt from the federal law and regulations that ban such insider trading.

Moreover, the bill requires members of Congress to disclose the purchase or sale of stocks, bonds, commodities futures and other securities within 30 days of transactions. The information would be posted on the Web.

A similar disclosure requirement would apply to many federal employees in the executive branch, including the White House, cabinet departments and independent agencies.

The new reporting requirements would not apply to transactions involving investments in mutual funds with “widely diversified” assets.

“For the first time,” Ms. Gillibrand said, “this bill would establish that we have a clear fiduciary responsibility to the people we serve. It removes any doubt that both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission can investigate and prosecute cases involving insider trading of securities from nonpublic information that we have access to when we do our jobs.”

By a vote of 60 to 39, the Senate approved an amendment requiring “political intelligence” firms to register like lobbyists. Such firms collect information on Capitol Hill and sell it to hedge funds and others who use it to inform their investment decisions.

The main bill was genuinely bipartisan — a product of work by Ms. Gillibrand and Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut; Susan Collins, Republican of Maine; and Scott P. Brown, Republican of Massachusetts.

Republicans led the effort to impose new financial disclosure requirements on federal agency officials, similar to those for members of Congress. “What is good for the goose should be good for the gander,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama.

By a vote of 58 to 41, the Senate approved Mr. Shelby’s amendment requiring executive branch employees to report promptly on stock transactions, just as members of Congress would have to do.

Lawmakers disagreed about the number of executive branch employees who would be affected. Mr. Lieberman said it was more than 300,000. Aides to Mr. Shelby said it was fewer than 28,000.

Federal securities law does not explicitly exempt members of Congress. But, Ms. Collins said, “there is a dispute among experts” about whether lawmakers are covered by existing laws on insider trading.

The bill is meant to eliminate any ambiguity. It says that lawmakers have “a duty arising from a relationship of trust and confidence” to Congress, the federal government and citizens of the United States — a duty they violate by trading on nonpublic information.

Mr. Lieberman, the chief sponsor of the bill, said its passage would “help assure our constituents that we are here in Washington to address their concerns and not to profit personally” from public service.

The Senate voted Thursday on more than a dozen amendments before passing the bill, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or Stock Act.

A few lawmakers complained that the Senate was moving too fast, without proof of wrongdoing.

“The assumption here is that some of our colleagues are doing insider trading on the stock market,” said Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma. “Nothing could be further from the truth. The real insider trading is the horse-trading that goes on in this body that is not always in the best interest of the country.”

The “no” votes were cast by Mr. Coburn and Senators Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, and Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina. Mr. Bingaman said, “I can’t support a bill that places unreasonable and burdensome reporting requirements on over 300,000 federal workers.”

The Senate also approved an amendment to block payment of bonuses to senior executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said it was outrageous that the executives were receiving bonuses after the mortgage giants had been bailed out by taxpayers.

    Senate Approves Ban on Insider Trading by Congress, NYT, 2.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/us/politics/senate-approves-ban-on-insider-trading-by-congress.html

Filibustering Nominees Must End

January 28, 2012
The New York Times

The system for reviewing presidential appointments is broken. The Senate has a constitutional duty to provide advice and consent on the naming of judges and high-ranking executive branch officials. But the process has been hijacked by cynical partisanship and cheap tricks.

This is not a new problem, but it has gotten intolerably worse and is now threatening to paralyze government, as Republicans use the filibuster to try to kill off agencies they do not like. The number of unfilled judicial seats is nearing a historic high.

It is time to end the ability of a single senator, or group of senators, to block the confirmation process by threatening a filibuster, which can be overcome only by the vote of 60 senators. We agree with President Obama’s call in the State of the Union address for the Senate to change its rules and require votes on judicial and executive nominees within 90 days.

This is a major change of position for us, and we came to it reluctantly. The filibuster has sometimes been the only way to deny life terms on the federal bench to extremist or unqualified judges. But the paralysis has become so dire that we see no other solution.

The president could be doing a better job of nominating judges expeditiously. Still, 85 federal judgeships are vacant, a number that has grown by 65 percent under Mr. Obama. Of those, the federal court’s administrators consider 31 to be “judicial emergencies,” which means other judges on courts with those openings have unmanageable caseloads.

