Speier Calls Congress 'Enablers of Sexual Assault'

Jackie Speier

Lawmakers came down hard today on military leaders, the morning after allegations emerged of another head of a military sexual assault prevention program engaging in the very behavior he was charged with stopping.

Late Tuesday the Army announced that the coordinator of a sexual assault prevention program at Fort Hood, Texas, is under investigation "for pandering, abusive sexual contact, assault and maltreatment of subordinates." He has been suspended from all duties while his case is investigated by the Army's Criminal Investigative Command.

That report came a week after the lieutenant colonel in charge of the Air Force's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office was arrested for the alleged sexual battery of a woman in a parking lot near the Pentagon.

"Another sex scandal rocks the military," Rep. Jackie Speier said Wednesday. "Is Congress really going to stand by and let the military handle this? "Congress has been an enabler of sexual assault by not demanding that these cases be taken out of the chain of command."

Rep. Speier has a bill pending in Congress that would do precisely that, called the STOP Act. Staff for Speier said the U.S. Capitol Police are investigating threats against the congresswoman.

Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin said these reports were evidence of "a disgraceful culture of abuse" within the armed services.

"Reports of a soldier at Fort Hood, Texas, assigned to prevent and report sexual assaults, being accused of serious sexual misconduct, abuse, and maltreatment of soldiers is reprehensible," Sen. Durbin, D-Ill., said in a statement released Wednesday. "Next week, the Army will be before my subcommittee and they will face tough questions about these accusations."

Other lawmakers on Twitter called the Fort Hood scandal " unacceptable," " horrific" and " v[ery] disturbing."

Tuesday Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered that all of the military's sexual assault prevention coordinators and military recruiters to be retrained, re-credentialed and rescreened.

Also Read

View the original article here

Pentagon prepares to ask Congress for break from 'sequester'

By David Lawder and David Alexander

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon is preparing to ask Congress soon for more authority to shift funds to cope with automatic spending cuts, confronting lawmakers with another exception to the "sequester" just days after they gave a break to the flying public and the airline industry.

The request may be sent to the House of Representatives' Appropriations Committee as early as next week, a House Republican aide said on Wednesday.

The Pentagon won increased budget flexibility in March, but officials have told members of Congress they believe it was insufficient to cover shortfalls in training and operations.

The Defense Department move would follow closely the fix last week to ease airline flight delays caused by the temporary furloughs of air-traffic controllers by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The cuts, known as "sequestration," were originally hatched by Washington in 2011 as a way to force the White House and Congress to find an alternative budget deal rather than have spending cuts kick in automatically.

But policymakers failed to reach such a deal earlier this year and the cuts - totaling $109 billion for the current fiscal year - took effect on March 1.

Defense spending has taken the single biggest hit from the automatic cuts, with a $46 billion reduction through the September 30 end of the fiscal year.

One House aide said the request would cite a shortfall in war-fighting because of higher than expected costs of withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials paved the way for the move in testimony to congressional committees over the past few weeks in which they expressed worries about the sequester's impact on military readiness, particularly with tensions rising in Syria and Korea.

"With the events in the world today, with Korea, Syria, Iran, the continued fight in Afghanistan ... the discussion on readiness could not come at a more critical time," General John Campbell, Army vice chief of staff, told a U.S. Senate panel on April 17.

"The reality is that if sequestration continues as it is ... we risk becoming a hollow force," he added.

Members of Congress from states with a heavy military presence have been urging a shift of funds since the sequester took effect and might be hard-pressed to vote against it.

An April 18 bipartisan letter from Virginia senators and representatives urged Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to move quickly to prevent furloughs and loss of pay for "thousands of Virginians."

'REPROGRAMMING'

The Defense Department is preparing the request to shift funds, said Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Robbins, a Pentagon spokeswoman, but has not "yet specified the timing or the amount" it wants to transfer, or "reprogram" in budget jargon.

Congress last week approved a similar request from the Justice Department to shift $313 million within its budget to avoid furloughing some 60,000 employees.

Robbins said it was not yet clear whether the Pentagon would submit several different reprogramming requests or one large omnibus-style request, but the budget shifts would be sought "soon."

The Pentagon was one of several government agencies that won some budget flexibility in a stop-gap government funding measure passed in late March.

That allowed more than $10 billion that was locked up in other accounts to be shifted to the Pentagon's operations and maintenance account, which funds training exercises and military readiness.

While that has helped, it did not make up for the deep budget cuts brought on by the sequester. The Army alone is facing about a $13 billion shortfall in training, operations and Afghanistan war costs, Army Secretary John McHugh and Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno told lawmakers last week.

(Editing by Fred Barbash and Peter Cooney)

View the original article here

Congress passes plan to ease flight delays

By Doug Palmer and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday approved a Senate plan to ease nationwide air-traffic delays caused by automatic federal spending cuts, seeking to calm irritated travelers but sparking a backlash from interest groups not spared from cuts.

The Senate had unanimously voted for the plan late Thursday and the House approved it by a 361-41 vote. White House spokesman Jay Carney said President Barack Obama plans to sign the bill.

