A week after Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) held Congressional hearings on a bill that would prevent doctors in D.C. from performing abortions after 20 weeks, protesters descended on the Arizona Congressman’s office — who represents a district 2,300 miles and two time zones away from the nation’s capital — to ask “Mayor Franks” to fix pressing local concerns like pot holes , broken street lights and traffic lights:

Despite the persistent gender gap in opinion polls and mounting criticism of their hostility to women’s rights, Republicans are not backing off their assault on women’s equality and well-being. New laws in some states could mean a death sentence for a pregnant woman who suffers a life-threatening condition. But the attack goes well beyond abortion, into birth control, access to health care, equal pay and domestic violence.

Republicans seem immune to criticism. In an angry speech last month, John Boehner, the House speaker, said claims that his party was damaging the welfare of women were “entirely created” by Democrats. Earlier, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, sneered that any suggestion of a G.O.P. “war on women” was as big a fiction as a “war on caterpillars.”

But just last Wednesday, Mr. Boehner refuted his own argument by ramming through the House a bill that seriously weakens the Violence Against Women Act. That followed the Republican push in Virginia and elsewhere to require medically unnecessary and physically invasive sonograms before an abortion, and Senate Republicans’ persistent blocking of a measure to better address the entrenched problem of sex-based wage discrimination.

On Capitol Hill and in state legislatures, Republicans are attacking women’s rights in four broad areas.

The chart above is from the invaluable people at Voteview, who use data on Congressional voting to measure political positions and polarizations. What it shows is what should be obvious, but much of the Beltway chattering class still refuses to acknowledge: there has been a huge increase in polarization, and it’s because Republicans have moved right, not because Democrats have moved left. (You want to look at the Northern Democrat line; the southern Democrats disappeared or became Republicans).

As I said, this is obvious; yet people who try to say this get frozen out of the discourse, even when — like Mann and Ornstein — they have heretofore been pundits in good standing. Instead, you’re supposed to wring your hands over partisanship in the abstract.

And when the attempt to turn this hand-wringing into actual political effort flops, you blame it on the false equivalency police!

The facts have a well-known anti-centrist bias.

In a 2-to-1 decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a main provision of the Voting Rights Act on Friday, rejecting an Alabama county’s challenge to the landmark civil rights law. The provision requires governments with a history of discrimination to obtain approval from the Justice Department or from a federal court in Washington for changes in election procedures. It applies to all or parts of 16 states. The court said that Congress developed extensive evidence of continuing racial discrimination when it reauthorized the provision six years ago.

The leaders of the G8 group of the world’s most powerful economies say they want debt-stricken Greece to remain in the eurozone.

In their summit communique, G8 leaders also committed themselves to promoting growth alongside fiscal responsibility.

However, the leaders acknowledged “the right measures are not the same for each of us”.

Greece’s possible exit from the eurozone was high on the agenda, following inconclusive elections there.

The leaders of France, Germany, the US, the UK, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia have been meeting at Camp David in the US state of Maryland.

WASHINGTON — In the 1980s, the military had its infamous $800 toilet seat. Today, it has a $17,000 drip pan.

Thanks to a powerful Kentucky congressman who has steered tens of millions of federal dollars to his district, the Army has bought about $6.5 million worth of the “leakproof” drip pans in the last three years to catch transmission fluid on Black Hawk helicopters. And it might want more from the Kentucky company that makes the pans, even though a similar pan from another company costs a small fraction of the price: about $2,500.

The purchase shows the enduring power of earmarks, even though several scandals have prompted efforts in Congress to rein them in. And at a time when the Pentagon is facing billions of dollars in cutbacks — which include shrinking the Army, trimming back purchases of fighter jets and retiring warships — the eye-catching price tag for a small part has provoked sharp criticism.

The Kentucky company, Phoenix Products, got the job to produce the pans after Representative Harold Rogers, a Republican who is now the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, added an earmark to a 2009 spending bill. While the earmark came before restrictions were placed on such provisions for for-profit companies, its outlays have continued for the last three years.

The company’s owners are political contributors to the congressman, who has been called the “Prince of Pork” by The Lexington Herald-Leader for his history of delivering federal contracts to donors and others back home.

Military officials have said the pans work well, and Mr. Rogers defended them.

“It’s important that Congress do what it can to provide our military with the best resources to ensure their safety and advance our missions abroad, while also saving taxpayer dollars wherever possible,” Mr. Rogers said in a statement. “These dripping pans help accomplish both of these goals.”

But Bob Skillen, the chief engineer at a small manufacturer called VX Aerospace, which has a plant in North Carolina, said he was shocked to see what the Army was spending for the Black Hawk drip pans. He designs drip pans that his company sells to the military for a different helicopter, the UH-46, for about $2,500 per pan, or about one-eighth the price that his Kentucky competitor charges. The pans attach beneath the roof of the helicopter to catch leaking transmission fluid before it can seep into the cabin.

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday confirmed two nominees chosen by President Obama for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, overcoming Republican objections and bringing the seven-member board to full strength for the first time since 2006, before the economic crisis.

The OpenSecrets blog of the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington says the Supreme Court ruling “allowed non-profit corporations under the Tax Code 501c to spend unlimited amounts of money running … political advertisements while not revealing their donors.” The blog said “conservative non-profit groups [have] spent $121 million without disclosing where the money came from.”

The blog ticks off other results of Citizens United.

“The percentage of spending coming from groups that do not disclose their donors has risen from 1 percent to 47 percent since the 2006 midterm elections.”

Spending by those secretive 501c non-profits “increased from zero percent of total spending by outside groups in 2006 to 42 percent in 2010.”

OpenSecrets said the “amount of independent expenditure and electioneering communication spending by outside groups has quadrupled since 2006.”

Meanwhile, 72 percent of “political advertising spending by outside groups in 2010 came from sources that were prohibited from spending money in 2006.”

The Center for Public Integrity, which is devoted to investigative journalism, reports 62 percent of the money raised by the two conservative groups “associated with former Bush adviser Karl Rove have come from mystery donors, a statistic that shows the increasingly important role being played by non-profits in a post-Citizens United political world.”

Democrats were casting the general election fight as a referendum on whether moderates should still have a place in Washington, while Tea Party organizers said it would be seen as a national test of the movement’s enduring strength.

Democratic leaders, who had doubted their odds against Mr. Lugar, a Republican so moderate that even the leaders admitted that plenty of Democrats liked him, sounded giddy about their November opponent: Richard E. Mourdock, a Tea Party-supported Republican who seized a remarkable 61 percent of the vote in part by denouncing bipartisanship and pledging to an unwavering conservative approach.

“Democratic donors across the country are going to see this as a prime pickup opportunity,” said Matt Canter, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who added that the Indiana seat would fall among five top Republican-held seats being targeted in the fight for control of the Senate.

Labor leaders, too, said they saw an opportunity now in Indiana. “We’re all ramping up our plans as we speak,” said Nancy J. Guyott, president of the Indiana A.F.L.-C.I.O.

National conservative groups, some of which had poured more than $3 million to benefit Mr. Mourdock in the primary, were poised to send still more if needed. The number of such outside groups also appeared likely to grow if the contest here, against Representative Joe Donnelly, a Democrat, appears truly competitive — a notion some conservative leaders remained skeptical about, given Indiana’s Republican leanings.

“It’s a big race because a lot hinges on our success,” said Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns at FreedomWorks, which trains Tea Party members and which spent about $850,000 in Mr. Mourdock’s victory and plans to be similarly involved in the general election.

“If Mourdock were not to win,” Mr. Steinhauser said, the gloating would come not just from Democrats but establishment Republicans, pointing to the Tea Party. “They would want to blame that on us — ‘See, we told you so,’ ” he said.

By Wednesday, the outlines of a new political battle were emerging, with Democrats trying to paint Mr. Mourdock as a far-right candidate with little appeal for independents or moderate Republicans, and conservatives portraying Mr. Donnelly as a typical Democrat.

The Club for Growth, which had spent money on television and radio commercials against Mr. Lugar in the primary and said it would contribute more, if needed, in the general election, said Mr. Donnelly was “an economic liberal who votes in lock-step” with Democratic leaders.

I wrote earlier about the electoral implications of the defeat of longtime Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana in the Republican primary on Tuesday. It should make the seat much more competitive and will increase Democrats’ odds of retaining the Senate, although the nominee that Republicans chose instead, Richard E. Mourdock, the state treasurer, is perhaps a very slight favorite over the Democratic nominee Joe Donnelly.

The bigger story here, however, is that Mr. Lugar is the latest in a long line of relatively moderate Republican senators to meet an electoral demise. In fact, most moderate Republicans who served in the Senate just a few years ago will no longer be in the Congress when it meets again 2013. This is quite simple to illustrate.

I took the 55 Republican senators that served in the 109th Congress from 2005 through 2007 and divided them into two groups, moderates and conservatives, according to their voting records as analyzed by the statistical system DW-Nominate. Because there were an odd number of Republican senators in that year, I could not divide them exactly evenly, but I put 27 in the moderate group and 28 in the conservative group, with the dividing line falling between Senator John McCain of Arizona and Senator John Thune of South Dakota.

Of the 27 moderates, at most six will return to the Congress in 2013: Mr. McCain, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.

The House Budget Committee is set to meet today on a new GOP plan to stave off further cuts in military spending that are mandated by the Budget Control Act’s sequestration trigger. The Pentagon will be required to trim $55 billion from its budget next year and House Republicans think they’ve figured out a way to prevent that: cut programs for the poor, the AP reports:

The Republicans who control the House are using cuts to food aid, health care and social services like Meals on Wheels to protect the Pentagon from a wave of budget cuts come January. […]

Fully one-fourth of the House GOP spending cuts come from programs directly benefiting the poor, such as Medicaid, food stamps, the Social Services Block Grant, and a child tax credit claimed by working immigrants.

As CAP’s Melissa Boteach, Lawrence Korb and Max Hoffman noted in a report last month, with the cuts they are calling for, House Republicans will be protecting “largely useless” weapons systems, preserving funding for unnecessary programs like the V-22 Osprey, and adding two nuclear submarines to the U.S. military’s already “overwhelming preponderance of sea power.”

At the same time, the GOP plan would, for example, cut food stamps for 2 million people and reduce the same benefits for 44 million others. Nearly 300,000 school children would lose free school meals and hundreds of thousands could lose their Medicaid or CHIP coverage.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops last month criticized the GOP’s cuts to food stamps, tax credits for immigrant families, and other safety net programs as “unjustified and wrong.”

And while the AP notes that the GOP plan “will be dead on arrival” in the Democrat-controlled Senate, “they’re likely just a sample of what’s in store next year from Republicans if Mitt Romney wins the White House and the GOP takes back the Senate.”

Tea Party favorites such as Stephen Fincher of Tennessee were swept into Congress on a wave of anger over government-funded bailouts of banks.

Now those incumbents are collecting thousands of dollars for re-election campaigns from the same Wall Street firms whose excesses they criticized. They have taken no significant steps to curb them or prevent future taxpayer-financed rescues.

Republican freshmen have made clear their disdain for expanding government, and openly opposed a financial regulatory overhaul enacted by Democrats in 2010 before the newcomers arrived in Washington. Their ranks include 10 Tea Party-backed freshmen on the House Financial Services Committee, part of a force that won election in a populist backlash to government spending that included emergency lending to major banks and bailout of firms including U.S. automakers.