Today, 18 judicial nominees wait for Senate votes even though they were approved by the Judiciary Committee, 16 unanimously. It can take a year for a nominee to receive a vote, an extraordinary hardship — since many cannot work while they wait — that threatens to reduce the pool of highly qualified candidates.

There are many examples. Goodwin Liu, a liberal law professor nominated last year to an appellate bench, was filibustered even though he was entirely in the legal mainstream, supported by conservatives including Kenneth Starr and Clint Bolick. His offense: He once dared to criticize Justice Samuel Alito Jr. as being too conservative.

Democrats used the filibuster to impose a two-year delay on President George W. Bush’s appointment of Jeffrey Sutton, a highly credentialed candidate, for a federal judgeship because of his doubts about Congress’s power to enact legislation protecting workers and consumers.

It is not just judicial appointments that are frozen. When Congress created a vitally needed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as part of the financial reform law, Republicans in the Senate decided to block confirmation of a chief so the agency could not exercise its full regulatory powers.

This was not a matter of rejecting one choice for substantive reasons and asking for another. Republicans first told Mr. Obama that they would not confirm any head of the bureau unless he first agreed to gut its powers. Mr. Obama dropped his original choice, the highly qualified Elizabeth Warren, before she was named. Senate Republicans then blocked the confirmation vote for Richard Cordray, a strong pro-consumer leader and the bureau’s chief of enforcement. Mr. Obama gave Mr. Cordray a recess appointment, which means he will be able to serve only until the end of 2013.

Senators also use filibusters to block nonpolitical positions, like the administrator of the General Services Administration — to demand passage of a pet project, out of pique or, most troubling, as part of the Republicans’ electoral strategy to block anything Mr. Obama wants.

There was an attempt to deal with this seven years ago. A bipartisan group of 14 senators agreed to prevent judicial filibusters except under “extraordinary” circumstances after Republicans threatened to do away with the filibuster rule they now abuse so routinely. The center did not hold, and the agreement fell apart.

Under Mr. Obama’s proposal, during the 90-day period, hearings can be held, research conducted, objections raised, thunderous speeches given. But in the end, the senators will have to vote directly on the nominee, not hide behind the filibuster. This will require making confirmation hearings substantive events, not the Kabuki theater they are now.

We know it is risky. But the nation votes for a president, who needs to be able to appoint top officials and judges. The Senate needs to decide whether to give its consent or not. We can only hope that the president and the Senate will do that job responsibly, especially when both are controlled by the same party. Voters could then watch and reach their own judgments. And with fewer vacancies, government and the judiciary could do the nation’s work.

    Filibustering Nominees Must End, NYT, 28.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/filibustering-nominees-must-end.html

Senate Vote Approves Rise in Debt Limit

January 26, 2012
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted on Thursday to allow a further increase in the federal debt limit, permitting President Obama to borrow $1.2 trillion more to operate a government that spent about 55 percent more than it collected in revenue last year.

The 52-to-44 vote generally followed party lines, with Democrats supporting the increase in borrowing authority and Republicans opposed.

In the House last week, Republicans passed a “resolution of disapproval” to stop the increase in the debt limit. But the Senate refused on Thursday to take up that measure.

The upshot is that the debt limit will rise immediately to $16.4 trillion, from the current ceiling of $15.2 trillion.

House Republicans, led by Speaker John A. Boehner, boast that they have changed the conversation in Washington so that lawmakers focus on how to cut spending.

But Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, complained that the Senate was allowing the debt limit to rise in a perfunctory way, with little debate.

“Little has changed in Washington in the last five years,” Mr. Coburn said. “We’ve argued, debated and lamented on how to rein in the federal government’s costs and out-of-control spending. All the time that was going on, we were on a spending binge, spending money we do not have on things we do not need. Even though we knew we had to borrow more money, Congress has done nothing to avoid raising the debt limit further. Nothing.”

The 2009 economic stimulus law set the debt limit at $12.1 trillion. Congress increased the limit in December 2009 and February 2010 and again last summer, as part of a bipartisan budget agreement.