The legislation will give the Department of Transportation flexibility to use about $250 million in unspent funds to cover the costs of air traffic controllers and other essential employees at the Federal Aviation Administration who had been furloughed.

Congressional approval of the bill, barely four pages long, came as lawmakers looked to fly out of Washington for a week-long recess. It was not clear how quickly the air delays will ease once the bill is enacted.

Lawmakers were eager to stem the growing wrath of the traveling public, which had dealt with significant take-off and landing delays since the furloughs started on Sunday.

They had also faced anger from airline CEOs whose companies had mounted a grassroots campaign through a website called dontgroundamerica.com, encouraging Americans to send messages to Congress and the White House.

The quick legislative action marks a surprising bipartisan effort, especially after many Republicans had accused the Obama administration of manipulating funds to maximize the impact of the budget cuts and thus make Republicans look bad.

FRESH LOBBYING TO FOLLOW?

The move does come with the risk, though, of unleashing lobbying campaigns to ease other program cuts triggered by the controversial "sequestration" that took effect on March 1, requiring across-the-board spending cuts among most federal agencies.

Even as they lined up behind the bipartisan bill, House Republicans and Democrats blamed each other for what House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called "mindless" across-the-board spending cuts that brought the FAA furloughs.

Republican Representative Tom Latham of Iowa, who oversees transportation spending, accused the Obama administration of "shameful politics" by carrying out the furloughs, which the FAA said were required by the deficit-reduction law. "This is no way to run a government," he said.

Democrat after Democrat reminded Republicans that the Republican-controlled House had approved the sequestration in 2011. They complained that the FAA legislation fails to prevent 70,000 poor children from losing pre-school education, 4 million fewer meals from being delivered to poor, elderly people and stop the grounding of some military air combat units.

"Let's deal with all the adverse cuts, not just those that affect the affluent traveling sector," said Representative Steny Hoyer, the second-ranking House Democrat.

JOB 'WELL DONE'

Democratic Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland summed up the quick passage of the bill, as Congress hurried to start its recess, by saying: "Members of this House are going to run for the airports. They're all going to be flying home on airplanes. And, yes, they will make it easier for members of Congress to get through those lines. And they will pat themselves on the back and say job well done."

The plan for the budget cuts was originally hatched by Washington in 2011 as a way to force the White House and Congress to find an alternative budget deal. But policymakers failed to reach such a deal earlier this year.

The cuts aimed to trim a total $109 billion from federal spending through September of this year and affect a broad range of programs, from early education to medical research.

Congress faces yet another round of these automatic spending cuts that would start on October 1.

Some interest groups immediately cried foul at the FAA fix.

Cynthia Pellegrini, an executive at March of Dimes, a nonprofit that advocates for the health of mothers and babies, said she was troubled by Congress acting on a case-by-case basis.

"Over the next several months we feel there are going to be significant impacts on women, children and families," Pellegrini said in an interview. "This may not be as visible as longer lines at the airport. You can't see that a child's belly is emptier because her family couldn't get food assistance."

The U.S. Travel Association on Friday said it appreciated Congress' swift action, but said it was concerned that funds may be diverted from critical infrastructure projects.

"At a time when we should be modernizing our infrastructure to improve efficiency, capacity and U.S. global competitiveness, sequestration-related issues should not be solved on the backs of airports," the group said in a statement.

BAND-AID

Without the legislation, the FAA said it would have to furlough 47,000 employees for up to 11 days through September 30 in order to save $637 million that is required by the sequestration.

Of those 47,000 workers, almost 15,000 are full-time air traffic controllers or trainees.

While supporting the legislation, the White House on Friday said it falls short of broader action needed to address sequestration. "It will be good news for America's traveling public if Congress spares them these unnecessary delays," White House spokesman Carney said in a statement.

Carney said lawmakers need to take additional steps to alleviate the impact felt beyond the airline industry from the cuts, such as among poorer elderly people, defense industry workers and others brought on by sequestration.

"Ultimately, this is no more than a temporary Band-Aid that fails to address the overarching threat to our economy posed by the sequester's mindless across-the-board cuts," he said.

Transportation officials have made other cuts to their budget but furloughs of air traffic controllers began this week, prompting traveler backlash at major hubs like those in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

On Friday morning, departing flights at Newark Liberty International Airport were delayed more than an hour and 15 minutes, and Boston's Logan Airport had departure delays of more than 30 minutes, both due to staffing, the FAA said. Teterboro airport in New Jersey, which handles many corporate jets, also was experiencing delays of more than 90 minutes due to staffing.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan, Doug Palmer, Susan Heavey, Karen Jacobs and Alwyn Scott; Writing by Karey Van Hall; Editing by Bill Trott)

View the original article here

Boehner, Pelosi Hint at Next Showdowns in Congress

Boehner, Pelosi Hint at Next Showdowns in Congress

After a "rough" week across the country, House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi both addressed tragedy and strategy in their weekly news conferences today, offering their condolences to those affected by the Boston Marathon bombings and the West, Texas, explosion.