Still, the lawmakers haven’t passed, considered or even introduced legislation to address concerns about “too-big-to- fail” banks voiced by members of both parties and such Federal Reserve bank presidents as Richard Fisher of Dallas and Jeffrey Lacker of Richmond, Virginia.

“I haven’t seen any of them putting forth legislation on breaking up the big banks or on other things that would genuinely prevent a bailout next time,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, a Washington- based umbrella group of organizations that supported the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and other financial regulations.

Some of the key provisions in the 2012 bill include:

Strengthening federal penalties for repeat sex offenders and creating a federal “rape shield law,” which is intended to prevent offenders from using survivors’ past sexual conduct against them during a rape trial;
Mandating that survivors, no matter their income levels, are not forced to bear the expense of their own rape exams or for service of a protection order;
Funding support for: community violence prevention programs, legal aid for survivors of violence, people who are evicted from their homes due to domestic violence, support programs specifically for immigrant communities, rape crisis centers and hotlines, programs and services for survivors with disabilities.
Keeping survivors safe by requiring that a victim’s protection order will be recognized and enforced in all state, tribal, and territorial jurisdictions within the United States;
Providing additional tools for protecting women in Native American tribal jurisdictions, by enabling tribal courts to prosecute non-native folks who live on tribal lands (note: all legal protections afforded defendants in State courts, including due process, would still be mandated in tribal courts).
Republican senators have taken issue with a few new provisions in this current reauthorization, including: protections for queer couples, protections for immigrant women, and expanding the reach of tribal jurisdictions.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science ; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization . Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist .

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday overcame opposition from several Republicans and passed legislation that would overhaul the financially ailing Postal Service, voting weeks before the agency plans to begin closing thousands of post offices and consolidating hundreds of processing centers to cut costs.

The measure was passed 62 to 37, despite a warning from Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, that it would add to the national debt.

Senators who sponsored the bill said it would provide needed relief for the Postal Service, which said it would run out of cash if Congress did not act.

“This is a bipartisan bill that will bring necessary change to the Postal Service in order to save it,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, who sponsored the bill with Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts, both Republicans, and Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware.

Postal worker unions gave the bill a mixed reaction. The National Association of Letter Carriers called it flawed because, among other things, it would cut services and jobs. The American Postal Workers Union agreed but said the bill would provide short-term relief to the Postal Service.

“There are some things that we don’t like in the bill, but it’s far better that something has passed rather than nothing,” said Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union.

The Postal Service, which objected to parts of the bill because it would limit the agency’s ability to close facilities and cut services, expressed disappointment in the vote. “If this bill were to become law, we would be back before the Congress within a few years requesting additional legislative reform,” the postmaster general, Patrick R. Donahoe, said in a written statement.

The bill would provide retirement incentives for nearly 100,000 of the post office’s 547,000 workers. It also would allow the agency to study the elimination of Saturday deliveries if it could not cut costs in the next two years, and it would free up the agency to offer a broader range of revenue sources like delivering beer and wine for retailers. The agency would also recoup more than $11 billion that it had overpaid into one of its pension funds.

Perhaps most significant, the bill would restructure the payments the agency makes into a health benefits fund for future retirees. Under a 2006 law, the agency has to pay $5.5 billion annually into the fund, which the Postal Service said had added $20 billion in debt to its balance sheet since 2007.

The bill would lower the amount of the prepayments and allow the agency to stretch them out over 40 years. The Postal Service is the only federal agency that prepays its future retiree health obligations.

The latest ugly (and seemingly needless) partisan fight on Capitol Hill concerns a measure designed to prevent domestic violence against women.

On Wednesday, women from both parties raced to hold news conferences in which they promoted bills (or in the Republicans’ case, a germ of a bill) that would extend the Violence Against Women Act, replete with upsetting personal anecdotes meant to demonstrate the need for reauthorization, if not bipartisanship in seeking it.

The act, first passed by Congress in 1994 and reauthorized, in a bipartisan and unremarkable manner, in 2000 and 2005, gives tools to law enforcement officers, courts and social service agencies to prevent and respond to domestic violence. Its passage is widely credited with reducing domestic violence.

The Senate version of the reauthorization, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee along partisan lines, would continue existing grant programs that aid local law enforcement agencies and shelters and would strengthen federal stalking laws – measures supported by Republicans, who would also like to consolidate some programs and put caps on Justice Department salaries among other streamlining processes.

The version being offered by Senate Democrats has attracted some Republican resistance because it would give tribal authorities the ability to prosecute non-American Indians in cases of domestic violence on reservations. It would also include gay, bisexual and transgender victims in programs for domestic violence and allow more illegal immigrants who are victims of domestic violence to claim temporary visas.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, is working on her own version of the bill, which would be offered as an amendment to the Democrats’ version. It features many modifications, including making eligibility for services under the law gender-neutral and maintaining the current cap on visas.

In a news conference Wednesday morning, Senators Patty Murray of Washington, Barbara Boxer of California and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, all Democrats, berated Republicans for resisting their bill – even though its 61 co-sponsors, some of them Republicans, say that the bill will pass their chamber.

Odds are, in other words, that if Obama wins, he will still be negotiating with Republican leaders in Congress. But the same can’t be said for Mitt Romney.

If Romney wins the election, it’s almost a sure bet that Republicans win control of both the House and the Senate. And that matters. Right now, the GOP’s agenda is the Ryan budget, and that’s entirely fiscal: It’s a premium support plan for Medicare, and tax cuts, and deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other domestic programs. All that can be passed through budget reconciliation — which is to say, all that can be made immune to the filibuster.

So if Romney wins and the Republicans take control, they could accomplish quite a lot on party-line votes, even if their majorities are slim, and Democrats are opposed. Indeed, Romney could end up being a fairly transformational president for conservatives so long as he’s paired with a Republican Congress.

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday defeated a Republican attempt to block a vote on a bill to save the struggling Postal Service. The vote was 62 to 37.

The Senate had hoped to have a final vote on the legislation on Tuesday, but Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, raised a point of order to try to derail the bill.

Now a final vote could come Wednesday on the wide-ranging measure, which would allow the Postal Service to study the elimination of Saturday deliveries and to provide a broader range of potentially lucrative services like delivering beer and wine for retailers.

The bill would also provide retirement incentives for cutting some of the agency’s 547,000 positions and would restructure benefit programs, including stretching out and reducing payments for the health benefits of future retirees over a 40-year period. Mr. Sessions and three other Republican senators — Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Dan Coats of Indiana and Bob Corker of Tennessee — argued that the bill would add $34 billion to the national debt. The measure would allow the Postal Service to collect $11 billion that the agency overpaid into a pension fund and allow it to defer $23 billion in payments that would go toward its retiree health benefit plan.

The Postal Service said the prepayment to the pension fund had added $20 billion in debt to its balance sheet since 2007. Under the Budget Control Act, passed last year, the Senate is prohibited from bringing legislation to the floor that adds to the deficit.

Five-term Representative Tim Holden of Pennsylvania was defeated in a Democratic primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, losing to Matt Cartwright, a lawyer, who made Mr. Holden’s vote against President Obama’s health care law a major issue in the newly redrawn 17th District.

Mr. Holden, who is part of the Blue Dog Coalition of conservative Democrats, would become the second incumbent to lose to a newcomer in a House primary this season. This year, Representative Jean Schmidt, Republican of Ohio, was also defeated by a member of her own party . In both cases, the anti-incumbent “super PAC” Campaign for Primary Accountability has worked against the defeated House member.

In Mr. Holden’s case, the liberal League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn.org also piled on, taking advantage of a new district drawn by Republican legislators that is considerably more Democratic than Mr. Holden’s old seat. Center Forward, a group that is pro-Blue Dog Democrat, tried to bail out Mr. Holden with an advertisement last week attacking Mr. Cartwright. Mr. Holden himself had tried to portray his opponent as a corrupt lawyer wrapped up in a pay-to-play judicial scandal.

But ultimately, Mr. Cartwright’s own money may have made the biggest difference in a district where most Democratic voters had never been represented by Mr. Holden. Mr. Cartwright also hit Mr. Holden for voting with Republicans on some energy policies.

The incumbent was one of only 25 remaining Blue Dogs, whose ranks were decimated in the Republican surge of 2010 that wiped out most Democrats in Republican-leaning districts.

WASHINGTON — The financial health of the Social Security system deteriorated in the last year, while the outlook for Medicare stabilized somewhat, the government said on Monday.

The annual report by the trustees for the two federal programs estimated that the Social Security trust funds would be exhausted in 2033, three years earlier than the trustees projected a year ago.

But they left unchanged their estimate that Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund would be exhausted in 2024. That is the same date that was projected a year ago, and is five years earlier than was projected two years ago.

The central message of the new report remains the same: the two entitlement programs are unsustainable without structural changes that have so far eluded Congress and the administration.

Google spent $5.03 million on lobbying in the first quarter of the year, the New York Times reported Monday. According to filings with the US House of Representatives, the company’s spending represents a 240 percent increase from a year ago. It’s a possible reflection of Google’s increased struggles with government agencies and privacy advocates over its business practices, but also of its crusade against PIPA and SOPA.

In just the last few months, Google has been caught bypassing Safari’s Do Not Track setting, and was slapped with a (minuscule) fine for using its Street View vans to collect data from unsecured WiFi networks (including e-mail addresses and webpage requests). These moves, along with the company’s privacy policy changes in March, have earned it many side-eyes from lawmakers and regulatory agencies.

From January to March of this year, Google spent over $5 million on lobbying, nearly matching its entire 2010 lobbying budget of $5.2 million. If the company maintains this pace, it will likely earn itself a spot as one of the top ten spending entities for the year as logged by Open Secrets. Comparing this same rate with 2011 figures, Google would outspend the entire tobacco industry ($17.07 million), the combined spending of JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup ($18.67 million), but would be just barely behind the combined budgets of pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Merck ($20.685 million). For comparison, Apple spent only $500,000 for the same 2012 quarter; Microsoft spent $1.79 million.

Google’s spending may look excessive on the surface, but it’s important to note the company also spent some $4 million lobbying against SOPA and PIPA, two bills that overreached in their restrictive powers with the purported goal of stopping content piracy, according to CNN. If the company chooses not to continue the fight against CISPA and other bills similar to SOPA and PIPA that rise in their wake, its spending may drop off for the rest of the year.

Well before online bill paying was popular, the Postal Service in 2000 began operating a secure system that would have allowed it to remain the primary conduit for most Americans’ monthly payments. But the Internet industry objected, and Congress successfully pressured the Postal Service to abandon it.

The same pattern has repeated several times over the last decade, with the Postal Service identifying a way to cope with the decline of traditional mail, only to have companies — and ultimately Congress — object.

The agency’s troubles, which could result in the closing of thousands of post offices and hundreds of mail processing centers as early as next month, have many sources. Some are the inevitable result of technological changes, and others are the result of missteps by the Postal Service.

But top Postal Service officials and outside experts say that another, underappreciated factor has been an insistence by Congress that the service not compete directly with private companies, even as companies like FedEx and U.P.S. have encroached on the Postal Service’s turf.

Now, with the volume of traditional mail plummeting and with the agency on the brink of running out of cash, the Senate is debating a bipartisan bill that would let it enter into several new lines of business, like shipping beer and wine. And it would create a chief innovation officer to identify new lines of electronic business. The Senate is expected to vote as early as next week on whether to advance the legislation.

The bill would also provide retirement incentives intended to cut about 20 percent of the Postal Service’s 547,000 workers, allow the service to study the elimination of Saturday deliveries, and recoup more than $11 billion that the Postal Service overpaid into one of its pension funds.

