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Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is “pushing back against White House demands for no-frills legislation on the federal borrowing cap, is calling for another round of spending cuts beyond the sequester as part of any agreement to raise the debt limit,” Roll Call reports.
Said Boehner: “I believe that if we’re going to increase the debt limit, there ought to be cuts and reforms in place that are greater than the increase in the debt limit.”
Wonk Wire: The fiscal policy debate is out of whack.
Virginia Lt. Gov. nominee E.W. Jackson (R) misspelled the title of his 2008 book, Ten Commandments to an Extraordinary Life: Making Your Dreams Come True.
The book has a typo on its front cover, with one “m” missing in “commandments,” the Huffington Post reports.
“This is not your father’s Republican Party. It really is a fundamentally different party. There’s never been as much distance, at least since I’ve been alive, distance between where the mainstream of the Republican congressional party is and the Democratic Party is. It’s a chasm. It’s a gigantic chasm.”
— Vice President Joe Biden, quoted by the Huffington Post.
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A major gun-rights bill in North Carolina “took an unexpected turn with a proposal to eliminate the law that requires people receive a permit from their county sheriff before they can buy a handgun,” the Raleigh News and Observer reports.
The bill “still requires a permit to carry concealed handguns but expands the places that those weapons can be taken: all educational property, not just public colleges and universities as an earlier version proposed; private schools, unless they prohibit weapons; parades and funeral processions, unless they’re expressly prohibited.”
“Republicans are now on track to avoid a costly, high-profile primary in the South Dakota Senate race next year,” Roll Call reports.
Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD) announced she will seek re-election rather than challenge former Gov. Mike Rounds (R) in the primary for the open seat. Her move clears a major hurdle in the GOP’s path to picking up the seat of retiring Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD).
A new Des Moines Register poll in Iowa finds that just sevens months after Iowans rallied behind Obama to help ensure his re-election, 54% disapprove of the job he’s doing a president. That’s his worst rating in Iowa in his 4½ years in office.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds a majority “is holding fast in support for gay marriage, and even more Americans say legally married gays should receive full federal benefits.”
A week after he released partial transcripts of interviews with IRS officials involved in the scandal surrounding the targeting of conservative groups, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darell Issa said releasing the full transcripts would be “reckless” and “irresponsible,” the Huffington Post reports.
“U.S. intelligence operatives covertly sabotaged a prominent al-Qaeda online magazine last month in an apparent attempt to sow confusion among the group’s followers,” the Washington Post reports.
“The operation succeeded, at least temporarily, in thwarting publication of the latest issue of Inspire, the English-language magazine distributed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. When it appeared online, the text on the second page was garbled and the following 20 pages were blank. The sabotaged version was quickly removed from the online forum that hosted it, said independent analysts who track Islamist militant Web sites.”
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) “made history Tuesday, becoming the first senator of the modern era to deliver a Senate floor speech entirely in Spanish as he explained his support for a bipartisan immigration bill up for consideration,” the Washington Post reports.
“Over the course of a 14-minute speech, Kaine said he wanted to use the Spanish-speaking skills he learned working in Honduras in order to explain aspects of the bill to the roughly 40 million Spanish speakers living in the United States.”
A new Gallup survey finds Americans’ views of former president George W. Bush have improved, with 49% now viewing him favorably and 46% unfavorably. That is the first time since 2005 that opinions of him have been more positive than negative.
John Avlon notes that what connects the unruly and still-evolving scandals distracting the White House — ranging from the IRS to AP to Verizon — “is a portrait of an increasingly out-of-control federal bureaucracy that moves with an unaccountable borg-mind of its own. “
“This is the leviathan that libertarians and conservatives have warned about in sometimes overheated, hyperpartisan terms. The problem predates President Obama–government has been growing more or less consistently since the founding of the Republic, but especially since the New Deal, outpacing the growth of population. Now the complexities and temptations that come with new technology have hatched scandals that move almost on autopilot: leak investigations are announced and the gears of secret government churn on their own, often under the constitutional imperative of national security, sometimes leading to conditions contrary to the chief executive’s wishes and vision.”
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is still fundraising on her campaign website with a pitch that Democrats are “trying to defeat her” — even though she is retiring and won’t be on the ballot in 2014, Smart Politics notes.
Anthony Weiner’s New York City mayoral campaign “insisted it’s too soon to talk about strategy nearly three weeks into the ex-congressman’s comeback race. But the campaign’s carefully-curated stops, which typically number fewer than his rivals–might also reveal something about the polling that convinced him to jump into the race in the first place,” Politicker reports.
“Voter research conducted by one rival campaign revealed an interesting finding: that black voters seemed to be more forgiving of Mr. Weiner’s online dalliances than other groups.”
Pew Research: “A majority of Americans – 56% – say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism, though a substantial minority – 41% – say it is unacceptable. And while the public is more evenly divided over the government’s monitoring of email and other online activities to prevent possible terrorism, these views are largely unchanged since 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”
Former White House chief of staff Bill Daley is forming an exploratory committee as he weighs a Democratic primary challenge to Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D), the Chicago Tribune reports.
“The move allows Daley to start raising money and not let the summer slip away as he waits to see whether he’ll get a one-on-one matchup with Quinn in March. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan also is thinking about running for the Democratic governor nomination, but it’s unclear when she’ll make that decision. It’s also uncertain whether Daley will stay in should Madigan join the fray.”
Said Daley: “I can control what I can control. I’m not going to get into what-ifs: What if this person runs, doesn’t run, wins this? I can’t deal with that anymore, and I’m not going to.”
“I don’t look at this as being a whistleblower. I think it’s an act of treason.”
— Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), quoted by The Hill, on the man who leaked information on National Security Agency surveillance programs.
“As a fragile bipartisan effort to pass sweeping immigration legislation through the Senate reaches the final stretch, President Obama, who has been deliberately absent from the debate until now, has reemerged, hoping to cross the finish line along with the lawmakers who have championed the bill,” BuzzFeed reports.
“But Republicans who favor reform are eyeing the president’s last-minute immigration push warily, worried that his presence in the process could threaten the delicate compromises Republicans and Democrats have made over the past several months.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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