"Words alone cannot console the loved ones, but we will do what we can to care for them," Pelosi, D-Calif., said. "With the investigation ongoing, we will make sure that justice is done."

"Our hearts go out to the victims and the people of Boston," Boehner, R-Ohio, added. "[I'm] glad the president's up there today, and I add my prayers to his."

As the investigations in Boston and Texas proceed, inside the beltway Congress continues battling over a series of legislative showdowns.

Pelosi and her leadership team fired off a letter today to the speaker demanding that he appoint conferees to settle differences over the House and Senate-passed budgets.

"Right now the focus is on adopting a budget that reflects our country's values, creates jobs and strengthens the middle class," she said. "The Senate has passed its budget bill…and we're overdue; April 15 was the deadline for us having a budget for a conference report."

When asked whether he intends to comply with Pelosi's request, Boehner encouraged bipartisan informal conversations to continue between House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray. The speaker predicted that the Democrats' approach would only lead to further political warfare because under House rules, if conferees fail to reach an agreement within 20 legislative days, the minority is able to make procedural motions to score political points.

"The minority has the right to offer motions to instruct, which become politically motivated bombs that…show up on the House floor," Boehner said. "We're following what I would describe as regular order. These informal conversations are underway, and that's the way it should work."

Both Pelosi and Boehner also addressed ongoing immigration reform, and congratulated the Gang of Eight on creating a bipartisan compromise.

"I want to congratulate the Senate Gang of Eight for coming forward with their bill," Boehner said. "I'm sure there's parts of it I would agree with, parts that I would disagree with, but the fact is that they've worked together in a bipartisan fashion to craft this bill."

Pelosi echoed the speaker's sentiments, and admitted that while the bill was commendable, it is not a perfect agreement for either party.

"I feel very confident about how we go forward on the immigration bill. I commend the eight Senators for the work that they did," she said. "Of course, it's a compromise. Would I change things? Of course, but I do think that that's what a compromise is about."

Boehner also noted that reaching compromise legislation among a small group of members does not necessarily prepare every other lawmaker to act on the issue.

"You have to remember, about three-fourths of members of Congress have never dealt with the issue of immigration," he said. "There's a big learning curve that the members are going to have to go through."

Also Read

View the original article here

Obama launches fund-raising blitz to help Democrats in Congress

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will launch a fund-raising drive for the 2014 mid-term elections on Wednesday with addresses to deep-pocketed donors in California, hoping the Democratic Party can defy the odds and gain congressional seats in the polls.

The party in power in the White House usually loses seats in election years in which the presidency is not up for grabs. This means Democrats have their work cut out for them in trying to win a majority in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and add to their majority in the Senate.

"An off-year is always tough for the party in power," said Democratic strategist Bud Jackson. "But never say never, and I think it's possible that you could swing some seats. At the very least you make the attempted grab."

The president has an interest in making the effort, because without a significant change in the make-up of Congress, he faces possible paralysis for many of the initiatives laid out in his inaugural address and State of the Union speech.

His second term, won decisively in the election last November over Republican Mitt Romney, has opened with a repeat of the partisan tensions that marked his first term and with an unrelenting stalemate over taxes and spending.

A bid to tighten gun regulations, which Obama will address at a stop in Denver on Wednesday, is in danger as pro-gun groups pressure lawmakers who for decades have been reluctant to take on the powerful gun lobby. Only an immigration overhaul looks promising as Republicans smarting over Hispanic vote losses in 2012 need a victory on it as much as Obama does.

This does not mean Obama is abandoning his priorities until after the mid-terms. His team in general sees the need for action as soon as possible before the country's attention turns to the 2014 and 2016 elections.

OBAMA MAY TEMPER MESSAGE

As a result, Obama may offer a more restrained message when he speaks at fund-raising events in San Francisco, talking up his party's agenda without antagonizing political opponents.

Some Republican senators told Obama when he visited Capitol Hill in March that it did not help their fiscal negotiations with him when he traveled around the country criticizing them.

Obama aides said Obama can both support his own party's campaign apparatus while still seeking compromise with Republicans.

"There's plenty of work to do here in Washington D.C. before we turn our attention to the midterm elections," said White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest.

Obama's San Francisco stop will kick off 14 events he intends to stage this year to raise money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, its Senate counterpart or the Democratic National Committee. The party is still trying to pay off its debts from the last election.

In San Francisco, Obama has two evening events planned to help House Democratic campaigns. California Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi, the top House Democrat who was dethroned as speaker in 2010, is expected to attend.

Democrats need to win 17 seats in 2014 to win control of the House.

"The confidence that the president is showing by dedicating his efforts to our efforts is a shot in the arm for House Democrats," said Jesse Ferguson, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The first event - a cocktail reception priced at $5,000 a person - is at the home of billionaire former asset manager Tom Steyer and his wife, Kat Taylor. After that, a $32,500-per-person dinner will be held at the home of billionaires Ann and Gordon Getty.

The next day Obama will attend two DNC fundraisers.