The agency’s leaders, however, say that cost-cutting alone will not improve its fortunes and that it must increase revenue.

Tony Rudy, who served as deputy chief of staff to Tom DeLay , a former House majority leader, was sentenced on Friday to five months in a halfway house. Mr. Rudy, 45, pleaded guilty six years ago to conspiring with Jack Abramoff , a powerful Republican lobbyist, and others to accept gifts as a Congressional staff member and later to offering gifts to public officials as a lobbyist in exchange for legislative favors. His cooperation with prosecutors has led to 18 convictions.

The Utah Republican convention is going to a second ballot, to determine whether six-term Sen. Orrin Hatch will be renominated outright today, or if he will face a primary in June against former state Sen. Liljenquist.

Out of over 3,900 delegates in attendance on Saturday, Hatch received 57.2 percent of the vote on the first ballot, the state GOP announced, to Liljenquist’s 28.8 percent. All eight other candidates have been eliminated — even if their supporters combined together, they would not be able to overtake Liljenquist.

Hatch and Liljenquist will now compete again on a second ballot, in a one-on-one match. The level of support needed to win outright is 60 percent of the vote, at which point there would not be a primary.

At the state GOP convention two years ago, incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett came in third place, and was eliminated without the chance to compete in a primary.

Beginning in 2015, all new cars in the United States will likely need to be fitted with data-recording “black boxes” very similar to the devices currently used in aircraft. The U.S. Senate has already passed a bill that will make the devices a requirement, and the House is expected to approve the bill as well. Section 31406 of Senate Bill 1813 states that mandatory event data recorders must in installed in all cars starting in 2015, and it outlines civil penalties that will be levied against violators, Infowars.com reports. While the primary function of the black box devices would be to record and transmit data that could be used to assist a driver and passengers in the event of an accident, the bill has legislation built in that would give the government access to the data with a court order, and it also gives authorities the ability to access the data as part of an investigation. According to the report, these caveats could potentially lead to Big Brother-like scenarios where citizens are monitored or even actively tracked without their knowledge or consent.

The top eight companies that spent the most on federal lobbying from 2007 to 2009 all saw their reported tax rates decrease from 2007 to 2010, according to a new analysis released Monday by the Sunlight Foundation.

The report notes that these top eight firms spent $540 million on lobbying from 2007 to 2009. They filed 332 lobbying reports that mentioned taxes and named 491 different tax bills in those reports.

The top eight companies that spent the most on lobbying were Exxon Mobil, Verizon Communications, General Electric, AT&T, Altria, Amgen, Northrop Grumman and Boeing. Exxon Mobil spent the most, some $81.92 million from 2007 to 2009.

AT&T recorded the largest tax reduction, with its tax rate falling from 34.0 percent to negative 6.4 percent from 2007 to 2010, or an estimated reduction of more than $7.3 billion. Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris, had the smallest decline from 2007 to 2010, with its rate declining from 28.9 percent to 27.4 percent. Six of the top eight companies saw declines of at least 7 percentage points.

The report comes as both President Barack Obama and Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney, have proposed lowering corporate tax rates. Obama has proposed lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent but eliminating loopholes and deductions. American manufacturers would get a bigger tax cut, having an effective rate of no more than 25 percent.

Romney has proposed cutting the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and repealing the corporate alternative minimum tax.

An elite network of K Streeters is on track to hitting the $117,000 limit that individuals are allowed to give federal candidates, PACs and party committees in the current campaign cycle, according to an analysis of federal records by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Their largess wins donors appreciation trips to venues such as Martha’s Vineyard and intimate dinners with lawmakers.

The rise of super PACs and a spate of closely contested races brought about by redistricting have intensified the political money chase. Still, lobbyists who tap their own bank accounts to give the maximum constitute the “standouts, the uber lobbyists,” according to Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the CRP.

Top givers say contributing gives them unparalleled access to policymakers and a chance to fulfill party loyalties. With more than six months remaining in the cycle, the 25 most generous lobbyists have already given in excess of $2.4 million, according to the analysis.

But critics have argued that the benefits would disproportionately land in the pockets of wealthy individuals and businesses such as sports franchises, financial firms and celebrities. Congress’ revenue estimators, the Joint Committee on Taxation, has calculated that the top 11 percent of small businesses would grab 64 percent of the break, while the 125,000 firms with $1 million a year in adjusted gross income would snag 18.3 percent. The 9.2 million small businesses at the bottom of the income heap would share about 15 percent of the break.

The bill “is not focused on cutting taxes for small businesses, but instead would provide tax cuts to the most fortunate,” the Obama administration noted in a statement. “Under the bill’s definition of income, many of the ‘small businesses’ that would receive the largest tax breaks are law partners, consultants, and other wealthy individuals and corporations with the biggest profits. The proposal is a giveaway that will cost $46 billion and could, in fact, lead to delays and reductions in investment and hiring.”

House Republicans are finding that their embrace of Roman Catholic bishops can have a political downside.

Ever since the Obama administration ran afoul of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over mandated contraception coverage, Republican lawmakers have used Catholic leaders as a cudgel in their efforts to paint the Obama administration as waging a war on religious freedom. But the group recently sent letters to chairmen of two House committees lambasting Republican efforts to cut government spending.

In particular, the bishops spoke out loudly against the budget blueprint passed by the House last month, as well as legislation passing through committees that would turn spending cuts into reality through changes to social welfare programs.

“Major reductions at this time of economic turmoil and rising poverty will hurt hungry, poor and vulnerable people in our nation and around the world,” the Rev. Stephen Blaire, bishop of Stockton, Calif., and the Rev. Richard E. Pates, bishop of Des Moines, wrote for the conference. “A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to the poor and vulnerable persons; it requires shared sacrifice by all.”

For House leaders, the letters could sting. Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio is Catholic. Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the architect of the House spending plan, has said that his Catholic faith informed his decisions.

“I want them to take a bigger look,” Mr. Boehner said on Wednesday of the bishops. “The bigger look is that if we don’t make these decisions, these programs won’t exist. And then they’ll really have something to worry about.”

But the call for shared sacrifice dovetails with Democratic talking points, amplified almost daily by President Obama. Along with the cuts in spending, the budget plan calls for significant reductions in corporate and personal income tax rates. Those tax cuts are supposed to be paid for by equal cuts to tax deductions and credits, a prescription some tax writers think will be impossible. But no matter what, Republicans oppose any increase in overall tax revenues.

In their letters, the bishops laid out “moral criteria to guide these difficult budget decisions: protect human life and dignity.” They wrote that “the needs of those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty, should come first,” and that “government and other institutions have a shared responsibility to promote the common good of all, especially ordinary workers and families who struggle to live in dignity in difficult economic times.”

On Wednesday morning, the House Agriculture Committee approved legislation to restrict eligibility to food stamps, cut nutrition aid to the states, and trim nutrition and obesity education grants. The action helps it meet its obligation under the budget to cut $33 billion in spending over 10 years.

The Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday was set to pass legislation requiring a Social Security number to claim the refundable child tax credit and eliminating the Social Services Block Grant, which helps state programs like child care, Meals on Wheels for older people, and child protective services. The committee must produce $53 billion in savings over 10 years to help prevent across-the-board defense cuts set to take place in January.

“The House-passed budget reflects the tough choices necessary to get this country back on course,” said Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “Republicans have made a commitment to reform Washington to strengthen our economy, create jobs and get our fiscal house in order.”

The US will make a profit from bailing out the nation’s banks and carmakers at the height of the financial crisis, the Treasury Department has said.

The bank bailouts may result in a return of $2bn (£1.3bn), the Treasury said in its latest projections for the government’s response to the crisis.

And the recovering auto industry has added 230,000 jobs as a result.

The recession was the worst since the Great Depression and $19.2tn of wealth was wiped out, it said.

“Although the economy is getting stronger, we have a long way to go to fully repair the damage the crisis has left behind,” the Treasury said.

“We are still living with the broader economic cost of the crisis, which can be seen in high unemployment.”

The vast majority of the projected returns - more than $179bn - come from the Federal Reserve’s huge investments and loans to banks.

The Fed and the Treasury together invested $182bn just to save insurance giant AIG.

The American Nazi Party has registered its first lobbyist in Washington DC.

John Bowles, 55, told US media he wanted to address political rights and ballot access and he expected lawmakers would accept meetings with him.

Lobbying was something the party would “try out for the first time and see if it flies,” Mr Bowles told ABC News. He registered as a lobbyist this week.

Lobbying is a common practice in US politics and lobby groups are required to disclose their interests in detail.

Mr Bowles’ Capitol Hill registration also listed his lobbying interests as agriculture, clean air and water, civil rights, the constitution, healthcare, immigration, manufacturing, and retirement.

Mr Bowles said he would not be paid for his work on Capitol Hill and would take a “careful and objective” approach.

The push for a broad overhaul of the federal tax code will begin in earnest next week with a series of meetings between Representative Dave Camp, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the Republican rank-and-file.

Republicans and Democrats have said for years that Congress would have to make real progress on a broad rewriting of the tax code before next year, when the Bush-era tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 expire. The budget plan that passed the House last month is forcing the issue.

That plan called for a new tax code with just two personal tax rates – 25 percent and 10 percent – and a 25 percent corporate income tax rate. Mr. Camp had proposed those rates in a letter to the House Budget Committee chairman, Paul D. Ryan, earlier this year.

Those sharp cuts in tax rates – at a cost of $4.5 trillion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center – are supposed to be paid for by ending or curtailing tax deductions and credits. Democrats, and some tax experts, say that cannot be done, unless Republicans plan to gut tax programs for the working poor, like the earned income credit.

But Sage Eastman, a spokesman for the Ways and Means Committee, said Mr. Camp was eager to prove them wrong.

“The chairman would not have written that letter, and every Republican member of the committee would not have signed that letter, and the budget committee chairman would not have put it in the budget if there was not a way to do it,” Mr. Eastman said. “I’ll say emphatically we can do it.”

Mr. Camp will hold a series of planning sessions next week in the leadership office of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority whip. The idea is to lay out the magnitude of the challenge, Mr. Eastman said. Not only are the Bush tax cuts expiring, but Congress has yet to renew dozens of routine tax breaks for businesses that expired last year, or pass a measure to stave off expansion of the alternative minimum tax into the middle class, another usually routine measure. If nothing is done, tax increases on Jan. 1 would total $309 billion in 2013 alone – and $5.4 trillion through 2022.

The House budget assumes that the federal government would collect as much revenue as it would if all the tax cuts were renewed, but it mandates a dramatically simpler tax code. It also prescribes eliminating the alternative minimum tax. Mr. Camp says the goal is not to create a tax code overhaul that can pass the Republican House but one that can get through the Democratic Senate and be enacted.

Mr. Camp and Mr. Ryan have taken heat from the left and budget watchdogs for the budget’s failure to specify a single tax loophole to close, much less the changes necessary to keep the tax rate reductions “revenue neutral.” Mr. Eastman said that was intentional.

“We’re going through a concerted effort to have this conversation, not only with the various stakeholders in Congress but with the American people as well,” he said. “This is not ‘We know best. Now you take your medicine.’ That’s what happened in the health care law.”

The Ways and Means Committee will also hold a hearing next week on tax-favored defined contribution retirement plans, like 401(k)’s and individual retirement accounts, with an eye on trimming the tax benefits.

