Second Thoughts on Sex and Politics

by Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica

The resignation of Rep. David Wu may seem like little more than a blip in the year's cavalcade of sexual misconduct by elected officials, from all-male tickle parties and crotch sexting to craigslist trawling. And the swift departure of this Oregon congressman, who said a recent sexual encounter with a friend's teenage daughter was "consensual," assures his name will fade as quickly as last week's debt reduction plan.

But the Wu story, which has been followed closely by few outside the Northwest, deserves more attention. In fact, it is among the most compelling arguments for why news organizations should aggressively pursue allegations of sexual misconduct, even when they seem like ancient history.

I am a reluctant convert to the value of sex as an investigative subject. In the late 1980s, shortly after Gary Hart's infamous invitation to "follow me," led to revelations about his extra-marital canoodling aboard the good ship Monkey Business, I was asked by an editor in the New York Times Washington bureau to look into a rumor that Vice President George H. W. Bush had fathered a child out of wedlock. I refused, telling my boss that "I didn't become a journalist to peer into people's bedrooms."

A few years later, a thinly sourced version of the story surfaced in the New York Post. Bush, by then president, brushed it off. "I'm not going to take any sleazy questions like that," he bristled. "I'm not going to respond other than to say it's a lie."

Quaintly, a denial from the president put the story to rest.

A few years later, I was in Arkansas for the New York Times to interview Judge David Hale, a peripheral figure in the Clintons' Whitewater land dealings. Jeff Gerth and I repeatedly pressed Hale for details on the couple's feckless attempt to create a vacation wonderland in the Ozarks. Mystified, Hale asked Gerth, who is now a ProPublica reporter, why we weren't more interested in Clinton's sex life. Jeff explained that we were from the New York Times and didn't do sex investigations.

Fast forward to Bill Clinton's second term, and we were all galloping after the Monica Lewinsky story which, typically, had been broken by our competitors. One weekend I went to visit my brother, a lawyer who respected the sober journalism practiced by the Times. We stopped in a supermarket and I bought a copy of the National Enquirer. "You read this?” he asked incredulously. "Yes, ‘' I replied. "They've had a lot of stuff first on Monica." Thumbing through the issue, I pointed to an article about a stained blue dress. "Who knows?” I said. "This might even be true."

In 2002, I joined the Oregonian in Portland, Ore., as a managing editor. Within a year, I was part of the management team that bungled one of the most significant sex scandals one could imagine: the story of how a former governor and Carter-administration Cabinet secretary had preyed on a teenage girl and covered up his misconduct. Neil Goldschmidt was the golden boy of Oregon politics, a kingmaker with the darkest secret imaginable. We had a plausible tip on the story but failed to follow up, allowing a competitor, Willamette Week, to break the story and win a Pulitzer Prize.

It marked the second time in modern history that the Oregonian had failed on a big sex story. Earlier, the paper had known about and failed to fully investigate on Sen. Robert Packwood's habit of making unwanted sexual advances. One of his victims had been a reporter in the Oregonian's Washington bureau. The story appeared first in the Washington Post, embarrassing the hometown paper.

In the wake of the Goldschmidt story, I pushed the Oregonian's reporters and editors to run to ground every tip relating to sexual misconduct by a public official.

Our attention quickly turned to David Wu, who was running for re-election in 2004. Wu, a Taiwanese immigrant and lawyer, was an awkward man. Years earlier, the paper had been tipped that he had sexually accosted his ex-girlfriend while a student at Stanford in the mid-‘70s. Efforts to confirm the story had been unsuccessful.

We assigned three reporters to try again. The woman at the center of the case politely but adamantly refused to cooperate, saying she had long ago made her peace with whatever had happened. No charges had ever been filed. There was no paper trail of any kind.

But over several months, reporters Laura Gunderson, Dave Hogan and Jeff Kosseff improbably tracked down witnesses who were willing to go on the record. They found Leah Kaplan, an 82-year-old former therapist at Stanford who had counseled the woman and was suffering from a fatal illness. Kaplan, still angered by the incident, breached patient confidentiality and said that she had pressed Stanford officials to take disciplinary action against Wu. She said they declined to ruin the record of a promising young man who, at the time, was hoping to attend medical school.

Kaplan's statements were intriguing, but not sufficient. We pressed the reporters to find the campus security officers who responded to complaints of a woman screaming in 1976. Find the cop. He'll remember.

And so they did. Raoul K. Niemeyer, then a patrol commander at Stanford, remembered that Wu had scratches on his face and neck. He said Wu claimed that what had happened was "consensual."

Just a few weeks before the election, we had a story ready for publication. Wu hired a lawyer who ferociously counter-attacked, threatening to sue the Oregonian if any story were published. Neither Wu nor the lawyer would answer questions about the incident, but they contacted Kaplan's family and made it clear they were prepared to hold the dying woman legally accountable for her conduct. Wu's campaign manager said the candidate would never respond to "unsubstantiated allegations."

Top editors at the paper were divided about what to do. It was late in the campaign. The incident was decades old. Could one reasonably call it a "youthful" mistake? Was it fair to put someone's college years under a microscope? The victim was unwilling to come forward. Shouldn't that weigh? And what about the threats from Wu's lawyer?

Ultimately, we decided to publish. We concluded that at least some voters would want to know their congressman had this incident in his past. The morning the story appeared, Wu issued a statement saying: "As a 21-year old, I hurt someone I cared very much about. I take full responsibility for my actions and I am sorry. This single event forever changed my life and the person that I have become."

Wu's opponent hammered away at his character—to no effect. More than 350 readers wrote to criticize the story, and even the paper's ombudsman attacked it, questioning its relevance and reliance on second-hand sources.

Wu went up in the polls, winning re-election easily.

Over the next few months, we heard other stories from other women. None was willing to go on the record. It appeared to us that Wu's aggressive conduct with women may have continued deep into his adulthood. But we were unable to prove it.

The Wu story revived during the 2010 election cycle, when most of his aides quit just after the campaign. Several said his behavior was bizarre. Someone leaked a photo of the congressman in a tiger suit that he had sent aides.

Following the story from New York as an editor at ProPublica, I shrugged. And then came the bombshell disclosure that an 18-year-old woman, daughter of a political supporter, had called Wu's offices and left a voice mail stating that she had been the victim of a coercive sexual encounter with him the previous Thanksgiving.

Oregonian reporters Charles Pope, Janie Har and Beth Slovic broke the story. Once again, Wu initially refused to respond to questions. Once again, the victim declined to participate in the story. Once again, Wu said it was "consensual."

After a few more days of hanging tough, Wu took the advice of Democratic leaders and said he would resign after the debt ceiling debate is resolved. ""The well-being of my children must come before anything else," he said in a statement.

I apologize to the teenager whose distraught call is said to describe a traumatic experience at the hands of a 56-year-old member of Congress. Despite our best efforts, we failed you. Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that sex can be a legitimate arena for investigative reporting. It certainly was in the case of David Wu.

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With All Eyes On Default, Some Dems Continue To Focus on Wisc. Recalls

The federal government may go into default on Tuesday, but some Democrats continue to focus on the other big political day coming next month: the day of the final batch of recall elections in Wisconsin.

Most Washington Democrats, understandably, remain enmeshed in the politics and policy of the debt crisis, but several big Democratic and progressive groups based in the nation's capital continue to fight it out in the coming recall elections in the Badger State.