Obama's trip is all the more important because of the need to pay off debt hanging over party organizations since the 2012 election. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee owed $10.8 million as of the end of February, according to Federal Election Committee disclosure forms, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee owed $15 million.

Republicans note that Obama's electoral sway is not so powerful when his name is not on the ballot. Democrats lost 63 seats and control of the House in 2010 midterms, as well as six Senate seats.

"There's something to his appeal when he's on the ballot. I'm not sure they can deliver the same vote when he's not," said Republican strategist Charlie Black.

(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and David Brunnstrom)

View the original article here

Congress Democrats Holding Out on Gay Marriage in the Minority

The number of Democrats who publicly oppose gay marriage dwindled this week as arguments in two Supreme Court cases drew national attention - and political pressure - to the issue.

In a matter of four days, six Democratic senators issued statements indicating that their view of the marriage debate had changed in favor of allowing Americans to marry regardless of gender. Only nine of the 53 Democrats in the Senate continue to oppose marriage equality in some way, and of those, few come down staunchly on the side of preserving the traditional one-man, one-woman definition.

Those nine senators are Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Tom Carper of Delaware, Bill Nelson of Florida, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Tim Johnson of South Dakota. Of the nine, some oppose DOMA, some have adopted a wait-and-see attitude, others are less specific.

Manchin's answer is straightforward: Spokesperson Katie Longo said that guided by his faith, Manchin "believes that a marriage is a union between one man and one woman" and wants to uphold DOMA.

Nelson is a more complicated case. In May 2012 he told the Miami Herald he believes the issue should be left to the states, but a spokesperson for his office told TIME this week that Nelson supports the one-man, one-woman vision of traditional marriage.

Some of those with more complicated stances on the issue tend to value a term President Obama once used to describe his views on gay marriage: "evolving."

"Senator Carper was proud to support Delaware's efforts to enact civil union legislation and earlier this month he joined 211 of his Congressional colleagues in co-signing the amicus brief that urges the Supreme Court to invalidate Section 3 of DOMA," a spokesperson for Carper told ABC News this week. "Like many Americans including Presidents Obama and Clinton, Senator Carper's views on this issue have evolved, and continue to evolve."

"Change" is another favorite.

"We'll have to see what the Supreme Court says about gay marriage," Landrieu told POLITICO on Tuesday. "And I just think that people's views about it are changing quite rapidly, a more progressive position. I'm just going to continue to talk to the people of my state."

An ABC/Washington Post poll released last week showed support for legal gay marriage among Americans had grown from 37 percent in 2003 to 58 percent. Almost 84 percent of Democratic Congress members signed an amicus brief for the Supreme Court asking them to overturn DOMA.

That said, not all those who signed the brief have come out in favor of legalizing gay marriage in their state - Carper, for example.

Even Republicans, typically a group staunchly opposed to gay marriage, have seen some switching up in the past month. More than 80 signed on to a similar amicus brief, led by former George W. Bush White House political director Ken Mehlman. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, announced his support for marriage equality earlier this month, and Wednesday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, announced she was "evolving" on the issue, after her Democratic counterpart, Sen. Mark Begich, endorsed it.

Political strategist Jason Johnson predicts the flood of politicians piling onto the other side isn't going to dry up any time soon. Any hesitancy to express support for same-sex marriage on either side of the aisle stems from uncertainty in how important gay marriage is to voters, according to Johnson.

"No one has been able to figure out with any effective consistency how gay voters vote and how straight voters vote on gay issues," Johnson told ABC News on Thursday. "It's very hard to determine what percentage of your population in your constituency are openly out gay voters and if gay marriage is their driving issue."

For Democrats, though, he said pressure is only going up.

"It's going to become a litmus test for Democrats and they're going to receive money pressure, and really at this point there's not much of a benefit … to standing against it, because it's the direction that the entire country is going in."

Also Read

View the original article here

Drumbeat Grows Louder in Congress for Obama to Act on Syria

WASHINGTON - As the Syrian regime and opposition trade accusations over the use of chemical weapons, the drumbeat in Washington for the United States to get more directly involved in the two-year old conflict is growing louder.

Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain released a statement today, calling for President Obama to act against Syrian President Bashir al-Assad.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the U.S. was looking into claims that the Assad regime had used a chemical weapon in a recent attack in the opposition stronghold of Aleppo. She would not confirm whether the administration believes Syria's chemical stockpile is secure, citing intelligence reasons, but said there continues to be an increasing concern that Assad will cross that line.

"We've been very clear about our concerns that the Assad regime is increasingly beleaguered, that it finds that the violence that it is using by conventional means is inadequate, including its barbaric use of Scuds. And so we are quite concerned that they will resort to other weapons," she said. "We've made clear that this would constitute a red line for the United States. The president could not have been clearer about it."

But Graham and McCain argue that Assad has likely already crossed the line and they want to see action taken.

"President Obama has said that the use of weapons of mass destruction by Bashar Assad is a 'red line' for him that 'will have consequences,'" the statement reads. "If today's reports are substantiated, the President's red line has been crossed, and we would urge him to take immediate action to impose the consequences he has promised."