Rep. Dan Benishek’s (R-MI) embrace of the Republican Party’s platform ran into stiff opposition at a town hall meeting in Saulte Sainte Marie, Michigan when at least a dozen constituents, many of them senior citizens, pushed back against Benishek’s claims on Medicare, Social Security, oil subsides and health care reform.
Benishek couldn’t even get through his opening remarks before attendees began criticizing his support for Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposed budget that would increase the cost of health care for seniors by providing “premium support” vouchers to eligible senior citizens.

“If you have a better idea as how to keep Medicare sustainable over the long term, I’d be happy to hear it,” offered Benishek.

He may have regretted those words after the event, because for half an hour, Benishek fielded several suggestions on how to increase funding for Medicare, ranging from ending oil subsidies to increasing taxes on the wealthiest two percent, suggestions that Benishek summarily dismissed.

Benishek also displayed a shocking lack of self-awareness about his level of knowledge of some key facts. “There are no government subsidies for oil,” he told one woman who suggested ending the very real subsidies given to oil corporations to help defray the cost of Medicare.

Perry’s remarks focused on the shift from peer-to-peer file-sharing to file-sharing websites. “Cyberlockers” such as Megaupload are one example. But Perry also pointed to MovieBerry as an example of an infringing site that looks legitimate to many consumers and has even convinced legitimate companies to buy advertising.

Perry conceded that “cyberlocker” sites were not inherently illegal, but he said sites like Megaupload have crossed the line because their business model was supported by “not much else other than copyright infringement.” He claimed that the top five cyberlockers get tens of billions of page views per year, generating millions of dollars in profits.

Perry emphasized the large number of jobs supported by Hollywood movies. Hollywood employs more than just actors and directors, he said. “We have drivers, florists, people moving things around.” Yet thanks to online file-sharing, he claimed, Hollywood is making fewer movies, and spending less on each one. That means fewer jobs.

Perry stressed the need for additional legislation to crack down on “rogue sites.” He argued that the new domain seizure powers created by the 2008 Pro-IP Act were insufficient to deal with the problem. And he denounced the OPEN Act, sometimes touted as a SOPA alternative, as “unworkable.”

At the Brooklyn event, Perry’s comments were followed by a rebuttal from Brooklyn Law School Professor Jason Mazzone, who pointed out that Perry’s remarks had completely ignored limitations on copyright such as fair use. According to an account by Mazzone’s colleague Derek Bambauer, Perry responded by saying that Paramount “wants to give fair use ‘a wide berth,’ and that their core concerns are about full downloads of their films, not uses of clips and such.” But he conceded that SOPA had not made such allowances for fair use.

At the University of Virginia, Perry’s remarks were followed by a rebuttal by Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge, who argued that Hollywood’s failing profits had less to do with Internet file-sharing than with the industry’s failure to produce good movies and come up with innovative business models.

What that means in English is that Obama wants to simplify the tax code for the wealthy. This is, broadly speaking, good for the economy in the long term. Economists generally agree that simpler tax codes with fewer breaks tend to yield stronger growth. Obama and leading Republicans, such as likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., all praise the idea of loophole-closing, base-broadening tax reform as a vehicle for future growth.

The Buffett Rule, though, isn’t a full tax-reform plan. It’s just a small chunk of one — less than $5 billion a year, if you assume that the Bush tax cuts expire at year’s end. Which is to say, it’s certainly not big enough to jolt growth any time soon.

It’s also not nearly enough to dent the widening income inequality in America that research suggests is a serious underlying problem in the economy but probably not the main driver of persistently high unemployment now.

If the Buffett Rule was a serious pitch to help the jobless, it would deal with one of those main drivers of unemployment. It would boost persistently weak aggregate demand or incentivize business investment. It does neither. Instead, it tells America’s job-seekers, Don’t worry, we’re going to make the tax code look more fair to you. Lots of polls suggest that’s a good political argument. But that’s what it is: a political pitch.

It’s “class warfare!” they claim. Because, you see, closing corporate tax loopholes and raising the marginal tax rate would only raise a meager $700 billion over 10 years, Stewart said. And as one conservative commentator noted, that’s only a small fraction of the federal deficit.

“I assume these folks have the same ‘why bother’ attitude towards low-level spending cuts,” Stewart said.

Not really. Programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, National Public Radio and free parking for federal employees? That all definitely has to go.

“Oh, so when you cut it, it’s $1 million, but when you tax it it’s, oh, $700 billion,” he said. “All we would have to do to raise $700 billion is cut 700,000 NPRs. It’s almost too easy.”

So if you’re looking to raise revenue, Stewart said, why not go elsewhere? Like to the poor. It makes perfect sense.

BOSTON — Senator Scott P. Brown posed for pictures with President Obama two days in a row last week, smiling as Mr. Obama signed two bills that Mr. Brown co-sponsored. Never mind that he is a Republican seeking re-election in a season of strident partisanship. Mr. Brown is on a mission to persuade the voters of Massachusetts that he is as independent as politicians come.

His carefully cultivated image — of a genial Everyman beholden to no one, flashing a moderate streak even as his friend and erstwhile mentor Mitt Romney hews to conservative ideas in the Republican presidential primary contest — is at the core of Mr. Brown’s strategy in what has become a tight race against Elizabeth Warren, his presumed Democratic opponent.

Ms. Warren, the Harvard professor and nationally known consumer advocate, entered the race beloved by the national Democratic base and has enchanted party loyalists here. She is also raising far more money than Mr. Brown, including an extraordinary $6.9 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with $3.4 million for him.

But for all her fans and campaign riches, Ms. Warren, has a lot of work ahead to persuade voters to oust Mr. Brown. In a Boston Globe poll released last week, 57 percent of respondents said Mr. Brown was the most likable candidate, compared with 23 percent for Ms. Warren. Asked which candidate was best able to work with the opposite party, 49 percent chose Mr. Brown and 27 percent Ms. Warren.

Over all, the poll found a dead heat, with 37 percent supporting Mr. Brown, 35 percent behind Ms. Warren and 26 percent undecided. But Mr. Brown had a 3-to-1 advantage with independent voters, who make up more than half the Massachusetts electorate. He even won praise from Democrats, 40 percent of whom said he was the most likable candidate.

Such numbers suggest that Mr. Brown may be having some success in his effort to define Ms. Warren as a Harvard elitist and a partisan “rock-thrower.” Meanwhile, he is playing up his Average Joe qualities on the campaign trail, using not only his famous pickup truck but also the same barn jacket that helped him beat a much better-known Democrat in the 2010 special election for what he called “the people’s seat.”

It was bad enough that Representative Mike Fitzpatrick, a Republican of Pennsylvania, skipped the oath-taking ceremony for the new Congress and still cast votes after he showed up in the chamber. Six of his votes were nullified, as were some from Pete Sessions, a Republican of Texas, who also ducked the swearing-in.

The two lawmakers contended they were legitimate because they watched the swearing-in on television at what was initially described as a simple party for constituents where they chimed in on the oath — much like small children used to when becoming official Mouseketeers before the TV screen.

Then came the ultimate embarrassment: Mr. Fitzpatrick turned out to be absent because he was holding a fund-raising party at the neighboring Capitol visitors’ center — a campaign donation event that House rules expressly forbid on Capitol grounds. It did not help that Representative Sessions, the chairman of the House Republicans’ campaign committee, was at his side.

Work has barely begun and the new Congress is already stirring fresh business for the House’s Office of Congressional Ethics. The incident should be thoroughly investigated and referred to the House ethics committee. It should be an early and clear warning to members that fund-raising, as 24/7 as it is in Washington, must not take precedence over lawmaking, even though too many members behave otherwise.

The finally sworn-in congressmen apologized to the House, with Mr. Fitzpatrick’s office maintaining there was no fund-raiser, only a transportation fee of $30 per head for the bus ride from home. But his local newspaper, The Morning Call of Allentown, reported that the invitation to “Mike Fitzpatrick’s Swearing In Celebration” solicited contributions of $30, $60, $120 and above. It also included a standard form for making contributions to the overeager congressman.

Representative Timothy V. Johnson of Illinois will not continue his re-election bid, despite winning the Republican Party nomination in a primary last month.

Mr. Johnson, a six-term congressman who was running in Illinois’s newly drawn 13th District, made the surprise announcement at a news conference on Thursday that he would instead retire at the end of his current term.

Republican leaders believe that a party victory is still probable in the central Illinois district, as they now scramble to find a new candidate before the November general election.

“This is a seat that favors Republicans, and Democrats are stuck with an incredibly flawed candidate who is attempting his fourth futile campaign for Congress,” said Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement on Thursday.

Mr. Johnson, 65, cited a “strained” schedule and family obligations for his decision. He is a father of 9 children, 11 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren.

“One of my grandsons is 2 years old; I have seen him for a total of about 10 minutes,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement. “I have another grandson who asked me not long ago if I was ever going to come to one of his ballgames. I didn’t have an answer.”

US President Barack Obama has signed a bill banning insider trading by members of Congress.

The STOCK Act was supported by both parties as an attempt to restore trust in a Congress with historically low approval ratings.

Previously, lawmakers could trade stock unrestricted even though they may have had specialist knowledge.

Mr Obama used the signing to push for further limits on lobbying and money’s effect on Congress.

There is “obviously more that we can do to close the deficit of trust”, Mr Obama said at the bill signing.

“We should limit any elected official from owning stocks in industries that they have the power to impact,” he said.

“We should make sure people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress, can’t lobby Congress, and vice versa.”

But we should not allow events in the court to completely overshadow another, almost equally disturbing spectacle. For on Thursday Republicans in the House of Representatives passed what was surely the most fraudulent budget in American history.

And when I say fraudulent, I mean just that. The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

And we’re talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?

None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)

So what are we to make of this proposal? Mr. Gleckman calls it a “mystery meat budget ,” but he’s being unfair to mystery meat. The truth is that the filler modern food manufacturers add to their products may be disgusting — think pink slime — but it nonetheless has nutritional value. Mr. Ryan’s empty promises don’t. You should think of those promises, instead, as a kind of throwback to the 19th century, when unregulated corporations bulked out their bread with plaster of paris and flavored their beer with sulfuric acid.

Come to think of it, that’s precisely the policy era Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are trying to bring back.

LOS ANGELES — When Gabrielle Giffords announced that she would step down from Congress in January, she did not shy away from the possibility that she would one day run for office again.

“I will return,” she said, “and we will work together for Arizona and this great country.”

Two months later, at the urging of her most fervent supporters and top advisers, Ms. Giffords appears to be holding on to much of the nearly $1 million left in her campaign account, in order to leave the door open for a potential run for the House or the Senate in the next campaign cycle.

Much of the money in Ms. Giffords’s coffers came in after she was nearly killed in a shooting rampage in Tucson last year. In the weeks since her resignation, she has made no move to return the money to donors or turn it over to the county Democratic Party for use in the race to succeed her in Congress.

“There’s a lot of people, including me, who are hoping that she hangs on to the majority of the money she has because we want to see her run again,” said Michael McNulty, a longtime supporter and confidant of Ms. Giffords.

Ms. Giffords is still going through intensive rehabilitation in Houston, and her supporters say they are careful not to set expectations too high. Still, they openly speak of the possibility of her running for the Senate seat now held by John McCain or perhaps running for the House again.

“She is focused on her recovery, which is exactly as she should be, but we haven’t ruled out any hope for the future,” Mr. McNulty said.

Ron Barber, a former aide to Ms. Giffords, is running for the seat she left at her urging. She appeared with him at his opening campaign rally, and Mr. McNulty said he expected that many of Mr. Barber’s donors would come from Ms. Giffords’s long list of financial supporters.