Wisconsin voters in several state districts will go to the polls August 9 to decide whether to dump two Democratic state lawmakers and six Republicans in historic recall elections. (One state Democrat, state Sen. Dave Hansen, already won big in his recall, able to remain in office in the first recall earlier this month.)

The recalls were triggered earlier this year in response to the outrage over Republican support for GOP Gov. Scott Walker's plan to strip state workers of their ability to bargain collectively. (Republicans responded to Democratic efforts to recall GOP lawmakers by forcing recall elections of Democratic lawmakers.)

If Democrats can oust three Republicans in the coming recalls, they can retake control of the state senate, and be in a stronger position to oppose further initiatives put forward by the conservative Walker.

"We've never been closer to winning these Wisconsin recall elections than we are right now," says Michael Langenmayr, deputy political director of Democracy for America (DFA), a progressive group affiliated with former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean.

DFA and other groups have been emailing supporters this week in a heavy fundraising drive ahead of the recalls to support voter-mobilization, keeping TV ads on the air, and more.

The continued financial support is key, according to John Winston, national political director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), because conservative interest groups have been "pouring" funds into the state to defend the embattled state Republicans.

"The reason is very simple, according to the [Washington] Post: 'the sudden influx of outside conservative money suggests that national right wing activists understand that if Dems take back the state senate, it would represent a massive blow to their broader agenda,'" Winston says.

"That's exactly what we've said from the beginning: defeating the GOP in Wisconsin will show Republicans across the country that there will be consequences for any legislator who votes for Scott Walker's radical agenda," he adds. "And that's why the DLCC has launched an aggressive response, including multiple television ads that we've expanded to include a targeted multimedia push."

Nick Passanante, DFA's Wisconsin field director, recently reported to supporters via email about the 38 days he's spent on the ground in the state.

Polls put Democrats ahead in three state districts, but down in three others, he says, including District 10, held by Republican state Sen. Sheila Harsdorf.

"A win in any of these three districts would be huge and we have all the momentum right now," Passanante says. "We've already knocked on 20,163 doors in Districts 8 and 10 and we're making calls into these districts every night. Now, we're expanding our canvass in District 10 to put us over the top."

Harsdorf's district a solid Republican area where "no one ever thought would be competitive, but the reaction to Republican attacks on middle class families has been so strong that we have a real shot of pulling off an upset here," he says.

"We've been on the ground in District 10 for three weeks. We've already hit 9,940 doors and the response has been amazing. Expanding our ground program here could be what makes the difference," he adds.



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New Effort Aimed At Ending Unemployment Discrimination

A Washington-based advocacy organization launched an online petition campaign aimed at companies that refuse to consider hiring unemployed workers, a perverse form of discrimination in today's economy when long-term unemployment remains persistently high.

The campaign comes after the National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a report showing that employers of all sizes, staffing agencies and online job posting firms are using recruitment and hiring policies that expressly deny employment to the unemployed -– simply because they are not working.

The online effort launched by USAction also follows legislation introduced by two House Democrats, Reps. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Henry Johnson of Georgia, that would prohibit employers and employment agencies from refusing to consider job applicants solely because they are unemployed.

"Just as a company would not dare say 'African Americans need not apply' or 'Jews need not apply,' it is outrageous that any company in this day and age would explicitly ban unemployed workers from employment," says Alan Charney, USAction director of strategy and policy. "This policy discriminates against people who have lost jobs through no fault of their own, excludes many jobless workers who are highly qualified and motivated and, paradoxically and unacceptably, lengthens unemployment status."

The NELP study reviewed job postings that appeared on four of the nation's most prominent online job listing websites: CareerBuilder.com, Monster.com, Indeed.com and Craigslist. It identified more than 150 ads that openly discriminated based on employment status. The overwhelming majority of the discriminatory ads required that applicants "must be currently employed."

"Whatever reasons employers and agencies may have for excluding the unemployed, the practice is deepening the pain for millions of workers who have already shouldered the brunt of the downturn and is actually hurting the economy by squandering the skills and experience of millions, reducing consumption, and increasing public costs," says Christine Owens, NELP executive director.

USAction this week delivered letters to corporate executives of CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com, asking the companies to reject advertising that discriminates. "Although we understand that the discriminatory wording of these ads was written by the employers themselves, discrimination against the unemployed is no more justified than ads that employers historically placed excluding the hiring of people of color or women or people of certain religions," the letter states. "You would presumably not accept ads that discriminate on race, gender, religious belief, etc. Why discriminate against the unemployed?"

Johnson first introduced the Fair Employment Act of 2011 in March. The bill would ban companies like CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com from posting ads that discriminate based on employment status, USAction says.

It would prevent employers and employment agencies from refusing to consider or offer employment to someone who is unemployed, or including language in any job advertisements or postings that states unemployed individuals are not qualified.

In June, despite 16 months of private-sector job growth, there were still 7 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls than when the recession began in December 2007, and 6.7 million fewer jobs on private payrolls.

Long-term unemployment remains a significant concern. Over two-fifths (44.4 percent) of the 14.1 million people who are unemployed — 6.5 million people — have been looking for work for 27 weeks or longer. These long-term unemployed represent 4.1 percent of the labor force. Prior to this recession, the previous highs for these statistics over the past six decades were 26.0 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, in June 1983.

“Discrimination against the unemployed – especially the long-term unemployed – in job ads and hiring practices flies in the face of what we stand for as a nation: Equal opportunity for all,” says Johnson. “The Fair Employment Opportunity Act of 2011 will help us level the playing field and get people back to work.”



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New Ads Put Fresh Conservative Spending Cut Pressure On Boehner, McConnell

Amid the chaos on Capitol Hill over the future of federal debt legislation, an influential organization of religious conservatives has launched new radio ads in Republican House Speaker John Boehner's home district in Ohio, and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's home state of Kentucky are pressing the lawmakers to hew to a hard line on spending cuts.

FRC Action, an arm of the Family Research Council, says it put its spots up to counter earlier ads aired by a group of progressive Christians which used the Bible to argue that the drastic budget cuts called for by conservatives were really anti-Christian and would hurt the poor.

The path to such an increase was unclear Friday, as Boehner was forced to scuttle a Thursday vote on his budget plan as he apparently failed to win support to pass his bill through the House. Democratic Senate Majority Harry Reid of Nevada has declared the Boehner bill dead-on-arrival in the Senate, regardless.

Given the power and influence FRC wields on the right in Washington, its new ads could limit any political bargaining room Boehner and McConnell might seek to win support for a budget compromise with Democrats in order to raise the government's debt limit ahead of Tuesday's drop-dead day, when the government is expected to default on its financial obligations without an increase in the debt ceiling.

According to a description of its ads provided by FRC Action, a narrator says, "Right now Congress is considering increasing America's debt. But debt hurts everyone, especially the poor."
In separate versions of the Ohio and Kentucky ads, ministers from each state then reads, "There's a group of well-meaning but misguided ministers who believe that the government is responsible for meeting the needs of the poor, calling proposed budget cuts immoral. But Jesus didn't instruct the government of his day to take the rich young ruler's property and redistribute it to the poor. He asked the ruler to sell his possessions and help the poor. Charity is an individual choice, not a government mandate."

FRC Action says it will continue to air the ads through Monday, a day before the expected default deadline.