The senators are calling for the United States to provide arms to vetted rebel fighters, to launch targeted strikes against Assad's aircraft and SCUD missile batteries on the ground, and to establish safe zones inside Syria to protect civilians living in opposition controlled areas.

Graham and McCain said time was not on the side of the administration to make sure Syria's chemical weapons cache does not fall into the hands of terrorists. Graham told Foreign Policy's The Cable that securing Syria's chemical weapons needs to be America's top priority, even if it means sending in U.S. troops to do it.

"I don't care what it takes," Graham said. "If the choice is to send in troops to secure the weapons sites versus allowing chemical weapons to get in the hands of some of the most violent people in the world, I vote to cut this off before it becomes a problem."

Foreign Policy also reported that the top Senate Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, is now in support of establishing a no-fly zone in Syria.

"I believe there should be the next ratcheting up of military effort and that would include going after some of Syria's air defenses," Levin said.

America's European allies Britain and France have called for lifting the UN arms embargo against Syria so that they can legally provide more direct weapon and ammunition help to Syria's opposition army. Britain announced last week that it will begin proving armored trucks and body armor to rebel fighters.

Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters Monday that the Obama administration is still unwilling to provide anything more than the non-lethal assistance the U.S. is already giving, but will not oppose the actions of other governments.

"President Obama has made it clear that the United States does not stand in the way of other countries that have made a decision to provide arms, whether it's France or Britain or others," he said.

Kerry acknowledged, however, that the danger of Syria's chemical weapons falling into the hands of radicals on both sides of the conflict is growing.

"We have consistently said, and I say again, the longer the bloodshed goes on, the greater the prospect that the institutions of the state of Syria implode, and therefore the greater the danger is to the region and the world that chemical weapons fall into the hands of really bad actors," he said.

Kerry called the two-year conflict, which has killed an estimated 70,000 people and produced nearly 1 million refugees, a "global catastrophe," admitting that the status quo is not working.

"So as long as President Assad continues to attack his own people with Scuds, with aircraft, with tanks, there is an imbalance in this," Kerry said. "If he believes he can shoot it out, Syrians and the region have a problem and the world has a problem."

Also Read

View the original article here

Dueling budget plans debut in Congress

By Richard Cowan and David Lawder

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's charm offensive to end Washington's budget wars hit a bump on Tuesday when Republicans and Democrats in Congress offered up vastly different plans to slash long-term deficits.

The competing budgets, both unlikely to get through Washington's divided government in their current form, raised fresh doubts about Congress reaching a compromise on taxes and spending, which polls consistently show the public wants more than any specific plan.

Instead, they appeared crafted to appeal to their respective party bases.

The Republican proposal, sponsored by House Budget Committee Chairman and former Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, promises to balance the budget without raising taxes in ten years. It would eliminate President Obama's health care overhaul and make large cuts in spending, particularly to so-called safety-net programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, the government health insurance plans for seniors and the poor.

Ryan is a likely contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, and the proposal could serve him well in primary races where conservatives wield the most influence.

The Senate Democratic budget proposal, which began leaking out just as Ryan announced his proposal, would shrink budget deficits by $1.85 trillion over 10 years but not balance the budget. It is largely the work of Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who heads the Senate Budget Committee.

It would rely on an equal mix of spending cuts and tax hikes on the wealthy. At the same time, it would create a $100 billion fund for rebuilding crumbling roads and bridges, creating construction jobs.

Both parties claim backing from voters; Republicans because they were returned to power in the House in 2012; Democrats because Obama was re-elected.

Over the past week the Democratic president has begun wooing Republicans in Congress to work with him on a "grand bargain" to corral budget deficits that have topped $1 trillion in each of the past four years.

Republican lawmakers who dined with Obama in recent days said they were encouraged by their meetings.

But with proposals actually being put down on paper, in the form of 2014 budget blueprints, the air of bipartisanship seemed to evaporate, at least for now - even as Obama huddled Tuesday just off the Senate chamber with fellow Democrats to urge progress.

Indeed, among the warnings Obama got from some Democrats, according to Senators who attended the meeting, was not to cut safety-net programs.

"These were two ideological documents. They are both bargaining positions," said David Brown, a policy analyst at Third Way, a centrist think tank in Washington.

Brown added that for a budget compromise to be reached in coming months, Obama will have to convince the public of the need to reform "entitlement" programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, although not necessarily as drastically as the Ryan budget requires.

Ryan, a leading conservative voice in Congress, took the wraps off of his budget outline for fiscal 2014 that begins October 1 and chastised the Obama administration for overseeing a rapid run-up in debt that now totals $16.7 trillion.

"You can't start really paying this debt down in a serious way until you balance the budget," he said. "The current high levels of debt we have today are a threat to our economy."

Ryan's budget, with its $4.6 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years, was welcomed by Republicans in Congress. It was similar to the budget Ryan proposed for fiscal 2013 that won approval in the Republican House.

