About 90 members of Congress “collected a government pension atop their taxpayer-financed $174,000 salary in 2012, National Journal found in an examination of recent financial records. Including a dozen newly elected freshmen who reported government pensions last year, the number now stands above 100. That’s nearly one-fifth of Congress.”
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Pryor in Tight Re-Election Race
A new Basswood Research poll in Arkansas finds Sen. Mark Pryor (D) just edging likely challenger Tom Cotton (R), 41% to 40%.
Pelosi Urges Clinton to Run for President
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told USA Today “there’s a great deal of
excitement” about a potential Hillary Clinton candidacy for president in 2016, adding that she
personally hopes Clinton enters the race.
She added: “I don’t know why she wouldn’t run. She’s prepared, she’s well known, she’s highly respected. She knows she would be able to do the job so very, very well.”
California Lawmaker Will Retire
Rep. John Campbell (R-CA) will not run for reelection in 2014, Roll Call reports.
Said Campbell: “At the end of this term, I will have spent 14 years serving in full-time, elected politics. I am not, nor did I ever intend to be, a career politician. I am ready to begin a new chapter in my life.”
Does Immigration Reform Stand a Chance?
“Insiders are split on whether or not an immigration overhaul will ever make it into law, but no one believes that the process will be easy,” NBC News reports.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) “has insisted – both privately and publicly – that he won’t bring legislation to the floor that does not have the support of a majority of House Republicans. On Thursday, he went even further, extending that pledge to any piece of legislation that results from a merger of House-and-Senate-passed bills.”
National Journal:
“As big a deal as this vote was–and by modern Senate standards it was
quite an accomplishment–the day’s celebration is very much tempered by
the chaos that lies ahead.”
Washington Post: “One voice lost in this battle over what the right, next move is on
immigration for the party? The major donors of the party who serve as
the bundlers of presidential campaigns and the funders of super PACs.
And, those big check-writers have a very clear preference: They want a
deal done.”
General is Target of Leak Investigation
Retired Gen. James Cartwright, the former second-ranking officer in the United States military, “is a target of an investigation into the leak of classified information about American cyberattacks on Iran’s nuclear program,” the New York Times reports.
Immigration Overhaul Passes Senate
“After three weeks of debate and 18 votes, the Senate overwhelmingly voted, 68-32, to pass an immigration overhaul Thursday, capping a process begun in January when the bipartisan ‘gang of eight’ announced it had agreed to a set of key principles for overhauling the system,” Roll Call reports.
The Washington Post notes that Vice President Biden presided over the vote
and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) “made the unusual
request that senators site at their assigned desks and stand to vote
when called.”
The Week: But will the House follow?
White House Assembles List of Bernanke Successors
Wall Street Journal: “The Obama administration has quietly begun assembling a short list of candidates for the Federal Reserve chairmanship, in the expectation that Ben Bernanke will step down when his second term ends in January.”
“Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew is putting together the list, working closely with a small number of senior White House officials. President Barack Obama could try to convince Mr. Bernanke to serve a third four-year term. But many of Mr. Bernanke’s friends and associates believe he wants to step down when his term expires.”
LePage Hints He May Not Run Again
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) told reporters that his future in politics was uncertain after the legislature overrode his veto of a state budget bill, the Bangor Daily News reports.
Said LePage: “I am going to be meeting with my family at some point and we are going to be talking it over. Quite frankly, I don’t know how you recover from this. I really don’t know how you recover from a tax increase. This is a giant obstacle. It’s like having a giant hole in the bottom of your ship and you are trying to get across the pond.”
Inside the Tea Party Civil War
The Washingtonian has a must-read piece on the unraveling of FreedomWorks, run by former Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX) and his behind-the-scenes strategist Matt Kibbe.
“Through their long crusade, the two had become as close as family, and Kibbe saw Armey as a father figure. But at the very moment that their small-government revolution was finally happening, Armey and Kibbe declared war on each other, dividing the FreedomWorks staff into opposing factions just weeks before the most important election of their lives. Employees scrambled to keep the infighting out of the press, fearing that the embarrassment would hurt Republicans at the ballot box, and they struggled to make sense of the rift.”
Bonus Quote of the Day
“If you can’t learn to compromise on an issue without compromising yourself, you sure as hell should never be in the legislative body. Every document of this country was a compromise. Go home and bitch and raise hell around the city council or something. Go haunt someone else. But you should never come to Congress. And you should never get married.”
— Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY), quoted by Time.
The End of an Era?
David Wasserman doesn’t expect the Supreme Court’s decision this week on the Voting Rights Act to dramatically alter the current shape of congressional districts or redistricting in the long term. But on other matters such as voter ID laws, early voting, and polling locations, the effective end of the preclearance era could be a different story.
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Years of Social Change
First Read: “If you follow American politics day by day, tweet by tweet, poll by poll, and speech by speech, it’s easy to lose sight of the biggest story over the past five years — just how much change (both socially and demographically) this country has witnessed over the past four years. The nation has its first African-American president who won re-election a year ago. A majority of Americas now support gay marriage, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that married same-sex couples are entitled to federal benefits. The country is on track to be a majority-minority nation 30 years from now. And the Senate is poised to pass immigration legislation giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. Taken together, this is a stunning amount of social change in a very short period of time.”
“And all of that change helps to explain much of the partisanship and politics over the past four years. After all, when one side is pursuing change, the other side is often resisting it.”
California Moves to Restart Same-Sex Marriage Licenses
Just after yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) “issued an order… requiring all 58 county clerks to issue marriage licenses when the ruling takes effect, which he said might take more than a month, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Quote of the Day
“This is Massachusetts. We only have three pastimes: sports, politics and revenge.”
— Democratic operative Jim Spencer, quoted by Roll Call.
Democrats Just Want You to Listen to Republicans
Raw Story notes Democrats “have a new strategy to use against their Republicans opponents: Just let them speak.”
“Following the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, the ‘DemRapidResponse’ channel simply uploaded a more than 20 minute long Republican press conference. The video wasn’t even edited, with the exception of a five second introduction that flashed, ‘Grand Old Party, Same Old Party on marriage equality’ across the screen.”
Christie Still Opposed to Same Sex Marriage
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) “said he would again veto a same-sex marriage bill if it reaches his desk, and that Wednesday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down a ban on federal benefits for same-sex married couples will have no effect on New Jersey, one of a handful of states that allows civil unions,” NBC Philadelphia reports.
Said Christie: “It’s just another example of judicial supremacy rather than having a government run by the people we actually vote for. I thought it was a bad decision, but it has no effect on New Jersey at all so we move from here.”
WikiLeaks Volunteer Was FBI Informant
Wired identified an 18-year-old Icelandic man as a FBI informant inside WikiLeaks.
Siggi Thordarson was a “long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000.”