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Think Again: 'Bad Things Happen Someplace, Muslims Involved'

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Eric Alterman

I know there are more important problems in the world than Jennifer Rubin’s blog on The Washington Post like the debt ceiling crisis, the Republican assault on the welfare state—that “if enacted, it could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history”—the criminality of the Murdoch empire, unchecked global warming, the banking industry’s assault on the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and so on.* But bear with me.

I’ve written about Rubin a few times in this space and elsewhere, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t even read her myself. Her blog, however, shows up on my various radar screens on occasion and almost always instructively. This week, it’s because Rubin, relying on arguments drawn from The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute, rushed into “print” last Friday afternoon with a column insisting that the horrific massacre in Oslo had “a specific jihadist connection” in the attack and employed this insight to argue for a bigger budget for the Pentagon.

I swear I am not making this up. She wrote: “This is a sobering [sic] reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists.” The column also insisted, no less crazily as it happens, that “Obama would have us believe that al-Qaeda is almost caput and that we can wrap up things in Afghanistan.” She was so proud of her column that she followed it with a tweet that read “Norway bombing and why we shouldn't slash defense- IT IS A DANGEROUS WORLD.”

Had this brilliant analyst waited for, say, her own newspaper to report on the incident, she would have learned that a "Norwegian man taken into custody, whom Norwegian media identified as Anders Behring Breivik, has admitted to firing the weapons, police chief Sveinung Sponheim told reporters Saturday. Police officials have described the man as a right-wing Christian fundamentalist, a member of a small, largely Internet-based community that has been quiet in recent years."

The murderer was also, inconveniently for Ms. Rubin, a strong “Israel right-or-wrong” variety of Zionist. He was also a big fan of an anti-Islam documentary featuring neoconservative rabble-rousers like Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson. Mr. Emerson, we cannot help but note, was the guy who, Rubin-like, tried to pin the Oklahoma City bombing on Muslims before anyone knew the truth of that tragedy.

In a follow-up column—and I swear I am not making this up, either—Rubin argued that this just proved her original point. “That the suspect here is a blond Norwegian does not support the proposition that we can rest easy with regard to the panoply of threats we face or that homeland security, intelligence and traditional military can be pruned back. To the contrary, the world remains very dangerous because very bad people will do horrendous things. There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.”

Naturally, Rubin was not alone in her boneheaded, belligerent speculation. People on MSNBC, Fox (including Laura Ingraham), The Weekly Standard, and the editors of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal among others did so as well, with the latter noting, “Al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahir has repeatedly singled out Norway…” Too lazy to do his own lying, Rush Limbaugh tweeted Rubin’s musings with approval.

All were seeking, in the words of Stephen Colbert, to “scoop reality,” or as he also put it, “pulling a news report completely out of [their] ass[es].”

Those places, together Rubin’s home base—and Commentary magazine, where editor John “Normanson” Podhoretz worried that America might respond to the killing in an overly “intellectual” manner—are exactly where one would expect to find this poisonous potion of fear, ignorance, and racism masquerading as news and comment. But The Washington Post?

Well, yes. And while The Post has proven particularly craven in its coverage of and by conservatives under former Wall Street Journal editor/buy-out king Marcus Brauchli, it remains representative of the need of mainstream institutions to coddle conservatives by abandoning all previously known journalistic standards if they are to remain in their good graces.

It’s no secret that The Post only hired Rubin because Brauchli and company felt they needed a right-wing blogger to offset the liberal Ezra Klein. In their first attempt to hire one, they picked out wet-behind-the-ears nonjournalist Ben Domenech, who turned out to have a greater talent for plagiarism than journalism, though he later went on to greater heights of character assassination and purposeful lying after being fired. In their second effort, they picked Dave Weigel, failing to realize that it was possible to cover the right smartly and fairly—and this is not my opinion but that of Brauchli himself, who called Weigel’s work “excellent”—without being a conservative oneself. And so they got rid of him, too. Finally came Rubin, who has achieved little (if any distinction) as a blogger except among those obsessed with attacking any and every criticism of Israel. But she was conservative and available.

To compare the knowledge, sophistication, research, and fairness of her posts to those of Mr. Klein is as instructive as it is cruel. Klein does real reporting, does justice to the views of those with whom he disagrees, and provides evidence for his views, which are rather more moderate than my own on most issues but always well supported. This statement will strike most readers of both writers as self-evident, but if you doubt it, do the research yourself. I’ll even get you started here and here. I dare any conservative to take the Ezra/Jennifer test. (What is perhaps funniest about Rubin’s misguided hysteria was the fact that her column made no sense even on its own terms. Yes it’s a “DANGEROUS WORLD,” but what exactly is the nature of that danger? In this case, let’s say the Oslo killer had been a member of a radical Islamic sect. How would increasing the Pentagon budget have prevented the murders? By invading Norway? The big-ticket items in the Pentagon budget, are, sadly, more useful for fighting a land war against the Soviet Union than defending against homemade bombs and the like.)

The fact that each of these writers represents the “left” and “right” on The Post points to two salient facts about today’s political discourse. First off, the left supports and believes in actual journalism. Its complaint with the media is that journalists allow other factors—laziness, sensationalism, silliness, and the right’s “working of the refs”—to interfere with the process of informing news consumers. But on the right, the actual news is a problem, and so journalists are attacked when they report it overly zealously, regardless of whether it is true.

Look here and you will find a Commentary blogger complaining that the media pays too much attention to Israel. Scroll down and you will see a bunch of other Commentary articles complaining of the same thing. Note that Commentary, since the late 1960s, has existed almost exclusively to defend Israel (and attack affirmative action) and yet they complain of the fact of anyone else paying too much attention, regardless of the quality of information.

Why? I don’t profess to know, but I offer two hypotheses. First, conservatives know that they cannot support their arguments in light of inconvenient truths (“The facts have a liberal bias”) and so they seek to kill the messenger. Second, those institutions who are genuinely committed to balancing alleged liberalism with alleged conservatism are going to have a hell of a hard time finding right-wingers able and willing to live up to their standards.

In a conservative complaint about the alleged unfriendly environment for conservatives in the nation’s universities, New York Times right-winger John Tierney finds that those who have studied the paucity of such people on campus discovered it is not due to any identifiable discrimination (“It is unlikely that discrimination is a major causal factor accounting for professorial liberalism”), a view that is endorsed by almost all Republican professors as well.

Interestingly, however, Tierney goes on to observe that “These respondents weren’t your typical Republicans. Nearly two-thirds of them favored stricter environmental regulations—hardly a right-wing agenda.” He is right, of course, but he fails to see how damning this is to “real” right-wingers. To be a conservative today means to deny reality.

All 20 of 20 Republican Senate candidates in 2010 rejected the scientific consensus on man-made global warming—one that every significant scientific panel has reinforced. So too did all 31 members of the House who declined to vote, on Tuesday, in favor of allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gasses.

So yes, great universities are unfriendly to people who prefer to embrace know-nothing propaganda put forth by people like the Koch-funded Cato Institute, or to the kind of colleges that make Dinesh D’Souza their president. They prefer people whose research and writing relies on actual evidence that can be tested and reproduced in the sciences or footnoted to scholarly sources in the humanities.

“Left” and “right” are not equivalents in this country any more. One is genuinely concerned with facing reality and addressing it, however imperfectly and often, mistakenly. The other couldn’t care less. It’s time those in the media seeking “balance” understood this. Their failure to do so is likely to do a great deal more damage to this country than all of the crazed Muslims that exist in Jennifer Rubin’s imagination. You might even call it a “cult.”

