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Good afternoon, Progressive Electorate readers. This is your afternoon open thread to discuss all things Hill-related. Use this thread to praise or bash Congresscritters, share a juicy tip, ask questions, offer critiques and suggestions, or post manifestos. We'll be checking in all weekend, especially if the snowpocalypse hits.
It's looking like the Senate is putting in hours that would make even the most dedicated graduate student wince.
The Senate voted 63-33 to limit debate on the 2010 defense appropriations bill in the early hours of the morning Friday.
The $636.3 billion defense bill was passed Wednesday by the House, and in addition to war funds carries the extension of several soon-to-expire policies, ranging from unemployment aid and healthcare benefits to the anti-terrorism law known as the Patriot Act.
The bill now heads for a 7:30 a.m. Saturday vote in the Senate after Friday's 1:30 a.m. cloture vote, according to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
And if you were watching C-Span just before 2 a.m. today, you probably saw a very bored and rather irritated looking Senator Franken presiding.
Speaking of which, I assume that everyone has seen this:
I have mixed feeling about this. Yes, it was refreshing to hear Franken tell Lieberman to STFU. And yes, Harry Reid was trying to move things along. And yes, there is almost no actual persuasion happening during those Floor debates. But it still seemed a little petty and I thought we were leaving petty to the Republicans.
With time running out to forge a comprehensive climate agreement, negotiators at the U.N.-sponsored talks are considering a new draft agreement that would not require a binding treaty by 2010 but would lay the groundwork for a more ambitious target in limiting the rise of temperatures around the globe.
The decision to remove the 2010 deadline is significant, because scientists have warned that the longer nations wait to make deep greenhouse gas emission cuts, the harder it will be to avert dangerous climate change.
Considering treaties require two-thirds majority for Senate ratification and considering we can't even convince Republicans to support the troops, this might not be the worst news in the world. In fact, the worst news in the world would be if China were to refuse to cooperate.
"Developed and developing countries have now agreed to listing their national actions and commitments, a finance mechanism, to set a mitigation target of 2 degrees Celsius and to provide information on the implementation of their actions through national communications, with provisions for international consultations and analysis under clearly defined guidelines," the official said. "No country is entirely satisfied with each element, but this is a meaningful and historic step forward and a foundation from which to make further progress."
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In other treaty news, the United States and Russia are close to a deal to cut stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
START expired on Dec. 5; the two countries have been operating on an interim agreement since. The new version of Start would require each side to reduce deployed strategic nuclear warheads to roughly 1,600, down from 2,200, administration officials said. It would also force each side to reduce its strategic bombers and land and sea-based missiles to below 800, down from the old limit of 1,600. The remaining issues to be resolved center on verification, American officials said.
Still, that should leave both sides plenty of nukes to destroy the world several times over and if the GOP blocks this, we can ask why they hate the planet so much.
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On the health care front, Senator Ben Nelson's concerns run deeper than just the Coathanger Amendment. He might just be concern trolling, though.
Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, the final Democratic hold-out on health-care reform legislation, said Thursday that his opposition to the bill extends beyond the use of federal subsidies for abortion-covering plans to the impact that expanding Medicaid will have on the finances of his home state.
A Medicaid expansion would "create an underfunded federal mandate for the state of Nebraska," Nelson told a Nebraska radio station. Instead of mandating that Medicaid cover everyone up to a certain level, as the House and Senate bills now do, he argued that states should be permitted to "opt out" and find other means of covering their poorest residents.
Health-care policy experts say that Nelson's concerns have little basis -- and that, in fact, Nebraska could make out better at the end of the day than many other states.
The good news is that the RWNJ rumor that the White House threatened to close an airbase in Nebraska to get Nelson to vote for the bill is a load of crap.
And finally: If the White House wanted to put pressure on Nelson, threatening to, as Goldfarb put it, "put Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base on the BRAC list" is just about the least effective way they could do so. See, BRAC -- the Base Realignment and Closure process -- just doesn't work that way.
On the other side of the aisle, so to speak, invokes Tom Petty. No they "Won't Back Down."
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blasted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Friday morning for speeding a major healthcare overhaul through the upper chamber before Christmas.
McConnell and senior Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) said the speed and secrecy Democrats have used to move such a massive reform is unprecedented.
~snip
McConnell made clear that he does not plan to back down next week. His tough stance makes it more likely that the Senate will vote late in the day on Dec. 24 to pass the healthcare bill if Democrats are to meet their Christmas deadline.
Stung by the intense White House effort to court the votes of moderate holdouts like Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, liberals are signaling that they have compromised enough. Grass-roots groups are balking, liberal commentators are becoming more critical of the president, some unions are threatening to withhold support and Howard Dean, the former Democratic Party chief, is urging the Senate to kill its health bill.
Two days after the Justice Department announced federal indictments related to the fatal beating of a Mexican immigrant in Shenandoah, Pa., federal authorities said the charges were part of a larger effort to step up civil rights enforcement after nearly eight years of decreased hate crime prosecutions.
Thomas E. Perez, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said the department brought more federal hate crime cases this year than in any other year since 2001.
Iranian soldiers briefly took control of an oil field Friday near the border in southern Iraq in an incident that Iraqi officials called a "provocation."
The Iranian troops took down an Iraqi flag that flew at the Fakka oil field and replaced it with an Iranian one, according to Gen. Habib al-Hussaini, who commands the Iraqi army division responsible for the area.
"They stayed for a few hours, and then they left," Hussaini said in a telephone interview.
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Talking Points Memo has the video of Dylan Ratigan getting into it with Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Personally, I liked her response.
There's not much point in having me on if you're not going to let me respond.
Like politicians across the nation in both parties, Clark has begun planning for the states' decennial redistricting of their congressional boundaries. That process will not formally start until 2011, after April's census count yields the December 2010 announcement of the state-by-state reapportionment of the House for the next decade.
Clark is confident that Republicans will control the process in Indiana under the leadership of GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels, given their party's expectation that it will hold the state Legislature after next November's election. Clark's preparations are a stark warning to Democratic Reps. Brad Ellsworth and Baron Hill in the state's southernmost 8th and 9th congressional districts.
There's your reason to care about state legislative races.
Biden appeared on Thursday with Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) to tout the effects of the stimulus law in Rep. Nathan Deal's (R-Ga.) district.
Deal said he was caught off guard by the media event. He explained that had it not been for Perdue's office making a courtesy call, he would not have known Biden was planning to appear in his district.
~snip
Regardless of partisan politics, protocol dictates that the White House invite members of Congress to attend major administration events in their districts.
According to records obtained by the AJC through the state's Open Records Act, both the Office of Congressional Ethics and the U.S. House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct have inquired about Deal's role in a 20-year business arrangement with the state that earned his company $1.5 million from 2004 through 2008.
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