But its deep cuts in social safety net programs coupled with significant tax cuts for upper-income Americans, was roundly criticized by Democrats.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada even challenged the Ryan plan's claim of achieving balance by 2023, saying it "relies on accounting that's creative at best and fraudulent at worst."

A senior Republican senator, Jerry Moran of Kansas, dismissed Murray's 2014 budget blueprint, saying, "all the Democrats can come up with for a budget is a trillion-dollar increase in taxes."

A GULF TO BRIDGE

As has been the case since early 2011, when deficit reduction took center stage, Democrats and Republicans were fighting over the same, fundamental questions: Should budget deficits be attacked with spending cuts, tax increases or a combination?

A McClatchy-Marist poll released Tuesday showed that Democrat respondents prefer increasing taxes over cutting spending by a margin of 65 percent to 27 percent.

The pattern was reversed for Republicans surveyed, who preferred cuts to tax increases by 79 percent to 14 percent. Support for cuts declined when specific programs are mentioned.

But seven in ten of all those polled said they believed it is more important "for government officials to compromise" to find a solution than to insist on their own goals.

"The gulf we have to bridge is just as big as it ever was," said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Budget Committee.

But for all the squabbling washing over Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Obama did not seem rattled.

Senator Benjamin Cardin, a liberal Democrat from Maryland who attended Tuesday's lunch with Obama, told reporters: "On the budget issues, he acknowledged that 'look, the best course now, is to let the budgets go, get them into conference, and try to reconcile the two.'"

In other words, the president advised each side to pass their respective budgets, ones that will appeal to their core political supporters, and then work out the differences the old-fashioned way in a House-Senate negotiating group.

That will be a complicated task however and Obama got a taste of it from liberal Democratic senators who at lunch expressed their concern with the president's willingness to potentially cut social programs like Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare healthcare for the elderly and disabled.

As Obama reaches across the aisle, his approval rating jumped up four percentage points from last week to 47 percent, according to a Reuters/Ipsos online poll released on Tuesday. But the percentage of Americans who disapprove of his performance at 50 percent was still higher than his approval rating. Fifty-seven percent of people said the country is going in the wrong direction, compared to 27 percent who think it is on the right track.

Meanwhile, a budget brush fire erupted on another front on Tuesday.

Legislation in the Senate to avert a March 27 government shutdown was being slowed by Republican senators. They expressed concerns over how money was being spent in the Democratic bill to fund federal agencies through September 30.

Leaders in the Senate and House of Representatives are nonetheless hoping to finish this short-term funding bill by next week.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan, David Lawder, Rachelle Younglai and Thomas Ferraro; Editing by Fred Barbash, Xavier Briand and Tim Dobbyn)

View the original article here

Focus shifting in Congress from automatic cuts to dueling budget plans

By David Lawder and Mark Felsenthal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With little prospect of getting rid of the automatic spending cuts that kicked in on March 1, the Congress and the White House will move on to bigger budget battles this week as dueling Republican and Democratic proposals land in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Neither budget plan is likely to be enacted. But the proposals to be submitted by Republican Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington should frame the debate over the government's taxing and spending priorities for the next few months and possibly into the 2014 Congressional elections.

The budgets from Ryan and Murray, who chair the budget committees in the two chambers, are widely seen as wish-lists unacceptable to the opposing party, underscoring the depth of the fiscal divide.

Ryan plans to unveil on Tuesday a slightly modified version of the budgets passed by the House in each of the past two years, cutting spending by $5 trillion over a decade and partially privatizing the Medicare health plan for retirees and dismantling President Barack Obama's healthcare overhaul law.

With the help of $620 billion in new tax increases on the wealthy as a result of the January "fiscal cliff" deal, Ryan's plan aims to balance the budget by 2023, compared with 2040 in his last year's proposal. But further tax increases are out of the question, he said on Sunday.

Murray has signaled that her budget will aim to give the economy some breathing room to allow faster growth in the next few years, while maintaining social safety net programs and making critical investments in education and research.

Her budget is not expected to achieve balance as Ryan's does, but will aim to shrink deficits down to a sustainable level that will allow debt as a percentage of the economy to start declining.

The plan will get there by eliminating some of the estimated $1 trillion in "tax expenditures" - subsidies paid through tax deductions, credits and other exclusions. Based on Murray's comments and recent Senate Democratic proposals to replace the automatic cuts, these loophole closures will focus on the wealthy.

"At a time when we absolutely must cut where we can, looking at ways we can close special tax breaks that aren't targeted to help the middle class or our economy just makes sense," Murray told a Senate Budget Committee hearing last week.

"There's no good reason, for example, that taxpayers currently subsidize millionaires more, when they purchase a second home, or a yacht, than they do middle-class families purchasing their first home."

Many Republicans, including Ryan, also want to close these loopholes, but they want to divert the savings to reduce tax rates. This sort of comprehensive tax reform, they argue, will create a simpler, cleaner tax code that will foster economic growth.

The budget proposals will focus on the 2014 fiscal year that starts on October 1, leaving in place the first $85 billion in automatic cuts - called the "sequestration" - at least for the time being.