*Headline borrowed from Mr. Colbert here.

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a columnist for The Nation, The Forward, and The Daily Beast. His newest book is Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama. This column won the 2011 Mirror Award for Best Digital Commentary.

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Boehner's Pressing For A Deficit Bill Experts Say Won't Solve The Problem

House Speaker John Boehner may be telling recalcitrant House Republicans to "Get your ass in line," and potentially expending huge amounts of political capital, to rally conservatives behind his budget plan. Boehner may well score a win late Thursday when his bill comes up for a vote, but speaker's bill may well not be enough.

That's not the word from partisan Democrats. Rather, a number of experts in finance and markets, are weighing in against the Boehner proposal, particularly because of its short time horizon.

Although Democrats want a bill to raise the federal debt sufficient to avoid another such showdown before the 2012 elections, the Boehner bill would require another battle over the ability of the federal government to pay its bills in just another few months.

Notably, a top official at one of the key credit-rating agencies, already is shaking his head at Boehner's short-term approach.

“We would be concerned if we thought that the debt ceiling debate would come back and be opened and we’d have to go through all this again and again and again,” David Beers, head of public finance ratings at Standard & Poor's, told CNBC.

All Senate Democrats have come out against the Boehner plan, virtually dooming it in the Senate, even if the House approves it. Senate Democrats all wrote Boehner in a letter on Wednesday, citing his short-term approach as a key reason they will vote his bill down if it reaches their side of the Capitol.

“In addition to risking a downgrade and catastrophic default, we are concerned that in five or six months, the House will once again hold the economy captive and refuse to avoid another default unless we accept unbalanced, deep cuts to programs like Medicare and Social Security, without asking anything of the wealthiest Americans,” the Senate Democrats write, including independent Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Although Beers, and the ability of his organization to issue a damaging downgrade of the federal government's credit rating, weighs heavily in the debate, he is not the only financial expert concerned about the Boehner plan.

Says Alan Blinder, a former vice president of the Federal Reserve: “The Boehner plan is going to have us fighting this out again in a matter of months, and we don’t need that.”

Lawmakers have just until Tuesday to come up with a deal to raise the federal debt limit, or else the government for the first time is expected not to be able to pay all of its bills.

That default could wreak havoc on the struggling U.S. economy, raising interest rates across the board and potentially costing hundreds of thousands of Americans their jobs.



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Devotion To Conservative Principle No Longer Behind Debt Crisis — Now It's Just Naked GOP Politics Driving Us Off A Cliff

By Scott Nance

As the clock ticks closer to midnight Tuesday and a first-ever default by the federal government that threatens to wreck the U.S. economy, Republicans will repeat over and over again that they are standing on principle for the benefit of the American people.

Don't believe them for a minute.

They aren't standing on principle; they are cowering in fear for their own political hides.

But what could be more frightening than throwing our country back into recession?

Facing a primary opponent from their own party in next year's elections. That's what.

There is no other reason for House Republicans not to agree to a deal today. None.

The deals have become so favorable for them that conservative columnist David Brooks criticized Republicans for rejecting what he calls "the mother of all no-brainers."

No less an anti-tax stalwart than the influential Grover Norquist, the activist behind a politically powerful no-tax pledge which most of the Republicans have signed on to, gave conservatives a hall pass with permission to take a compromise deal that raises some tax revenue.

Moreover, Republicans like to talk about coming to rescue of business and "job creators."

But even business executives have gotten so fed up with inaction on the debt crisis that they are telling Republicans that some new taxes would be OK, so just take the darn deal already.

With a conservative political overlord like Norquist and their sainted job creators all telling the Republicans to go for it, what's holding them back?

They are afraid, no matter how good the deal is, some tea party folks back home will demand some even more absolutist position and one of them will come out of the shadows and challenge them from the right.

They all don't want to be the next Bob Bennett. Bennett was a longtime Republican senator from Utah. He was as faithful a conservative as you could find, but he also was rational and realistic. Too realistic for the tea party folks back home. A tea party activist named Mike Lee popped up, and defeated Bennett for the Republican nomination for Senate last year. Mike Lee now is the senator, and Bennett is history.

With tea party folks actively cheering for default, a lot of these tea party-back freshman are terrified that if they took a deal — even an awesome one — they'll be the next Bob Bennett and their congressional careers will come to a screeching halt.

What these guys don't seem to understand, though, is that a lot of them probably will lose next year, anyway. If not in a primary, then certainly in the November general election.

Don't believe me? Ask Michael Flanagan.

"Who's that?", you ask.

He was one of the Republican heroes of the last big Republican takeover election, back in 1994. Flanagan defeated the Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, the then powerful-but-indicted chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Flanagan was a dragon slayer.

Except, guess what? Yep. Without a crook like Rosty to run against, Flanagan was dumped out of office just two years later.

It's just going to happen: A number of the GOP freshmen sit in districts President Obama won in 2008 and a bunch of the 2010 freshmen will turn into defeated one-termers like Michael Flanagan.

While we're name-dropping the names of obscure one-term wonders, let me drop one more: Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky.

Margolies-Mezvinsky was a freshman Democrat from a swing district in Pennsylvania back in 1993. She had the poor luck of being the Democrat who had to cast the tie-breaking vote for President Bill Clinton's tax increase that year, a tax increase that helped pave the way for a balanced budget just a few years later.

When she cast that vote, though, Republicans mocked Margolies-Mezvinsky mercilessly. Then Rep. Bob Walker went so far as to jump up and down on the House floor, yelling "Bye-bye, Marjorie!"

Sure enough, Margolies-Mezvinsky also couldn't make it back for a second term.

Except, it turns out, Margolies-Mezvinsky is OK with that. She wouldn't change her vote if she had it to do over. "I am your worst-case scenario. And I'd do it all again," she says.

This little-known lawmaker popped up again just last year. She told her story in the pages of the Washington Post. At the time, she was counseling wavering Democrats who were unsure about casting a politically difficult vote for healthcare reform.

"Simply put, you could be Margolies-Mezvinskied whether you vote with or against President Obama," she says. "You will be assailed no matter how you vote this week. And this job isn't supposed to be easy. So cast the vote that you won't regret in 18 years."

While Margolies-Mezvinsky was talking to Democrats about healthcare reform, the exact same thing could be said today to Republicans about raising the debt ceiling.

So, House Republicans: You can do the right thing, or continue to act as lemmings. But this time, you will be are taking us over the cliff, too.

Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade. Capitol Idea is his regular column from Washington. This article was first published as Devotion To Conservative Principle No Longer Behind Debt Crisis — Now It's Just Naked GOP Politics Driving Us Off A Cliff on Blogcritics.



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Whistleblowers Say Nuclear Regulatory Commission Watchdog Is Losing Its Bite

by John Sullivan and Cameron Hickey, Special to ProPublica

When he retired after 26 years as an investigator with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Office of the Inspector General, George Mulley thought his final report was one of his best.

Mulley had spent months looking into why a pipe carrying cooling water at the Byron nuclear plant in Illinois had rusted so badly that it burst. His report cited lapses by a parade of NRC inspectors over six years and systemic weaknesses in the way the NRC monitors corrosion.