Business groups that worked hard to install a Republican majority in the House equated Republican control with a business-friendly environment. But the majority is first and foremost a conservative political force, and on key issues, its ideology is not always aligned with commercial interests that helped finance election victories.

“Free market is not always the same as pro-business,” said Barney Keller, spokesman for the conservative political action committee Club for Growth.

There could be real-world consequences to the conservative rebellion. The 90-day extension of the highway trust fund that House Republican leaders say they will pass this week in lieu of a broad highway bill would keep existing projects moving for now. But business groups say few new government-funded infrastructure projects can get under way without longer-range certainty about federal backing.

Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) shared today her powerful story of being sexually abused and raped as a child. In a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Rep. Moore told her colleagues about being date raped and having her underwear stolen as a trophy of the event.

As one of the female legislators who is fed up with Republicans blocking reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), Rep. Moore said that opposition to the bill brought up memories of her personal history:

I don’t have enough time to share all these experiences with you but I can tell you that when this bill came out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with all the Republican Senators, all of the guys voting no, it brought up some terrible memories for me of having boys sit in a locker room and sort of bet that I, the egghead, couldn’t be ‘had.’ And then the appointed boy, when he saw that I wasn’t going to be so willing , completed a date rape and then took my underwear to display it to the rest of the boys. This is what American women are facing.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a lower court to decide whether Congress has the authority to allow Americans born in Jerusalem to claim Israel as their birthplace on their passports.

The decision postpones resolution of a long-running dispute between Congress and the executive branch over the power to set foreign policy, in this case the highly fraught issue of whether to formally recognize Israel’s claim that Jerusalem is its capital.

At issue is whether Congress overstepped its authority when it passed a law in 2002 requiring that Americans born in Jerusalem be allowed to name Israel as their birthplace in passports and other official documents.

The State Department has refused to enforce the law, saying that it interferes with a matter of foreign policy that is the president’s to decide.

For more than half a century, the United States has not recognized any state as having sovereignty over Jerusalem, a central issue in the intractable diplomatic negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

The court, without settling the case on its merits, ruled that the balance of power between Congress and the president in foreign policy was not inherently beyond the reach of judicial review.

With only one dissent, the justices overturned and sent back for reconsideration a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, upholding a district court. The lower courts had thrown out the case on the grounds that the executive branch held exclusive power over the recognition of foreign sovereignty and that its disregard of Congressional instruction could not be challenged in court because the status of Jerusalem was a political question.

The Senate voted Monday evening, 92 to 4, to proceed with a politically tinged debate on repealing tax subsidies for the oil industry after Republicans called Democrats’ bluff and agreed to take up a bill designed as more of a political statement than a legislative initiative.

The legislation would repeal a handful of tax breaks that the oil industry receives, at a time when the industry is reaping record profits from higher prices at the pump. The proceeds would go to pay for tax breaks for alternative energy sources like wind and solar power, which expired at the end of 2011.

It ultimately is not expected to pass. In February, seven Democrats – including the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico – voted with Republicans to oppose ending the same subsidies to pay for a separate issue.

Republicans jumped at the chance to thrust energy issues front and center – and to portray Democrats’ response to soaring gasoline prices as raising taxes on oil producers. That, they said, would only raise gas prices further.

Before the vote, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said: “I can’t think of a better way to illustrate how completely out of touch they are on this issue. And that’s why Republicans plan to support moving forward on a debate over this legislation, because it’s a debate the country deserves.”

The vote on the Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act was supposed to deliver a political message, letting Democrats attack vulnerable Republicans for blocking even a debate on ending billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil companies. Republicans have been hammering President Obama on energy for weeks, blaming him for gas prices that are well over $4 a gallon in many parts of the country.

Two Democratic senators are asking Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to investigate whether employers asking for Facebook passwords during job interviews are violating federal law, their offices announced Sunday.

Troubled by reports of the practice, Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said they were calling on the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to begin investigations. The senators are sending letters to the heads of the agencies.

The Associated Press reported last week that some private and public agencies around the country were asking job seekers for their social media credentials. The practice has alarmed privacy advocates, but its legality remained murky.

On Friday, Facebook warned employers not to ask job applicants for their passwords, presumably so they could view applicant profiles on the site. The company threatened legal action against applications that violated its longstanding policy against sharing passwords.

A Facebook executive cautioned that if an employer discovered that a job applicant is a member of a protected group, the employer might be vulnerable to claims of discrimination if it did not hire that person.

Personal information such as gender, race, religion and age are often displayed on a Facebook profile — all details that are protected by federal employment law.

Not sharing passwords is a basic tenet of online conduct. Aside from the privacy concerns, Facebook considers the practice a security risk.

These statistics are pretty interesting considering the Republicans in Congress are making Planned Parenthood, and contraception in general, one of their biggest issues. If this doesn’t describe out of touch with Americans I don’t know what does.

Two U.S. Congressmen Monday once again proposed a bill that would require the vast majority of video games to bear a warning label about content they consider “potentially damaging.”

Under the one-page Violence in Video Games Labeling Act [PDF link], packaging for all video games except those rated “EC” for Early Childhood would be required to prominently display a message reading “WARNING: Exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior.” The proposed label would be required even if the video game in question is not violent.

“The video game industry has a responsibility to parents, families and to consumers—to inform them of the potentially damaging content that is often found in their products,” bill sponsor Representative Joe Baca (D-CA) said, as reported by The Hill. “They have repeatedly failed to live up to this responsibility.”

“Just as we warn smokers of the health consequences of tobacco, we should warn parents—and children—about the growing scientific evidence demonstrating a relationship between violent video games and violent behavior,” co-sponsor Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) said. “As a parent and grandparent, I think it is important people know everything they can about the extremely violent nature of some of these games.”

As taglines go, “All of the above” is not exactly phenomenal, lacking the sex appeal of its energy-policy sister, “Drill, baby, drill,” and the historic resonance of, say, “Where’s the beef?” It conjures a standardized test more than economic stimulus.

But President Obama’s use of the phrase to describe his current energy policy leanings – signaling yes to a combination of domestic drilling, alternative energy and conservation — is driving Republicans nuts, because the phrase has been a product of their party’s energy platform for years.

They find it especially galling since Mr. Obama made moves to block, for now, part of the expansion of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Mr. Obama has used the phrase while visiting oil-rich areas of the country, and his administration is promoting it every chance it gets.

It is hard to know precisely how “all of the above” came to pertain to energy, although Senator John McCain and his running mate in 2008, former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, made good use of it in their presidential campaign, along with “drill, baby, drill” and that underdog maxim, “mine, baby, mine.”

But it may well have been conceived in 2000 on the floor of the House, when Representative Benjamin A. Gilman, Republican of New York, gave a lengthy speech on energy, saying: “We need to be exploring alternative energy sources, the use of coal, the use of hydroelectric power, of biomass, geothermal, photovoltaic, solar thermal and wind, utilizing ethanol, creating a system of electric reliability, increasing the exploration and supply of natural gas, and retrofitting or building cost-efficient oil refineries. In addition, we need to utilize government land for responsible oil and natural gas exploration.”

Mr. Gilman also said that the American Petroleum Institute at the time advocated “that an effective national energy policy must, at a minimum, allow for all of the above.”

The White House threatened to veto the House bill and defended the payment advisory board, saying it “will help reduce the rate of Medicare cost growth responsibly while protecting beneficiaries.”

Under the law, the board cannot make recommendations to “ration health care,” raise revenues or increase beneficiaries’ premiums, deductibles or co-payments.

Republicans said the board would inevitably try to save money by cutting Medicare payments to doctors, who would then be less willing to treat Medicare patients.

“I have been a practicing physician for over 15 years, and I don’t think I have seen anything potentially more detrimental to seniors’ health care than the Independent Payment Advisory Board,” said Representative Larry Bucshon, Republican of Indiana and a heart surgeon. “No president should have the power to create a board with this much control over health care.”

Representative Alcee L. Hastings, Democrat of Florida, said: “I am appalled by the hypocrisy of my Republican colleagues who keep stating that federal spending needs to be kept under control. But at the first opportunity, they wind up rejecting one of the most serious tools in place to actually tackle Medicare spending and make care more affordable.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that repealing the board could increase Medicare spending by a total of $3 billion from 2018 through 2022.

The legislation was adopted by unanimous consent after the Senate voted, 96 to 3, to end debate on the bill, which was approved in the House last month by a vote of 417 to 2.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut and the chief sponsor of the measure, said it was “the most significant Congressional ethics legislation we’ve adopted in at least five years.”

The lopsided votes showed lawmakers desperate to regain public trust in an election year, when the public approval rating of Congress has sunk below 15 percent.

The bill prohibits members of Congress from trading stocks and other securities on the basis of confidential information they receive as lawmakers. It makes clear that the insider trading ban in federal law applies to members of Congress and their aides and to officials in the executive and judicial branches of the federal government.

In addition, the bill requires lawmakers to disclose the purchase or sale of stocks, bonds, commodities futures and other securities within 45 days of transactions, rather than once a year as they now do. The information will be posted on the Web.

Thousands of federal agency officials, including many at the White House, will be subject to similar reporting requirements.

The bill — the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or Stock Act — originated in the Senate. But House Republican leaders rewrote it, and the Senate on Thursday accepted the changes.

Following last week’s Senate “deal ” over judicial nominees — “well, that’s a step in the right direction” anyway, Peter O’Toole said in Lawrence of Arabia — I want to come back briefly to one point which is under-analyzed in the debate over the costs of political obstructionism in the face of “judicial emergencies ” all over America. It is the concept that federal judges are themselves a vital form of “capital investment” in the districts and circuits in which preside; more important to their communities — and almost always more of a bargain — than any pet project a politician is likely to scoop out of the pork barrel.

It was an epic comment made last Tuesday by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), before the deal was struck, that reminded me of how little respect some lawmakers must feel for judicial nominees, how little understanding they must have of what federal judges do, and how little senators must care about who suffers when worthy nominees are blocked from adjudicating cases as quickly as practical.

“This is a needless exercise and a waste of the Senate’s time because I assume these 17 people already have a job,” McConnell said of the 17 judicial nominees in play at the time on the floor of the Senate. “What we’re worried about is all the people who don’t currently have a job who might in some way benefit from a jobs package that we are by and large in agreement on,” Sen. McConnell added.

The senator evidently was making a play on words about a jobs bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) had threatened to stall if Senate Republicans didn’t stop blocking floor votes on the judicial nominees, 14 of whom were either unanimously endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee or had only one Republican Committee member vote against them.

Sen. McConnell is right to worry about jobs. But last week’s fight over judicial nominees wasn’t a fight over the 17 nominees themselves — it was a fight for the rights and remedies of tens of millions of potential litigants residing in the judicial districts those nominees would serve. It was a fight with real meaning to people all over the country who have grievances with one another that must be resolved in federal court. What Senate obstructionists (of both parties) ignore in their preening speeches about “job creation” is that federal judges are perennial job creators — to the extent they bring certainty and finality to legal disputes.

Mr. Santorum, hurting politically in Pennsylvania because of his defense of the Iraq war and President George W. Bush, had written a book, “It Takes a Family.” It was a blistering attack on liberal “elites” and what he saw as their moral relativism as well as “radical feminists” who, he said, had devalued mothers who preferred staying home rather than going to work.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” recalled David Urban, who had been chief of staff to Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and was close to Mr. Santorum. “ ‘You’re running for re-election! Why not wait till afterward?’ ”

Mr. Urban said Mr. Santorum told him that these were ideas he really believed.