A Senate Democratic bill to fund the government through the end of the current fiscal year will make no effort to replace the cuts, focusing instead on ways to grant agencies authority to better manage their expenditures.

"We know that coming up with the $85 billion to solve sequester has to be done at the leadership and presidential level," the bill's author, Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, said last week.

The White House on Monday acknowledged that elimination of the across-the-board spending cuts will likely come only as part of a larger, comprehensive budget deal with Republicans, many of whom are determined to keep the $85 billion in savings.

"So, our focus now, as the president has said, is on working with Congress" on the regular budget process, "and through that process hopefully produce a bipartisan agreement on deficit reduction," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

NEW STARTING LINES

The week marks "a transitional moment" for Congress, said one aide, because it represents a return to the normal legislative process of considering budget resolutions in both chambers.

For more than two years, Washington has lurched from crisis to crisis amid "leadership-brokered" deficit deals and stop-gap spending extensions.

The Democratic-controlled Senate has not passed a formal budget resolution in nearly four years.

By returning to so-called "regular order," the Republican-controlled House in particular aims to engage more lawmakers in the process of deciding how to cut deficits so that there is more support among rank-and-file members for the finished product.

The last two major deficit deals were reached at the last minute at the highest levels of the White House and Congress, staving off a potentially devastating debt default in 2011 and averting a massive tax increase on January 1.

Obama will continue his efforts to engage congressional Republicans and Democrats directly, by holding meetings with lawmakers this week.

Obama's shift to a "charm offensive" in dealing with members of Congress likely reflects a sense of public weariness from endless budget battles, said Steve Bell, a former staff director of the Senate Budget Committee and now with the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

"It's important to change the subject away from debts and deficits and instead talk about things where you can make progress - immigration reform, for example, or on guns," Bell said.

With the effects of the automatic spending reductions yet to fully kick in, the president may be counting on public pressure to build on for an alternative to the deep cuts, Bell said.

In the meantime, the president can establish links with members of Congress of both parties and work on other issues.

(Editing by Fred Barbash and Mohammad Zargham)

View the original article here

Congress moving swiftly to avoid government shutdown

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congress is moving rapidly to pass legislation funding the federal government through September 30, as Senate leaders on Tuesday expressed eagerness to avoid any threat of agency shutdowns when money runs out on March 27.

"I'm cautiously optimistic we're going to reach a solution before we leave here for the Easter recess," which is scheduled to begin on March 23, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters on Tuesday.

Reid's Republican counterpart, Senator Mitch McConnell, gave a similarly upbeat assessment, telling reporters, "There seems to be no interest on either side in having a kind of confrontational government shutdown scenario."

Their comments follow Republicans' introduction of a new funding bill in the House of Representatives that will keep in place $85 billion worth of controversial, across-the-board spending cuts triggered on Friday.

The House measure, expected to win passage on Wednesday, aims to partially shield some defense and veterans' programs from the indiscriminate cuts by including two updated military-related spending bills. It also will shift some funds to security-related efforts such as border and embassy security, prisons and FBI operations.

Senator Barbara Mikulski, the Democrat who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, expressed frustration with the lack of flexibility for domestic programs such as education in the Republican plan.

"It's only guns. We need butter," Mikulski told reporters.

The White House also said it was concerned that domestic agencies would be forced to operate under older, more restrictive spending. In a statement, it said it would work with Congress to "refine the legislation" and would keep pressing lawmakers for a replacement to the automatic sequester cuts.

Next week, Senate Democrats will move their version of the bill for a vote and are likely to add funding flexibility for some domestic programs, party aides said.

Both the House and Senate versions are expected to cap discretionary spending at $1.043 trillion for the full 2013 fiscal year, but this would be reduced to around $982 billion if the sequester cuts remain in place.

PICKING THEIR BATTLES

Over the past couple of years, these short-term government funding bills, called "continuing resolutions," have been used as leverage by Republicans to try to lower spending. Amid Democratic resistance to some of the deeper spending cuts sought by Republicans, there were fears that negotiations would break down, forcing widespread shuttering of government agencies.

With House Republican conservatives feeling more confident now that they have locked in the $85 billion in new savings for the next seven months, the appetite for yet another showdown seems to have waned.

"What remains to be seen is whether this move ... apparently away from a crisis, is truly a shift in strategy for Republicans, or just a short break from extremism that they've had over the last few years," Reid said.

Once the funding bill for the remainder of this fiscal year is enacted, Congress promptly will turn to its next fiscal battle: a budget blueprint for the next fiscal year that begins on October 1.

Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan next week is expected to release an ambitious budget blueprint that aims to achieve balance in 10 years. But to achieve this, he may have to row back on at least one promise he made last year as the Republican vice presidential candidate - that any cuts to the Medicare health program will not affect anyone 55 or under.

He has floated a plan to push the age threshold up to 56 to reap additional savings from the program.

And sometime this summer, Congress and President Barack Obama will be engaged in yet another fight over the need to raise the U.S. Treasury Department borrowing limit.

It is unclear whether either of these measures will bring Democrats and Republicans together on a long-term deficit-reduction deal.