But rather than accept Mulley's findings, the inspector general's office rewrote them. The revised report shifted much of the blame to the plant's owner, Exelon, instead of NRC procedures. And instead of designating it a public report and delivering it to Congress, as is the norm, the office put it off-limits. A reporter obtained it only after filing a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan has thrust the NRC's role as industry overseer squarely in the spotlight, but another critical player in U.S. nuclear safety is the NRC's Office of the Inspector General, an independent agency that serves as watchdog to the watchdog.

Now, Mulley and one other former OIG employee have come forth with allegations that the inspector general's office buried the critical Byron report and dropped an investigation into whether the NRC is relying on outdated methods to predict damage from an aircraft crashing into a plant.

The inspector general's office, they assert, has shied away from challenging the NRC at exactly the wrong time, with many of the country's 104 nuclear power plants aging beyond their 40-year design life and with reactor meltdowns at Fukushima rewriting the definition of a catastrophic accident.

"We're in the nuclear power business. It's not a trivial business; it's public health and safety," said Mulley, who won the agency's top awards and reviewed nearly every major investigation the office conducted before he retired as the chief investigator three years ago.

"We have to have somebody that's going to look over the NRC's shoulder and make sure they were fulfilling their obligations," he said.

Inspector General Hubert T. Bell declined to comment, but Joseph McMillan, the assistant inspector general for investigations, said the office has continued to vigorously pursue cases. He confirmed that the aircraft crash case has been closed but said it was proper. Regarding the Byron case, McMillan acknowledged disagreements but said: "I stand by the work we have done."

The U.S. nuclear industry can point to an enviable safety record -- no member of the public has ever been injured by an accident at a plant. Nonetheless, critics point to issues like the NRC's drawn-out effort to enforce fire rules as evidence that the five-member commission and the agency it runs are too close to the industry.

The inspector general's office has traditionally filled a key oversight role, conducting dozens of investigations that have changed how the NRC regulates nuclear waste, fire protection and security, among other things. Its regular reports to Congress cover waste, fraud and agency performance.

Many federal agencies have similar independent offices to ferret out wrongdoing and improve efficiency. The NRC's was established in 1989 and has been led for the past 15 years by Bell, who was appointed by President Clinton after nearly three decades in the Secret Service.

'Everything Seems to Die'

In the office's history, Mulley has left a big mark.

For years, he documented how the NRC dropped the ball on the handling of nuclear fuel and security in nuclear plants. His reports on defective fire barriers led to congressional hearings and ultimately to a complete overhaul of the agency's fire protection regulations.

He retired in 2008 as a senior-level assistant for investigations but continued work as an OIG consultant for two more years. Before he retired, Bell and a deputy wrote that Mulley was "so thorough and knowledgeable of all aspects of investigations, that even NRC management recognizes the value added to having Mr. Mulley's expertise on all cases."

Mulley is not alone in his concerns about the inspector general's office. Another former employee told ProPublica that the office has become reluctant to probe anything that could become controversial or raise difficult questions for the NRC.

"They don't want to do anything," said the ex-employee, who left out of dissatisfaction with the direction of the office and asked not to be named to protect his current job. "Everything just seems to die."

The former employee told ProPublica that the OIG's office had dropped an inquiry into whether the NRC could accurately predict the damage to a plant from an airplane crash, and Mulley confirmed his account, saying the office received a tip in 2007 that the NRC was using an outdated method.

Because a wrong prediction could lead to insufficient protection for the plants, the inspector general's office opened an investigation, Mulley said. "We went to several experts who said that thing is antiquated, you can't use it," he said.

Mulley said that the NRC's experts insisted that their method was accurate. He said the aim of the investigation was not to prove that the NRC experts were wrong but to show there was a dispute and question whether the NRC should update its predictions.

"In my mind, the OIG was not going to resolve it," he said. "It raised a valid question."

The 2001 terrorist attacks drew attention to the potential hazard of an aircraft crash for nuclear plants, and afterward the NRC and nuclear industry examined whether new precautions were needed.

The main industry trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, commissioned studies that showed U.S. plants could sustain a direct hit from a modern airliner without any radiation release.

Following 9/11, the NRC adopted a rule requiring nuclear operators to take steps to minimize possible damage from major natural disasters or an aircraft crash. Two years ago, the commission required new licensees to assess whether their reactors could withstand an airliner crash.

Eliot Brenner, an NRC spokesman, said the agency's method of evaluating the risk to plants has been thoroughly checked and relies on "realistic threat parameters."

McMillan said that OIG completed its investigation into the crash prediction issue and that the case was "closed to the file," meaning that no report was issued.

The decision to forgo a report usually means that the inspector general found no public safety concerns. McMillan declined to comment on the report or to describe any conclusions. He said it was available only through a Freedom of Information Act request, which ProPublica filed today.

The Byron Plant's Rusty Pipe

Mulley spent more than a year investigating why the pipe blew out at the Byron plant.

On Oct. 19, 2007, a worker using a wire brush to clean a thick coating of rust from the massive steel pipe ripped completely through the metal. Water shot out, triggering a 12-day shutdown of the plant's two reactors located outside Rockford, Ill.

The 24-inch pipe was part of the plant's Essential Service Water System, a network of eight huge pipes that carries water to cool emergency equipment. During an accident, it can be critical because it protects the generators and pumps that keep the reactor from overheating.

"It's a safety-related system," Mulley said. "If it doesn't operate, you can't operate the plant."

After the pipe ruptured, the NRC assigned a special inspection team to find out whether Exelon could have prevented it. Mulley put together a four-person team to start a parallel investigation into whether the NRC inspectors should have caught the problem beforehand.

His team interviewed workers and NRC inspectors assigned to the Byron plant since the early 1990s. They concentrated heavily on the inspectors' actions in 2007, when Byron engineers began scrutinizing pipe sections, called risers, that were partly buried in concrete in a below-ground vault.

Plant engineers performed ultrasonic tests on the thickness of the risers. Originally, the pipe walls were three-eighths of an inch thick, but over the span of three tests, engineers stepped the acceptable thickness down to three-hundredths of an inch -- equivalent to seven sheets of paper.

Mulley's team found that the NRC's on-site inspectors had not checked the Byron engineers' work even though repeated drops in safety margin should have been a red flag. Corrosion in Byron's essential water system had been discussed in plant meetings, and because testing the risers required repeated use of a crane to gain access, inspectors should have suspected something.

"The NRC is supposed to -- if they're overseeing this thing -- take a look at it and say, 'Oh, wait a minute, what's going on?'" Mulley said. "But obviously, they didn't look at that one."

Mulley found that NRC's on-site inspectors had repeated opportunities to check the pipes over the years but had not done so. In interviews, the inspectors told Mulley's investigators that they had been busy with other work. Although inspectors had preformed a required number of equipment checks, Mulley's report found that their inability to set priorities was a weakness in the inspection program.

The NRC, it turns out, had received a warning about a similar pipe break at the Vendellos nuclear plant in Spain, Mulley's team discovered. Peter B. Lyons, then an NRC commissioner, had even mentioned the Vendellos break in a speech, saying the agency was on top of the problem. But the word was never sent to NRC inspectors in the field, Mulley found.

"I don't think anybody up there was purposely saying, 'Hey, this is not so important,'" Mulley said of the Vendellos information. "I think they knew it was important. I think they intended to. I don't think anybody followed up on it, and then it falls into the cracks."