”There are some guys — Paul Wellstone was one,” Mr. Urban said, referring to the liberal Democratic senator from Minnesota, “who know what they believe, they don’t take polls and they don’t worry about the consequences. For him, this book was a big marker.”

That race, which ended in Mr. Santorum’s landslide defeat, nonetheless helped him establish a persona — passionate and polarizing on issues of family and morality, hawkish on terrorism and Israel, eager to cast himself as putting principles ahead of politics.

Those very qualities may have cost him the election in 2006. But they have helped rebrand him as the face of conservatism in 2012 as he challenges Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination.

In 2006, Mr. Santorum was also dogged by criticism from the right — echoed today on the presidential campaign trail — that he was complicit in the big-government conservatism of the Bush years. First elected to Congress in 1990 as a reformer intent on challenging the ways of Washington, he found himself cast as an insider at a time when voters wanted change.

His loss, by 17.4 percentage points, was the biggest for any incumbent senator in Pennsylvania since at least the Civil War, according to G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin and Marshall College. That eyepopping margin is the chief reason that few people took Mr. Santorum seriously last year when he started running for president. How could he get elected anywhere after he had lost his own state so lopsidedly?

Mr. Santorum says he was caught in “a meltdown year” for Republicans, both in Pennsylvania and nationally. That was certainly true. In Pennsylvania, they lost most offices, including four Congressional seats. In Washington, they lost the House and control of the Senate.

But if the climate was harsh, Mr. Santorum was part of it. Always brash, he had become a more rancorous figure since he last faced the voters in 2000. He was No. 3 in his party’s leadership and responsible for its messaging, which often meant either defending Mr. Bush or going on the attack.

And he took high-visibility roles on divisive issues, including abortion, homosexuality and the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo.

”His views were not consistent with the Pennsylvania constituency,” said Mr. Specter, who was later driven from the Republican Party by conservative opposition and lost his Senate seat in 2010. ”I’m talking about women in the workplace, the book, his opposition to birth control — that’s not American, to be opposed to birth control.” (Mr. Santorum says he personally opposes contraception but he has voted to finance it.)

The voters to whom he is appealing this year — mainly conservatives and evangelical Christians — are the same core voters he appealed to in Pennsylvania. But in 2006, they were a minority in the state’s general election; now they dominate the Republican primaries. And they are drawn to Mr. Santorum’s moral certitude, his fire-and-brimstone passion, his pugilistic posture of never giving up and never giving in.

I found echoes of Thomas Jefferson’s notion that when people fear the government, there is oppression, and when government fears the people, there is liberty, in the opening of Kim Hart’s recent piece in Politico about the ongoing reaction in Washington to the SOPA/PiPA protests:

“In the wake of the Internet blackout that led to the dramatic death of two controversial online piracy bills, a new warning has entered the Hill vernacular: ‘Don’t get SOPA’d.’

Unfortunately, after that provocative opening, the story devolves into the familiar narrative about the competition between “Hollywood” and “Silicon Valley”, reinforcing the prevailing notion that the job of Congress is to balance the interests of two competing lobbies rather than looking after what is best for the citizens of our republic. The SOPA protests weren’t the work of some Silicon Valley lobby; as +Andrew Rasiej said to me recently, they were the work of “the Internet public.”

(Andrew noted that that lovely term, “the Internet Public,” was coined by Dave Parry in his essay “It’s not the Public Internet, It is the Internet Public.” http://profoundheterogeneity.com/2011/02/its-not-the-public-internet-it-is-the-internet-public/)

Faced with global warming facts on the Rachel Maddow show last night, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) countered, “It’s not true.” Maddow asked him to react to the 97 percent of scientists who agree that global warming is real. Although Inhofe was eager to point to anecdotal evidence for his conspiracy theories, he simply replied:

That isn’t true Rachel. You say something over and over again and your audience, particularly your liberal audience, they want to believe it […] This 97 percent, that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve named literally thousands of scientists on the floor.

As a prominent climate denier and Big Oil favorite, Inhofe’s ignored the scientific evidence throughout the interview. But he’s not known for relying on scientific research — recently, he quoted the Bible as proof.

One of his points was that environmentalists aren’t “winning” despite outspending the energy industry 2-1. But environmentalists are the ones vastly outspent by dirty energy, 8 to 1 in lobbying and contributions during the climate bill debate. Inhofe’s evidence was a discredited Climate Shift report where even the leading expert on the report withdrew his name.

During the interview, Inhofe denied Big Oil’s mere existence, saying “because we hear things about big oil but what you hear is not all that big of oil.” Inhofe said the $4 billion in tax breaks to oil doesn’t count as a subsidy, even though he admitted the industry is “actually doing really well right now.” The top five oil companies alone made $137 billion in profits, while spending $146 million lobbying Congress to maintain those same tax breaks.

As Maddow herself pointed out, Inhofe benefits from polluters doing well — he’s taken almost $500,000 from oil and gas, and unsurprisingly Koch Industries is his No. 1.

The concern with crowd funding is the same one I’ve long had with secondary markets. Ultimately, both are potentially very positive, and if you are a fan of free markets, you should trust that they’ll both be more good than bad. But both are ripe for abuse and excess.

As with the secondary markets, if the start up community wants to push for this bill, it’s incumbent on the startup community to set up exchanges that don’t allow fraudsters to bilk mom and pops. Otherwise the SEC will rapidly ruin a good thing with bad regulation.

After weighing the pros and cons and talking to a lot of people on both sides, I decided the bill was indeed a no brainer for an entrepreneur like me to support and I signed the petition. I urge you to do the same.

Takeaway: A bill is currently making its way through the United States Senate that effectively eliminates overtime pay for IT professionals.

There was a bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate last week that seeks to modify the Fair Labor Standards Act’s (FLSA) computer employee exemption, effectively eliminating overtime pay for IT professionals. The Computer Professionals Update Act (”CPU”/S. 1747) was introduced in the Senate by Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) and cosponsors Senators Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Mike Enzi (R-WY), and Michael Bennet (D-CO).

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, extolled the measure, passed on a bipartisan vote of 74 to 22 , as “a jobs bill in the true sense of the word.”

“I hope the House will take this up and not listen to this shrill voice that makes up so much of the Republican caucus in the House,” he said.

But the nearly three million jobs expected to be “saved or created” by the measure largely come from construction jobs that stand to be lost if federally financed projects grind to a halt on April 1, when money from the highway trust fund could no longer be used.

That deadline appears to be weighing heavily on House Republicans, who initially had wanted to use their measure to change federal transportation policy fundamentally by linking infrastructure spending to the expansion of oil drilling from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to the outer continental shelf off the East Coast.

The five-year House proposal was stymied by a coalition of opponents in both parties, and Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, one of its initial backers, has all but abandoned it.

“As the speaker said, the plan as it stands right now is to let the Senate pass a bill and take up something that looks like it,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner, “unless the House coalesces around a better alternative, which we are actively pursuing.”

The Senate bill, written by one of the chamber’s most liberal Democrats, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, and one of its most conservative Republicans, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, consolidates 196 federal transportation programs to about a dozen, while giving more flexibility to the states to decide transportation priorities. But it largely keeps the scope of federal highway, transit and other surface transportation projects intact. Senators kept the duration of the bill short, to two years, because of the difficulty in paying for its programs as gasoline tax revenues slide.

President Obama, as well as highway and transit advocates, had pressed for a big, upfront increase in infrastructure spending to lift the economy and address the nation’s aging roads and bridges. But considering that House Republicans last year were considering a 35 percent cut to transportation spending, level funding may have been the best that advocates could hope for, said Rob Healy, vice president for government affairs at the American Public Transportation Association.

Rather than raising the gas tax, as many transportation advocates suggest, the Senate jury-rigged the bill with an array of revenue provisions, tapping a trust fund established to clean up leaking underground storage tanks and adjusting the way pension fund contributions and liabilities are calculated.

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group, criticized the use of 10 years of revenue from such provisions to pay for a two-year transportation bill.

“That’s kind of how Congress is approaching every problem,” cobbling together short-term fixes without addressing long-term problems, said Jeff Shoaf, head of Congressional relations for the Associated General Contractors of America, which nonetheless strongly supported the bill.

Mr. Shoaf said the legislation would spur hiring in the construction industry, where unemployment hit 17.1 percent in February. With infrastructure spending stable for two years, construction firms should begin buying equipment and hiring permanent workers, he said.

Senate Democrats are expected on Tuesday to unveil their version of a small-business financing bill that passed last week in the House , with the Senate legislation including three of the six House provisions, as well as other measures to extend credit to small businesses, Democratic aides said.

The Senate measure will include slightly modified versions of three House measures to make it easier for small businesses to go public, sell equity shares to raise money and attract investors through “crowd-funding.” All three provisions have bipartisan support. The new bill will also include a measure by Senators Mary L. Landrieu , Democrat of Louisiana, and Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, to ease restrictions governing the amount of debt a small business can take on. It will also extend the Small Business Administration ’s program to help refinance short-term commercial real estate loans into longer term loans, and it reauthorizes the Export-Import Bank, a provision that some conservatives oppose.

The changes to the House bill could anger activists like Steve Case , the AOL co-founder who has begun a social media campaign to move the legislation to President Obama as soon as possible. But Senate aides say they still expect prompt action and a signing ceremony this spring.

Democrats made clear the new bill is only a starting point, and they expect the other provisions of the House bill to be introduced as amendments.

Eager to preserve their majority in the Senate, Democrats are rolling the dice in Maine on a popular independent former governor who is seeking Senator Olympia J. Snowe ’s seat, in the hope that he sides with them next year if elected.

On Wednesday, Representative Chellie Pingree, a Democrat, announced that she would not run to succeed Ms. Stowe, a moderate Republican who announced last week that she would not run for re-election. Another Democrat, former Gov. John Baldacci, may still run, but party strategists say Ms. Pingree was their strongest candidate.

Ms. Pingree’s decision clears the way for former Gov. Angus King , a left-leaning independent, whose candidacy has put Democrats in a bind. The party badly wants to win the Snowe seat to offset possible losses in more conservative states like North Dakota and Nebraska. But Mr. King, who supports abortion rights, was likely to siphon off support from the Democratic candidate. As one Senate Democratic strategist said, either Mr. King will be the next senator or Republicans will keep the seat.

“I think with Pingree, it was an easy call for her,” said Mark Brewer, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Maine . “There was no guarantee that Angus King was going to win this race, but I would have to say at this point, Angus King was the favorite. She was going to have to give up her House seat to do it, which was going to be an ultra safe seat for her.”.

In a statement, Ms. Pingree, a favorite of liberal activists and a former head of Common Cause , said, “Although the prospect of running for and possibly serving in the United States Senate was very exciting, I believe I will best serve the people of Maine by running for re-election to the House.”

Democratic officials adamantly maintained that they did not push Ms. Pingree from the race, and they say they have not spoken to Mr. King. If he is elected, there is no guarantee that Mr. King will align himself with the Democrats and support their candidate for majority leader, but Democrats see little chance of him siding with Republicans.

“He won’t say, and we won’t ask,” the Democratic strategist said.

If Mr. King remains independent and leans toward neither party, he would forgo any committee assignments and other benefits, an unlikely move.

Here is an example of the writing Limbaugh was complaining about: The conservatism we know evolved in the 1970s to meet a very specific set of dangers and challenges: inflation, slow growth, energy shortages, unemployment, rising welfare dependency. In every one of those problems, big government was the direct and immediate culprit. Roll back government, and you solved the problem.