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, defended the new increase in the debt limit, saying it would not authorize additional spending, but just ensure that the United States could honor past commitments.

“Increasing the debt limit permits the Treasury Department to pay the bills we have already incurred,” Mr. Baucus said.

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said that many Republicans who voted against the increase in the debt ceiling had also voted in recent years to spend more on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on domestic programs.

Mr. Durbin admonished his colleagues: “Don’t vote for the spending if you won’t vote for the borrowing, because we know now that they are linked together. They are one and the same.”

In an address to Congress in February 2009, a week after signing the economic stimulus law, Mr. Obama said he would “cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office.”

Republicans said Thursday that Mr. Obama was far from that goal. The deficit — $1.3 trillion in each of the last two fiscal years — has declined slightly from 2009, when it totaled $1.4 trillion.

The federal budget deficit is the difference between money spent and money collected by the government in a single year, while the debt represents amounts borrowed by the government over many years to fill those gaps.

With the latest increase in the debt limit, Republicans said, the debt will cross a significant threshold, as it will be roughly the same size as the economy, measured by the gross domestic product.

About two-thirds of the debt is held by the public in the form of Treasury bills, notes and bonds. The rest consists mainly of special-issue government securities held by trust funds for Social Security, Medicare and other programs.

The Treasury still finds that it can borrow at extraordinarily low interest rates. But Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said the United States should learn from the experiences of European countries that spent beyond their means.

    Senate Vote Approves Rise in Debt Limit, NYT, 26.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/us/politics/senate-approves-1-2-trillion-debt-limit-rise.html

Senate Postpones Vote on Internet Piracy Bill

January 20, 2012
The New York Times
By JONATHAN WEISMAN

WASHINGTON — Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, on Friday called off a scheduled vote on the online antipiracy bill that had rallied the World Wide Web and rocked Capitol Hill, and House leaders took steps to slow legislation as well.

Taking to the medium that helped organize extensive protests against the legislation, Mr. Reid, Democrat of Nevada, announced a delay in the vote via the social media Web site Twitter. But he indicated the issue, which had been scheduled for a vote Tuesday, had not died.

“There’s no reason that legitimate issues raised about Protect I.P. can’t be resolved,” he wrote, referring to the legislation by its shorthand name. “Counterfeiting & piracy cost 1000s of #jobs yearly. Americans rightfully expect to be fairly compensated 4 their work. I’m optimistic that we can reach compromise on Protect I.P. in coming week.”

In the House, Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called off plans to formally draft his version of the antipiracy bill next month.

After vowing two days ago to move forward, Mr. Smith said in a statement on Friday: “The committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation.” But he added, “The House Judiciary Committee will postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

The Protect I.P. Act and its counterpart in the House, the Stop Online Piracy Act, had broad bipartisan support when they were drafted by Mr. Smith and Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The bills were pushed hard by the Hollywood studios, recording industry, book publishing world and United States Chamber of Commerce as antidotes to rampant piracy of American cultural wares by offshore Web sites.

But many Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, saw the bills as a threat, and said they would stifle creativity on the Internet while forcing search engines and social media to become police officers for the Department of Justice. Other outlets, like Wikipedia, objected to any proposed laws that could crimp the free flow of information on the Internet.

With new-economy aplomb, the Internet giants rallied their troops to rise up against Washington stalwarts like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. What had started as a nonpartisan issue began turning to Republican advantage, as Republicans led the flight away from the bill.

By Thursday night, senior Republican staff members were bragging that the remaining supporters of the bills were largely Democrats, even though members of both parties had helped draft them.

Mr. Leahy went along with Mr. Reid’s decision to back off, but he made it clear he was doing so reluctantly.

“More time will pass with jobs lost and economies hurt by foreign criminals who are stealing American intellectual property and selling it back to American consumers,” he said in a statement.

“The day will come when the senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem,” he added. “Somewhere in China today, in Russia today, and in many other countries that do not respect American intellectual property, criminals who do nothing but peddle in counterfeit products and stolen American content are smugly watching how the United States Senate decided it was not even worth debating how to stop the overseas criminals from draining our economy.”