Report Revised, Kept From Public

Because the Byron incident touched broadly on NRC inspection policies, Mulley opened his case as an Event Inquiry -- a report normally intended for release to Congress and the public. He stayed on after retirement to complete it, submitting it in 2009 with some tough conclusions.

The NRC "provided little meaningful regulatory oversight of corrosion of piping in the Byron essential service water system, one of Byron's most risk significant systems," his version states. Moreover, the NRC "did not take full advantage of lessons learned" from Vendellos.

Mulley said no one raised questions.

"The report languished for a year," he said. "Nobody ever got back to me once to let me know, although I emailed them asking what's going on, what's happening with this thing."

Then, in September 2010, the inspector general's office issued a new version. Mulley's draft had been thoroughly rewritten, and although the facts were similar, the conclusions were not.

The report said NRC oversight "was not successful" and that guidance for inspectors "was not specific enough," but pointedly blamed Exelon for the inspectors' failings.

"Although the (NRC) resident inspectors carried out routine oversight responsibilities in accordance with agency requirements, the licensee's failure to analyze a problem correctly resulted in the resident inspector's lack of awareness of a significant problem," it states.

By contrast, Mulley's version squarely faults NRC inspectors and procedures.

"From 2000 to 2007, the NRC did not conduct any documented inspection activity of essential service water piping," it states, while inspectors "provided no regulatory review … to support the licensee's lowering of the acceptable minimum wall thickness" in the piping.

The revised report did not mention Vendellos or the NRC's failure to inform inspectors about it. And instead of being issued publicly, the report was classified for internal use only.

"I was amazed," Mulley said. "This had never happened before in all my years."

Mulley said the official report left out systemic problems his team uncovered and was not published so that shortcomings in NRC oversight would be hidden from the public and Congress.

"I think changes that could have been made, pressure that could have been applied to improve the process, improve our oversight, are not going to be done," Mulley said.

'We Stand by the Report'

Brenner, the NRC spokesman, said the commission has upgraded procedures as a result of its own review of the Byron incident. In particular, he said inspectors were told to prioritize inspections of areas that had limited access and of equipment that repeatedly degraded, like the pipes at Byron.

McMillan declined to answer any specific questions about the Byron report because the matter has been referred to the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, which has the authority to investigate allegations of wrongdoing against inspectors general.

He said he believed the Byron case was handled appropriately. "We can have disagreements over how the reports are handled," he said, "but at the end of the day, we stand by the report."

A spokesman for the council's integrity committee said he could not comment. Marshall Murphy, an Exelon spokesman, also declined to comment. The company previously has said it improved procedures after the pipe rupture at Byron.

The significance of a strong, independent inspector general is not lost on the NRC, which is struggling with how to respond to the Fukushima accident after a special agency task force called for a potentially far-reaching reworking of regulations covering catastrophic events.

Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who has come under fire recently for pushing too fast on reforms, reflected on the inspector general's role in a statement last month.

The office, Jaczko said, "plays an important role in enabling the American people to continue to have confidence that my focus as chairman -- and the entire agency's focus -- is on effectively carrying out the NRC's vital safety mission."

Mulley said that mission is too vital for him to remain silent.

"I am coming forward because I spent my entire life, most of my professional life, doing this," he said. "We get the power to write these reports, we get the power to talk to you. We've got the power to go to (Capitol) Hill, at least keep it in line a little bit as much as we can.

"We can't be every place but at least try to keep them in line, and I think it's vital."

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Tea Party Continues To Press For Default

Although House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans acknowledge the federal government must raise its debt limit for the sake of the overall U.S. economy, tea party activists on the right continue to push for default.

Jim Babka, president of a conservative group known as DownsizeDC.org, is one of those who argue lawmakers can just do nothing ahead of the looming Tuesday deadline, at which time the federal government needs an increase in its debt ceiling, or will be expected to no longer be able to pay all of its bills.

"Republican politicians are pretending to act, but they're actually playacting," says Babka, who says his organization has 31,000 members. "House Republicans could balance the budget right now, simply by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. They don't need the cooperation of the President or Senate to accomplish this. They don't even need to take a vote. They can simply 'do nothing.' Just leave the debt ceiling where it is."

Washington policymakers are at a virtual standstill after weeks of debate over the debt ceiling, with Boehner and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid offering separate bills to cut spending and raise the debt limit.

In his televised response to President Obama's address to the nation Monday night, Boehner says, "The United States cannot default on its debt obligations. The jobs and savings of too many Americans are at stake."

A federal default would trigger an increase in a wide array of interest rates, throw the nation back into recession, and could cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their jobs, according to a variety of economic experts, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

But despite such warnings of the damage a first-ever federal default would do to the struggling U.S. economy, some conservatives continue to believe default is an allowable solution.

At least 10 GOP House members, including 2012 presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, reportedly intend to vote against Boehner's budget plan, despite the deep cuts it would make to federal spending. Conservative intransigence on the debt ceiling apparently is limiting Boehner's ability to move a final deficit/debt deal through Congress.

By negotiating at all with Obama and congressional Democrats, House Republicans are conning conservative activists, Babka claims.

"The truth," he says, "is that the Republican leadership is trying to hustle the GOP's supporters. The Republican leadership prefers business as usual, so they can continue to borrow and spend to buy votes, reward friends, and punish enemies."

Babka and his group are not alone. A number of other prominent tea party groups released a joint statement Wednesday, titled, "Tea Party Rips 'GOP RINOs' for Debt Limit Sell-Out," where RINO stands for "Republican in Name Only."

"The Boehner deal only secures $7 billion in spending cuts, a measly amount that guarantees a downgrade of America's AAA bond rating....Any Republicans that abandon the core values of fiscal responsibility will find themselves being challenged in 2012," says Amy Kremer, chairman of Tea Party Express.

Some tea party activists have gone so far as to mock Tuesday's default deadline as "phony."



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Capitol Idea: If Not 'Mano-a-Mano,' What Were You Expecting, Mr. Speaker?

By Scott Nance

"I didn't sign up for going mano-a-mano with the President of the United States."
-- House Speaker John Boehner

In a town otherwise dominated politically by Democrats, just what did Republican John Boehner think he was signing on for when he ousted Nancy Pelosi as House speaker?

Indeed, Boehner seemed destined from the day he took the speaker's gavel to, eventually, have to take on the president — especially with that cadre of tea party conservative freshmen nipping at his heels.

If Boehner didn't think he'd have to go "mano-a-mano" with President Obama, he's probably the only one not to have entertained that particular notion.

What's most striking about the current crisis is how history really is just repeating itself.

We've been here before, and we're partying like it's 1995 all over again.

That's the last time congressional Republicans played a political game of federal budget chicken with a Democratic president.

Back then, the stakes were a government shutdown. As disastrous as a shutdown then seemed, a simple shutdown now seems quaint compared to the real possibility of a full, first-ever-in-history, default by the federal government.

After the shutdowns of the mid 1990s were over, the federal parks re-opened, government workers were paid retroactively for the time they were furloughed, and everyone went on the merry ways.

Default, however, will be with us for much longer. The federal government's so-far sterling credit rating will be downgraded, interest rates will go up for everyone, hundreds of thousands of Americans could lose their jobs, and the nation could go back into recession.

Boehner, by his own admission, is one of the Republicans who insisted on tying a routine increase in the federal debt ceiling to some larger budget deal in the first place.

It didn't have to be this way.