Government is implicated in many of today's top domestic concerns as well … But the connection between big government and today's most pressing problems is not as close or as pressing as it was 27 years ago. So, unsurprisingly, the anti-big-government message does not mobilize the public the way it once did.

Of course, we can keep repeating our old lines all the same, just the way Tip O'Neill kept exhorting the American middle class to show more gratitude to the New Deal. But politicians who talk that way soon sound old, tired, and cranky. I wish somebody at the … GOP presidential debate at the Reagan Library had said: "Ronald Reagan was a great leader and a great president because he addressed the problems of his time. But we have very different problems—and we need very different answers. Here are mine."

One clear sign that the economy is improving: a Senate hearing featuring the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, ended ahead of schedule Thursday after the committee members ran out of questions.

It was one of the shortest and least contentious appearances that Mr. Bernanke has made on Capitol Hill since the recession started five years ago.

Mr. Bernanke repeated the Fed’s assessment, which he delivered most recently to a House committee on Wednesday, that the domestic economy would grow modestly this year despite higher oil prices and turbulence in Europe.

“We don’t see at this point that the very severe recession has permanently affected the growth potential of the U.S. economy,” Mr. Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee.

He is required by law to appear before the committee twice a year to discuss the Fed’s management of the nation’s monetary policy.

Mr. Bernanke fielded a number of familiar critiques from Republican senators about the Fed’s efforts to accelerate the pace of growth, but the exchanges lacked the intensity of Mr. Bernanke’s previous appearances.

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, asked Mr. Bernanke whether the Fed’s efforts to hold down interest rates were contributing to the rise in gasoline prices, by encouraging investors to buy oil and other commodities.

Mr. Bernanke said he saw no evidence of such an effect.

“The reason that we’ve seen these sharp movements has more to do with the international situation than with U.S. monetary policy,” he said.

Mr. Bernanke also renewed his calls, at the urging of Republicans on the committee, for Congress to adopt a long-term plan to reduce the government’s annual deficits.

He was in one respect more specific than he has been in the past, saying that Congress should aim to reduce the deficit over the next 10 to 15 years to reach a point where revenues cover all costs except interest payments.

But the key is to understand how Dems plan to use it.

The GOP views this as a way to advance a key storyline about Dems — that they are so ideologically committed to expanding government power that they even want it to reach into matters of faith. But Democratic operatives believe that the specter of intrusive government can actually cut in their favor in this debate.

They believe that independent voters — particularly women — are prone to see this as a bid by elected officials to dictate that their employers’ values should be able to trump their own values. Dems believe independents will see the bid to empower employers not to cover contraception as a heavy-handed infringment on their freedom.

Republicans, of course, will scoff at this, arguing that the government is mandating that insurers cover services that employers object to — and will ultimately have to pay for. But Dems believe public attitudes towards contraception are so liberal that they will color perceptions of this whole debate and make the public more receptive to the Dem framing of it — inevitably making the GOP framing look hidebound and reactionary.

A national Dem operative tells me paid ads on this issue is a real possibility in swing states like Virginia, Ohio, and Nevada. It’s already a major issue in Massachusetts; Scott Brown voted for Blunt today. Republicans think Dems in states like Nebraska, Montana, and Missouri embrace this at their peril.

Now it’s true that too many Dems defected on this issue — Senators Ben Nelson, Joe Manchin and Bob Casey voted for Blunt. And it’s true that the expected defections among Republicans didn’t materialize. Both Susan Collins and Dean Heller voted for it — the latter vote being particularly interesting, since he’s already under fire in the Nevada Senate race for his opposition to Planned Parenthood.

The lack of GOP defections could either signal that Republicans don’t believe this is the loser Dems say it is, or that Republicans decided their best hope was to hang together and hope for the best. Either way, both sides have laid their bets, and given the commitment of base voters on either side to this issue, this battle isn’t going away.

As president of the Club for Growth , the politically active free-market advocacy group, Chris Chocola wields tremendous power, rating members of Congress on their fiscally conservative purism. Those who fail to meet the club’s tests can expect a club-backed primary opponent, or at least a negative advertising barrage that leaves them trembling.

Had he been in his increasingly influential position just a few years ago, Mr. Chocola would have almost certainly aimed heavy political fire at a fiscally straying Republican lawmaker from Indiana: himself. When he was in the House, from 2003 to 2007, Mr. Chocola voted for various pieces of legislation that are similar to the ones that his group now rails against.

They included a 2004 bill to lift the debt ceiling — which had no spending cuts, compared with the deal reached by Congress last year, that set more than $2 trillion in cuts in motion but that the club deplored — and a 2005 highway bill that lives in conservative infamy for its inclusion of the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark, and one far less conservative than the House bill that Mr. Chocola now denounces.

He voted aye for an expensive expansion to the Medicare program in 2003, now viewed by many as a moment when the Republican Party lost its way on spending. (In contrast, Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, a past president of the club, voted against the Medicare bill when he was in the House.)

If Mr. Chocola now holds the Republican world to a conservative fiscal orthodoxy he did not practice as a lawmaker, he does not see a problem. “The world has changed,” he said. “And some of my views have changed. I am not asking to be elected now.”

The club is indisputably a force to be reckoned with in Republican politics. It has played a key role in driving from office Senate veterans like Robert F. Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and has been instrumental in advancing the careers of rising Republican stars like Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah.

But many Republicans say the Club for Growth is holding members to impossible legislative standards in a city where their party remains a minority, and that it contributes to the gridlock that many Americans find toxic.

What’s more, many Republicans — most of whom are so afraid of the group that they will not talk about them on the record — say the Club for Growth and other conservative groups are running people once considered good conservatives out of town. Representative Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee, is one of its targets.

“I don’t know about what the Club for Growth is doing,” said Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio. “But I can say this: Chairman Upton has done a marvelous job as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, led the effort to repeal Obamacare, led the effort to expose Solyndra, and he has got as conservative a voting record as you will find, and, frankly, I think he has done a marvelous job on behalf of Republicans in the House.”

The club was started in 1999 and is bankrolled by contributions from 75,000 members across the country.

In the 1999-2000 election cycle, the club’s political action committee bundled a little more than $1.4 million in direct contributions to candidates; in the 2009-10 period, the PAC bundled nearly $6 million, a spokesman said.

The club’s leaders focus on races where they know they can make a difference.

The club’s score card, which ranks lawmakers’ voting behavior based on limited-government principles, is set upon by Republicans like the Oscar nominations list by Hollywood, with everyone dying to know who ranks where, especially in election years.

NASA could stand to tighten up the security of its data, according to a report filed with the US House of Representatives Wednesday. Virtually none of the agency’s portable devices are encrypted, and 48 of them were lost or stolen between April 2009 and April 2011. One of those was an unencrypted notebook containing algorithms to command and control the International Space Station.

The report notes that while around 54 percent of devices used government-wide are encrypted, only 1 percent of NASA’s devices are encrypted as of February 2012. Even worse for the agency’s information security, its security experts aren’t even certain how much sensitive data has been lost, as their reports rely on those who lost the devices to self-report what was lost, rather than requiring a check of backed up files.

Lost hardware is not the least of NASA’s problems, either: the report also addresses cyber attacks often launched against the agency, called advanced persistent threats. When the agency itself checked for security vulnerabilities, it found several security holes in support systems for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station. Through those holes, an attacker can gain control of the system or “render it unavailable.”

A November 2011 attack on the Jet Propulsion Lab by Chinese-based IP addresses gave unauthorized users “full functional control” over the networks, including the ability to modify, copy, or delete sensitive files and add, modify, or delete user accounts for “mission-critical” JPL systems. That incident is still under investigation.

Overall, NASA reported 5,408 security incidents involving malware or unauthorized access to its system, costing the agency an estimated $7 million.

The battle over implementation of the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement in Europe is heating up, while the war of words over the Stop Online Privacy Act is still in play . Rightsholders have called critics of these measures “demagogues” and “dirty tricksters,” but the critics show no sign of retreating from their opposition.

The fight against copyright maximalism has largely been negative. To offer something more positive, Public Knowledge (PK for short) has released an Internet Blueprint —six bills that the group says could “help make the internet a better place for everyone” and that “Congress could pass today.”

We’re not expecting Congress to pass them today (or tomorrow), but they’re at least an intriguing start point for debate. Here’s a quick version each.

The entire TSA paradigm is flawed. It requires an impossibility for it to succeed. For the TSA model to work, every single possible means of causing danger to an aircraft or its passengers must be eliminated. This is an impossibility. While passengers are being frisked and digitally strip-searched a few dozen yards away, cooks and dish washers at the local concourse “Chili’s” are using and cleaning butcher knives.
While bomb-sniffing dogs are run past luggage, the beach at the departure end of LAX is largely unpatrolled, and anybody with a shoulder launched missile (you know the ones they regularly shoot down U.S. helicopters with in Afghanistan) could take out any plane of their choice. I am reticent to discuss anything further that would give anybody ideas. However, these two have had wide dissemination in the media but are by NO means the biggest threats.
I sometimes ruminate while standing in line waiting to take off my shoes, remove my belt, laptop, iPad, etc., etc., about the improvised weapons I saw in prisons and how hard they were to find. It’s fascinating what weapons prisoners can make out of plastic forks, newspapers and toothbrushes. Ask any prison guard if an inmate can make a weapon out of an everyday item, and how long it would take them. Approximately 99% of what the average traveler carries on a plane would be considered contraband in a maximum security prison, due to the fact that it can easily be converted into a weapon. Toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks, pens, pencils, anything with wire (iPod headset), any metal object which can be sharpened, etc., etc. is a potential weapon. Carried to its logical end, TSA policy would have to require passengers to travel naked or handcuffed. (Handcuffing is the required procedure for U.S. Marshalls transporting prisoners in government aircraft.)
TSA’s de facto policy to this point has been to react to the latest thing tried by a terrorist, which is invariably something that Al Qaeda identified as a technique not addressed by current screening. While this narrows Al Qaeda’s options, their list of attack ideas remains long and they are imaginative. Therefore, if TSA continues to react to each and every new thing tried, three things are certain:
1. Nothing Al Qaeda tries will be caught the first time because it was designed around gaps in TSA security.
2. It is impossible to eliminate all gaps in airline security.
3. Airline security screening based on eliminating every vulnerability will therefore fail because it is impossible. But it will by necessity become increasingly onerous and invasive on the travelers.

The retirement of Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine is about as damaging to a party’s electoral prospects as these things get, turning a seat that Republicans were very likely to retain into one they will probably lose.

There have been some comparable cases in the recent past, but most were on the Democratic side, in particular the retirements of Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana in 2010, and the pending retirement Senator Kent Conrad, also of North Dakota, in this cycle.

Ms. Snowe’s retirement levels the playing field a bit. When we last took an overview of the Senate in December, I gave Republicans a 15 percent chance of losing Ms. Snowe’s seat. Even that 15 percent, however, was not an estimate of Ms. Snowe’s chances of losing in a head-to-head matchup against a Democrat; she remains popular in Maine and easily won re-election there in a difficult election cycle (2006). Instead, it was a hedge against the possibility that Ms. Snowe would retire or succumb to a primary challenge, precisely because the consequences of this would be so damaging to Republicans.

Maine, while idiosyncratic , is a blue-leaning state, enough that you would expect Democrats to have an edge there in an average election cycle in a contest between “generic” opponents.