    Senate Postpones Vote on Internet Piracy Bill, NYT, 20.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/technology/senate-postpones-piracy-vote.html

Games and Gimmicks in the Senate

January 5, 2012
The New York Times
By LAURENCE H. TRIBE

Cambridge, Mass.

ON Wednesday President Obama, using his power to make recess appointments, named Richard Cordray as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A few hours later, he used the same power to appoint three new members to the National Labor Relations Board, acting to overcome unprecedented Senate encroachment on his duty to appoint executive officials. The president’s right to do so is clearly stated in the Constitution: the recess appointments clause empowers him to “fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”

However, since the twilight years of the George W. Bush administration, the Senate has tried to nullify this power by holding “pro forma” sessions every three days, during what no one doubts would otherwise be an extended recess. In these sham sessions, manifestly serving only to circumvent the recess appointment safety valve, a lone senator gavels the Senate to order, usually for just a few minutes; senators even agree beforehand that no business will be conducted.

It is this transparently obstructionist tactic to which President Obama said “enough,” striking a badly needed blow for checks and balances with strong support both from the text and the original purpose of the recess appointment clause.

Its aims, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 67, included facilitating appointments “necessary for the public service to fill without delay.” Although the main concern in 1789 involved difficulties of travel that kept a recessed Senate from acting swiftly, the broad imperative retains modern relevance, even when the Senate engineers its own unavailability.

Past practice also points the way. Presidents have long claimed, attorneys general have long affirmed and the Senate has long acquiesced to the president’s authority to make recess appointments during extended breaks within a Senate session. In 1905, the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded that “recess” referred to periods when, “because of its absence,” the Senate could not “participate as a body in making appointments” — a definition that precludes treating pro forma sessions as true breaks in an extended recess.

Since 1867, 12 presidents have made more than 285 such appointments, without constitutional objection by the Senate. And attorneys general going back to Harry M. Daugherty in 1921 have held that the Constitution authorizes such appointments.

This does not free the president to make recess appointments whenever the Senate breaks for lunch or takes routine weekend vacations that conceal no objective scheme to frustrate presidential appointments. Without limits on both sides, he could bypass the Senate’s “advice and consent” role by routinely recess-appointing controversial nominees.

These limits mean the president can resort to recess appointments of this kind only in instances of transparent and intolerable burdens on his authority. Article II charges him to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed”; this duty, combined with appointment and recess-appointment powers, requires an irreducible minimum of presidential authority to appoint officials when the appointments are essential to execute duly enacted statutes.

In this case, the administration’s focus on the gimmicky nature of pro forma sessions is best understood as one among several factors that combine to present unconstitutional interference with the president’s irreducible power and duty.

Equally crucial is the identity of the two agencies involved. The N.L.R.B. cannot decide cases without at least three members, which it would have lacked without a recess appointment. And the C.F.P.B. cannot legally exercise its full statutory authority, including the regulation of credit reporting agencies and payday lenders, without a director. Some Senate Republicans vowed to filibuster any new N.L.R.B. appointments in an effort to shut down that agency, and nearly all pledged to deny any C.F.P.B. appointee an up-or-down vote unless the president agreed to weaken that new agency’s statutory powers.

When these appointments are challenged in court — the United States Chamber of Commerce has already said it may file suit — the scant judicial doctrine on recess appointments will surely benefit from careful assessment of text, history and structure. But whatever standards the courts ultimately adopt to construe the clause, this case ought to be a slam-dunk.

I am no enthusiast for sweeping claims of unilateral executive authority, as I made clear during the debt ceiling crisis last summer, when I found nothing akin to a “recess borrowing clause” to authorize the unilateral action some had urged upon the president. Here, in contrast, President Obama has taken steps to enforce existing statutes, not ignore them.

The Constitution that has guided our Republic for centuries is not blind to the threat of Congress’s extending its internal squabbles into a general paralysis of the entire body politic, rendering vital regulatory agencies headless and therefore impotent. Preserving the authority the president needs to carry out his basic duties, rather than deferring to partisan games and gimmicks, is our Constitution’s clear command.

 

Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard,

is the author of “The Invisible Constitution.”

    Games and Gimmicks in the Senate, NYT, 5.1.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/opinion/games-and-gimmicks-in-the-senate.html