Republicans, after all, helped raise the debt limit many times in the past: 17 times under President Ronald Reagan, four times under President Bill Clinton, seven times under President George W. Bush, and it has been raised three times thus far under President Obama.

But by helping to link the debt ceiling to deficit reduction, Boehner actually helped guarantee the whole thing would end in confrontation.

What's most surprising is that Boehner seems surprised.

After all, he was there in the House for that last game of budget chicken.

He saw first hand how Bill Clinton out-maneuvered then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and actually then used the whole mess to ride to re-election.

So just why is Boehner so amazed that Barack Obama would be doing the same thing right now?

Perhaps Boehner's only sore that he's on the losing end of the contest. Americans "expressed more trust in President Obama than in congressional Republicans to make decisions about both the federal deficit and debt ceiling," according to a new poll.

I'm sorry, Mr. Speaker, but you saw this train coming — and you still decided to jump in front of it.

I'd say, "Better luck next time," but maybe Republican speakers finally will learn it's never worth going mano-a-mano with the president of the United States.

Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade. Capitol Idea is his regular column from Washington. This article was first published as If Not 'Mano-a-Mano,' What Were You Expecting, Mr. Speaker? on Blogcritics.



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Whatever Happened to the War Powers Act Controversy?

by Marian Wang, ProPublica

Call it last month’s biggest controversy, if you’d like.

When U.S. military involvement in Libya passed the 90-day mark in June, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had sharp words—and even a lawsuit—ready for President Obama. They alleged that he’d failed to comply with the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires presidents to seek congressional approval for any hostilities lasting more than 60 days.

The Obama administration had responded that the United States was playing a support role in Libya that didn’t rise to the level of “hostilities” and thus didn't require congressional approval. It was a legal reasoning that even lawmakers supportive of the Libya intervention ridiculed as flimsy. (Read our explainer on the War Powers Act.) The back-and-forth dominated a news cycle, and the law was brought up at about half of all the White House press briefings conducted in June.

And then, the controversy disappeared.

“Congress made a big stink about it and didn’t do anything,” University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner told me. He believes the War Powers Act puts unconstitutional constraints on executive power and that ultimately, Congress may not have wanted the responsibility of asserting its prerogatives under the War Powers Act.

“You want us to withdraw in the middle of a battle, abandoning our allies? Congress doesn’t want to do that,” Posner said. “It’s like you want someone to hold you back when you want to fight someone else. You want to look like you’re tough and you’re willing to fight, but you don’t really want to have to do it.”

But Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman, who believes Obama has set a terrible precedent in Libya, said that until Congress dropped everything to debate the debt ceiling, lawmakers were actually moving to address the issue.

“I don’t think it was play acting at all,” Ackerman said. He said that if the Libya engagement continues into the fall when Congress is back in session, the controversy is sure to revive itself.

The previous congressional efforts to force the issue have ended in either defeat or had little more than symbolic effect.

Last month anti-war lawmaker Rep. Dennis Kucinich put forward a measure calling for an end to U.S. involvement in Libya, but it failed to pass the House. House Speaker John Boehner put forward a resolution rebuking the president, which did pass, but as the New York Times noted at the time, it “was more an expression of opinion” with “no practical effect.” The House later rejected a bill that would have authorized military operations in Libya while also rejecting another that would have constrained funding for the operation.

In the Senate, lawmakers hoping to quell the controversy crafted a resolution of support for the Libya operation—but earlier this month, Republicans protested bringing the issue to a vote.

“Just to speak to how dysfunctional the U.S. Senate is, we’re here over the debt ceiling, but instead of focusing on the issue at hand, we’re going to focus on something that’s irrelevant possibly,” said Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the senior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, explaining his opposition to the vote.

Several of his Republican colleagues agreed: “Our debt is our most pressing national security concern,” said Republican Sen. Roger Wicker. The Huffington Post reported that Republicans were planning to filibuster the Libya resolution or vote against it in order to move on to the debt ceiling.

“I’ve spoken with the Republican leader just a short time ago, and we’ve agreed,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, in announcing that the vote on Libya would be postponed. “The most important thing for us to focus on this week is the budget.”

And just like that, without resolving the last controversy, Congress moved on to the next. The controversy over the debt ceiling continues, even as the deadline for that looms a week away.

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Poll: President Obama Would Lose to Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani

Of the dozen or so GOP presidential hopefuls currently in contention, Mitt Romney is the only declared Republican candidate who would defeat President Obama next year, according to a new Harris opinion poll.

The poll also finds that Obama also would lose to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. While he has flirted with a 2012 presidential run, Giuliani has done little to actually jump into the race, however.

Perhaps the biggest problem the Republican presidential field faces is recognition, according to the Harris pollsters, leaving the field in some sense of disarray.

Majorities of Americans are familiar with declared candidates Newt Gingrich (72 percent), Romney (67 percent), and Ron Paul (52 percent) while half are familiar with Michele Bachmann. All other potential candidates are at 30 percent or under in terms of familiarity.

These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 2,183 adults surveyed online between July 11 and 18.

Even among Republicans, many declared candidates do not have majorities familiar with them. Tim Pawlenty (33 percent), Rick Santorum (31 percent), Herman Cain (29 percent), and Jon Huntsman (15 percent) all have one-third of Republicans or less familiar with them.

With this in mind, it's not surprising then that among Republicans over one-quarter (28 percent) say they are not at all sure who they would vote for if they were voting in the Republican primary.

Giuliani (14 percent) and Romney (14 percent) rise to the top among Republicans followed by Sarah Palin (12 percent). All the other candidates presented are under 10 percent including Rick Perry (8 percent), Bachmann (6 percent), and Paul (5 percent).

Among independents there is a three tie for "first place" between Giuliani (10 percent), Romney (10 percent) and Ron Paul (10 percent). All three of those previously ran for president in 2008.

But more than two in five independents (42 percent) say they are not at all sure who they would vote for in the Republican primary election.

Looking ahead to November 2012, it seems there are three possible candidates who could give Obama a difficult time. Obama would lose his re-election if Giuliani (53 percent to 47 percent) or Romney (51 percent to 49 percent) was the Republican nominee. Each candidate would receive 50 percent of the vote if the president was running against perennial candidate Ron Paul. Right now, Obama would win re-election against the 10 other candidates presented.

"Right now the Republican party needs to figure out who they are and begin the process of coalescing around one candidate," the Harris organization says in an analysis of the polling results. "In the study of politics, there is always a debate regarding electability and this election may show that clearly. Should Republicans nominate a candidate who stands for certain values or policies important to a sub-section of the party, even though that candidate may not be electable in the general election? This is a question the Republican party needs to answer if they want to win next November."



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A 'Form Of Class Warfare,' Boehner Plan Would Likely Still Result in Downgrade

Republican House Speaker John Boehner's new budget proposal would require deep cuts in the years immediately ahead in Social Security and Medicare benefits for current retirees, the repeal of health reform's coverage expansions, or wholesale evisceration of basic assistance programs for vulnerable Americans, according to a top Washington budget analyst.

Boehner's plan also would still reportedly probably result in a downgrade of the the federal government's AAA credit rating.

With just a week left before the federal government is expected, for the first time, fail to pay all of its bills, Boehner and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid continue to craft separate budget plans.