The House sought Tuesday to undercut a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that gives state and local governments eminent domain authority to seize private property for economic development projects. Sponsors of the bill, which passed by a voice vote, said it was needed because the 5-to-4 ruling in a Connecticut case skewed constitutional intentions that eminent domain apply only to land for public use projects. The legislation would withhold for two years all federal development aid to states or locales that take private property for economic development. It also bars the federal government from using eminent domain for economic development. The House passed similar legislation five months after the court ruling, but the bill did not advance in the Senate. Prospects for Senate action on this bill are unclear. The ruling in the Connecticut case, Kelo v. City of New London, allowed New London to exercise state eminent domain law to take over the property of several homeowners for commercial use.

In a surprise that could reconfigure the fight to control the Senate, Senator Olympia Snowe, a three-term Republican from Maine, said Tuesday she would not run for re-election, citing excessive partisanship in the Senate.

“After 33 years in the Congress this was not an easy decision,” said Ms. Snowe in a prepared statement. “My husband and I are in good health. We have laid an exceptionally strong foundation for the campaign, and I have no doubt I would have won re-election. It has been an indescribable honor and immeasurable privilege to serve the people of Maine, first in both houses of Maine’s legislature and later in both houses of Congress. To this day, I remain deeply passionate about public service, and I cherish the opportunity I have been given for nearly four decades to help improve the lives of my fellow Mainers.”

Ms. Snowe, a moderate who cast key votes in bills that were dear to Democrats including the stimulus bill, was facing a Tea Party-backed challenger, but one who had failed to gain much traction in a state where Ms. Snowe remained popular and well known.

Ms. Snowe said the lack of comity and bipartisanship in the current Congress was a key motivating factor to her sudden retirement, which would well upend Republican efforts to retake the Senate; the party needs four seats to do so.

Speaker John A. Boehner has not said much publicly about the ethics issues swirling around Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, the embattled chief fund-raiser for House Republican candidates, but Mr. Boehner will standing by Mr. Buchanan’s side at a pricey fund-raising event in Sarasota this weekend.

Mr. Boehner, who vowed to take a hard line on ethical transgressions as speaker, is scheduled to be the guest of honor at Saturday night’s fund-raiser at a private residence in Mr. Buchanan’s district. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported this week that donors can get their pictures taken with Mr. Boehner at a special V.I.P. reception for $10,000 a couple.

In terms of political symbolism, the planned appearance amounts to something of a vote of confidence from the House speaker for Mr. Buchanan.

Mr. Buchanan, who is one of the richest members of Congress and is in his third term, has been accused by a number of former employees and executives in his auto businesses of using corporate funds to reimburse political donations to his campaigns and engaging in tax violations.

The House ethics committee is also investigating whether Mr. Buchanan failed to properly disclose all of his financial interests or leadership positions in a number of companies and organizations, and a federal grand jury in Tampa is said to have heard testimony in the case as well.

Mr. Buchanan’s lawyers say they are confident he will be exonerated and point out that the Federal Election Commission has already declined to take action against Mr. Buchanan over allegations that he personally directed improper reimbursements at three of his auto dealerships.

President Obama did not mention Rick Santorum by name Monday morning, but it was pretty clear who he had in mind.

Three days after Mr. Santorum accused Mr. Obama of being a “snob” and of trying to “indoctrinate” young people by encouraging them to go to college, Mr. Obama responded.

“I have to make a point here,” Mr. Obama said during remarks to the nation’s governors at the White House. “When I speak about higher education, we are not just talking about a four-year degree.”

Mr. Obama, who has often talked about the need to encourage vocational training after high school, seemed to take issue with Mr. Santorum’s assertion that he, being Harvard-educated, wanted to “remake” students in his own image.

“We are talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring

someone walking through the door handling a million-dollar piece of equipment,” Mr. Obama said. “And they can’t go in there unless they have some basic training beyond what they received in high school.”

“We all want those jobs of the future,” he added. “So we are going to have to make sure that they are getting the education they need.”

In his comments last week, Mr. Santorum said that Mr. Obama’s efforts to get people to go to college were part of an effort to get them into “indoctrination mills” led by liberal professors.

The House’s second-ranking Democrat on Monday said that a bipartisan group of lawmakers from both sides of the Capitol was preparing to begin yet another effort to reach a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction – and that the fruits of negotiations could emerge within weeks.

Speaking to the centrist group Third Way, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip, sought to bury the widely held belief that any deal on taxes and deficits will have to wait until after the November election.

“Contrary to what some believe, we cannot afford to set this work aside,” Mr. Hoyer said, according to the prepared text of his speech. “I’m here to give urgency to the pursuit now of an agreement designed to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long term,”

Congressional aides confirmed that the so-called Gang of Six in the Senate – now up to eight – has reconvened and is trying to move a bipartisan deficit reduction plan from a broad framework to detailed legislative language. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, has told the group he will not move forward until he sees real language and real momentum.

States are lagging in the creation of health insurance exchanges, the supermarkets where millions of consumers are supposed to buy subsidized private coverage under President Obama ’s health care overhaul .

Many states are waiting for a Supreme Court decision or even the November election results, to see whether central elements of the new law might be overturned or repealed. But that will be too late to start work. By Jan. 1, 2013, the Obama administration will decide whether each state is ready to run its own exchange or whether the federal government should do the job instead.

Republican governors and state legislators across the country are split. Some want to set up rudimentary exchanges with limited features — as a defensive tactical maneuver — rather than cede control to Washington. More-conservative Republicans do not want to do anything at all.

After a great deal of bickering and bargaining, the insurance exchanges emerged as a centerpiece of the 2010 health care law, crucial to achieving Mr. Obama’s promise of affordable coverage for all Americans.

The issue was a major topic of discussion over the weekend at the winter meeting of the National Governors Association here, and it is expected to come up Monday when governors meet with Mr. Obama at the White House.

Gov. Dave Heineman of Nebraska, a Republican who is chairman of the governors association, said his state would not “default to the federal government.” But he said “it would be a costly mistake to spend millions of taxpayer dollars” building an exchange before the Supreme Court issues its decision in a challenge to the health care law, which is expected in late June.

“Let’s just wait,” Mr. Heineman said.

A handful of states, including California, Connecticut, Maryland, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, are moving at a brisk pace to establish exchanges.

MAYBE YOU saw the pictures. Five middle-age men seated at a congressional hearing table to discuss freedom of religion and contraception. And not a single woman was on the panel. Unbelievable. Do you think Congress would ever have a hearing on prostate cancer and only have women speak? Of course not.

Washington is so out of touch with what’s happening to families across this country that the Senate is about to vote on an amendment that would allow any insurance company or any employer to claim a vague “moral conviction’’ as an excuse to deny you health care coverage. Here’s the really astonishing news: Senator Scott Brown is not only voting for this amendment, he is fighting to get it passed.

What does this mean? If you are married and your employer doesn’t believe married couples should use birth control, then you could lose coverage for contraception. If you’re a pregnant woman who is single, and your employer doesn’t like it, you could be denied maternity care. This bill is about how to cut coverage for basic health care services for women.

Let’s be clear what this proposed law is not about: This is not about Catholic institutions or the rights of Catholics to follow their faith. President Obama has already made sure religious institutions will not be forced to cover contraception - at the same time that he has made sure women can get the health care they need directly from their health care insurers. Carol Keehan, the president and CEO of Catholic Health Association, said that Obama’s approach “protects the religious liberty and conscience rights of Catholic institutions.’’

I support Obama’s solution because I believe we must respect people of all religious faiths, while still ensuring that women have access to contraceptives. Brown has rejected this compromise. Instead, he has cosponsored a bill that will let any employer or any insurance company cut off contraceptive care, maternity care, or whatever they want, and leave women without coverage at all for this basic medical care.

It is shocking that in 2012, Brown and his Republican colleagues would try to pass a law to threaten women’s access to birth control and other health care. Women all across this Commonwealth should have the right to use birth control if they want to. Giving corporate CEOs and insurance companies the power to dictate what health care women can and cannot get is just wrong. Those decisions should be up to women and their doctors.

Our goal should be to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, high-quality health care. At a time when families are struggling with the costs of health care, we should be trying to strengthen our health care system - not finding ways to create loopholes that threaten the rights of women to obtain the health care they need.

Massachusetts has been a leader in every aspect of health care: increasing access, reducing costs, and engaging in the innovations and research that make higher quality care better. We need to keep moving forward - not take a big step backward.

One thing is very clear — the audience at tonight’s debate is resolutely against compromise and negotiation in Congress.

On several occasions, Rick Santorum has admitted that he ended up voting for measures he didn’t agree with because that’s what legislators do.

Every time, the audience has loudly booed him.

When asked about education reform, Mr. Santorum admitted that he voted for the No Child Left Behind bill because he was “taking one for the team.”

Sometimes, he said, a lawmaker has to cast a vote for the leadership that’s against his principles. That’s what he did, he said.

The booing was immediate and loud, an indication that today’s Republicans — or at least the ones in the debate hall – are unwilling to accept those kind of compromises.

A day before Maine was to hold more caucuses, the state Republican Party on Friday afternoon reaffirmed that Mitt Romney was still leading Ron Paul in the caucuses that had been held so far.

The party recounted the votes for its nonbinding straw poll after complaints from some towns, like Belfast and Waterville, that their votes were omitted from the official tally that party officials announced last Saturday.

Those results showed Mr. Romney ahead of Mr. Paul by 194 votes; the results of the recount announced Friday showed him ahead by 239 votes.

Only 5,814 ballots have been cast so far in Maine’s convoluted Republican caucuses, amounting to about 2 percent of the state’s registered Republicans.

But these results are awaiting caucuses that have not yet been held. Still to come are votes from rural Washington County, where caucuses will be held Saturday, as well as towns in a few other counties around the state.

The party had planned all along to announce the results of its straw poll last Saturday knowing that several towns would not have voted. But it did not predict the uproar that ensued, much of it initially from Paul supporters who were furious that the results did not include many towns that might have given them the edge.

The outrage grew as the new media further scrutinized the caucus process, and many Maine officials became embarrassed at the Byzantine nature and the party’s complicated rules.

Party officials now say they will not announce the final results of the straw poll until March 10, after all towns have voted and reported their results.

The presidential straw poll is a meaningless beauty contest unrelated to the more important selection of the state’s 24 delegates, which will take place at a state party convention in May.

The distended process, and the fact that the delegates, once selected, are not bound to vote for a particular candidate, have reduced the state’s relevance in the national nominating process.

Lawmakers introduced bills in both chambers Thursday intended to close a loophole that enables for-profit schools to take advantage of G.I. Bill aid to rake in federal money.

Two of the sponsors — Senator Tom R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, and Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California and a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — told reporters the law would focus on for-profit schools that accept federal funds to educate veterans but sometimes leave them unprepared to enter the civilian workforce.

“It is clear that the business model of some of these for-profit colleges is to become totally reliant on federal funds, making billions in the process and spending a paltry amount on actually educating the students they spend billions to entice,” Ms. Speier said.

In 1998, Congress instituted the so-called “90-10 rule,” requiring that for every nine dollars of tuition covered by federal aid, there should be at least one dollar coming from private funds.

The law would close a loophole that counts military education benefits differently from Department of Education aid, which allowed schools to circumvent the rule by designating veterans’ education benefits as if the money were not paid by the federal government.

Enter the “severely conservative.” This was the description Mitt Romney bestowed upon himself at this year’s CPAC. “I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” said the oft-frontrunner. “Severe” is a word normally associated with pain or really bad weather. With today’s GOP, not only do Republicans refuse to have the same goals — they deny all similarities to their enemy. “The President is not like us.” This is severely conservative.