(Editing by Jackie Frank)

View the original article here

American, US Airways executives face gentle questioning in Congress

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Executives from American Airlines and US Airways Group Inc on Tuesday faced gentle questions from lawmakers about their planned merger, with some expressing concern about losing hubs in their districts.

US Airways Executive Vice President Stephen Johnson and American Airlines General Counsel Gary Kennedy defended the proposed $11 billion transaction by saying the companies had largely complementary networks, so little competition would be lost.

The Justice Department's Antitrust Division will review the deal to ensure it complies with antitrust law. Congress has no formal role in that process.

The executives faced few questions on what has been the primary concern about the merger - whether the deal would mean higher prices for the flying public.

Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, though, said he was concerned a reduced number of airlines would leave them room to control the market.

And he asked if the deal was really needed to compete, as the companies said. "While American is still in bankruptcy, it is poised to successfully reorganize. Moreover, US Airways posted record profits. This suggests that both airlines are perfectly capable of surviving, even thriving, as stand-alone airlines," he said.

Representative Thomas Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican, asked Johnson and Kennedy if they planned to raise prices. US Airways' Johnson said they would not go up but that he did not know if they would go down.

Pressed on what would happen to prices in the first six months to a year after the deal closed, American's Kennedy said: "We don't know. The airline industry is a very competitive industry with very thin margins."

Several of the lawmakers used the hearing to either pitch a local area as an airline hub or defend their city's value as an existing hub.

US Airways has three hubs — Charlotte, North Carolina, Philadelphia and Phoenix; American has five — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Miami.

Representative Steven Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, lamented the loss of Memphis as a hub after Delta merged with Northwest, noting a sharply pared flight schedule and job losses. Representative Keith Rothfus, a Republican from Pennsylvania, noted similar woes after US Airways cut Pittsburgh as a hub.

Representative Luis Garcia, a Florida Democrat, asked for reassurances that Miami would remain a hub, while Representative Blake Farenthold, a Texas Republican, noted the large number of hubs and asked: "What assurance can you give us that you're not going to shut one of those babies down?"

American's Kennedy replied, "We have a high level of confidence that the hubs that we have today will remain in place."

If approved, the deal would be the third major U.S. airline merger since 2008.

Kennedy said the transaction had been endorsed by labor unions and the boards of both companies and would give them badly needed financial stability.

Both executives cited the Delta deal to buy Northwest in 2008 and the United purchase of Continental in 2010, saying that consumers wanted to fly one airline to their destination, not several, and that this preference hampered smaller carriers.

The new company, to be called American Airlines, would become the largest U.S. air carrier, with 23 percent of available seats. That compares with Delta at 20 percent, United at 18 percent and Southwest at 18 percent, Johnson said in his written testimony.

Lawmakers from a Senate Judiciary subcommittee will hold a hearing on March 19. The witness list for that has not yet been released.

(Reporting By Diane Bartz; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

View the original article here

White House, Congress face cuts; details lacking

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House and Congress won't be immune to the automatic cuts in federal spending scheduled to kick in Friday. But for all the grim warnings the Obama administration has been detailing about the effect on everything from meat packing plants to airports, the consequences of the cuts on the politicians who concocted the idea are much sketchier.

To be sure, the legislative branch and the executive office of the president will take a hit if, as expected, $85 billion in across-the-board reductions begin to take effect in three days. As with other agencies, the impact won't necessarily be immediate.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said this week that White House personnel, like other non-exempt agencies of government, will experience reductions in pay and "there will be furloughs." But he said he had no breakdown of those numbers. Other government agencies have said they will spread out their furloughs so that workers will have to take one or two days off without pay per pay period.

President Barack Obama himself won't be among those affected. Included in the law's long list of exemptions to the cuts, in there along with Social Security benefits and food stamps, is the compensation of the president. Also exempt are the pensions of former presidents and payments to the widows and heirs of deceased members of Congress.

Still, there will be pain at both ends of Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue. According to a document prepared last September and modified in December by the White House Office of Management and Budget, most of the White House accounts, including the $113 million in salaries and expenses in the office of administration, would take an 8.2 percent trim. Likewise, the $396 million budgeted for senators' personnel and office expense accounts and the $1.226 billion budgeted for House salaries and expenses would take the same cut.

Those figures and percentages, however, were calculated before Congress took steps to delay the effective date of the reductions from Jan. 1 to March 1. As a result, the cuts might be slightly smaller.

Each congressional office operates independently and will determine how to find the reductions. The offices are not required to make public their plans to implement the reductions.

Other administration departments, acting to pressure Congress to change the cuts, have been eager to spell out the details.

Last week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood appeared in the White House briefing room to say that more than $600 million of Transportation Department cuts would come from the Federal Aviation Administration and that the agency's nearly 47,000 employees would have to be furloughed for about a day per pay period until the end of September. On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the White House press corps that the cuts would be equal to 5,000 fewer Border Patrol agents.

White House officials said the budget office is still working on how the cuts might specifically affect White House operations and personnel.

View the original article here