The Boehner plan calls for large cuts in discretionary programs of $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, and it then requires additional cuts that are large enough to produce another $1.8 trillion in savings to be enacted by the end of the year as a condition for raising the debt ceiling again at that time. It contains no tax increases. The entire $1.8 trillion would come from budget cuts.

"The plan is, thus, tantamount to a form of 'class warfare,'" says Robert Greenstein, president of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, an independent left-leaning Washington think tank. "If enacted, it could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history. This may sound hyperbolic, but it is not. The mathematics are inexorable."

The Boehner plan would force policymakers to choose among cutting the incomes and health benefits of ordinary retirees, repealing the guts of health reform and leaving an estimated 34 million more Americans uninsured, and savaging the safety net for the poor, Greenstein says. It would do so even as it shielded all tax breaks, including the many lucrative tax breaks for the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations, he adds.

"President Obama has said that, while we must reduce looming deficits, we must take a balanced approach. The Boehner proposal badly fails this test of basic decency," Greenstein says. "The President should veto the bill if it reaches his desk. Congress should find a fairer, more decent way to avoid a default."


Downgrade


Meanwhile, despite all of the financial pain it would inflict, the Boehner plan may well lead to a downgrade of the federal government's top-of-the-line credit rating, according to a separate CNN report.

Correspondent Erin Burnett reported that she spoke with an investor who talked directly with the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's. According to the Standard & Poor's source, Boehner's debt plan would probably still lead to a downgrade of U.S. debt by the ratings agencies, raising interest rates for all Americans. Reid's plan, however, would preserve America's AAA credit rating.

Washington policymakers have until August 2 to resolve their longstanding budget standoff. If they fail to reach an agreement to raise the federal debt limit by then, the government is expected to default on its current financial obligations.

A variety of experts have warned that that could damage the struggling U.S. economy, throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work and returning the nation to economic recession.
Obama and Boehner each addressed the nation on the debt issue in separate speeches televised in primetime Monday night.



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Public Opinion Snapshot: Who's on Whose Side?

This article was published by the Center for American Progress.

By Ruy Teixeira

As the endgame emerges on raising the debt ceiling it's fair to say that conservative intransigence is not endearing them to the public.

Here's one of the reasons why: 53 percent of respondents in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll said that President Barack Obama cares more about the economic interests of the middle class, while just 35 percent thought that was true of the Republicans in Congress. In contrast, 67 percent thought Republicans in Congress cared more about the interests of large business corporations, compared to 24 percent who thought that of President Obama. So conservative intransigence is starting to seem less a matter of principle than an expression of whose side they're on.

Reflecting these attitudes, the public believes Republicans should compromise on raising taxes in a debt ceiling deal. Sixty-two percent think they should give in and accept tax rises on the rich, while only 27 percent think they shouldn't give in. But the public doesn’t believe Democrats should give in on cutting Social Security and Medicare, programs that are hugely important to middle-class economic security. By 52-38 the public believes Democrats should not agree to such cuts even if it’s the "only way" to get a debt ceiling deal.

Who's on whose side—that's an important element in understanding the conflicts in Congress today. And it's certainly a good part of how the public will judge whatever deal Congress comes up with.

Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. To learn more about his public opinion analysis go to the Media and Progressive Values page and the Progressive Studies program page of our website.

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Dems, GOP Wrestle Over Influence Of Big Money in Presidential Fundraising

The two political parties are battling over presidential fundraising in the 2012 campaign.

National Republicans are slamming President Obama for his network of big-dollar campaign "bundlers," donors who collect large checks from network of deep-pocketed supporters. The chairwoman of the Democratic Party, however, argues it is the Republican candidates vying for their party's presidential nomination -- not Obama -- who have the bundler problem.

Obama and his GOP rivals earlier this month reported their second-quarter fundraising results. The president raised a record-breaking $86 million in the quarter, to be split between his re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Citing reports in Politico and elsewhere, the Republican National Committee (RNC) released a statement suggesting Obama is granting his bundlers "top-level access" to influence policy in exchange for their big campaign contributions.

According to Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, the average contribution to the president's re-election campaign was $69, and 98 percent of donors gave less than $250.

"President Obama has set a high standard for disclosure, implementing transparency measures that go above and beyond the law regarding his activities in the White House as well as his activities on the campaign trail," says Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the recently installed head of the DNC. "It is unfortunate that none of his would-be Republican opponents are willing to adhere to the same standards of openness, but it is not unexpected. If Republicans were to release the lists of their campaign bundlers, I anticipate that the public would see a laundry list of representatives from Big Oil and other moneyed special interests."

The Obama campaign released this month released the names of 244 individuals who have acted as his bundlers. Collectively, these individuals bundled at least $34.95 million on behalf of Obama and the DNC, according to a report by the Center For Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization which tracks money in politics.

"Republicans are bending over backwards to win the support of such deep-pocketed and well-connected donors, renouncing moderate positions on everything from the Recovery Act to health care reform and embracing extreme policies that would line the pockets of the wealthiest few while piling additional burdens on the backs of America's seniors and our most vulnerable citizens," Wasserman Schultz adds. "Yet, Republicans hope still to be seen as candidates of the people, and withholding the names of their bundlers is just one way they hope to obscure that truth. But I have some bad news for the Republican candidates –- they can hide their bundlers, but they can't keep the American people from finding out how they would really lead."



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Debt Crisis Becomes Local Issue: U.S. Mayors Push For Action

As Washington policymakers continue to race against the clock to solve their budget stalemate ahead of the August 2 deadline to raise the federal debt limit, the issue has begun reverberating in cities and towns across the country.

The head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors is urging Congress and the White House to reach an agreement on the debt limit to prevent a first-ever default by the federal government.

“Default will have an immediate and catastrophic impact on our cities, the implications are global, and economists agree. A credit downgrade will plunge us into a deep, double-dip recession,” says Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, president of the nonpartisan association of U.S. mayors. “We urge leaders in Washington to act now.”

Negotiations in Washington, meanwhile, continue to be chaotic at best, as the GOP-controlled House and the Democratic Senate reportedly are pursuing separate plans to avoid default.

The mayors, meeting in Los Angeles, cite a Congressional Research Service estimate that if the debt ceiling is not increased, “the federal government would have to eliminate all spending on discretionary programs.”

That means every federal payment to cities will stop, either immediately or shortly after default. The cuts would eliminate support for housing and community development, law enforcement, homeland security, job training, and transportation infrastructure.

Additionally, the security of local government’s tax-exempt bonds would be under threat. And, the mayors warn, cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- which have been under discussion in recent weeks as the talks have dragged out in Washington -- would take billions of dollars more out of local economies.

The mayors note that the federal debt limit has been repeatedly raised in the recent past: 17 times under President Ronald Reagan, four times under President Bill Clinton, seven times under President George W. Bush, and has been raised three times thus far under President Obama.

In addition to resolving the debt-ceiling matter, the mayors also want Congress to approve a new transportation bill in line with the Senate version of the legislation. The current surface transportation bill, which authorizes projects nationwide, is set to expire on September 30. Hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide are at stake, they say.

"The Senate Bill will protect jobs and put people to work," the U.S. Conference of Mayors says in a statement. "The bill approved by the House proposes a thirty percent reduction in the nation’s transportation programs – dealing a devastating blow to local projects and local jobs. According to an analysis by the Federal Highway Administration, if these cuts go forward, a half-million Americans will lose their jobs in 2012 in the highway program alone. Another 130,000 will lose their jobs in the transit program."



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