The federal budget deficit is expected to drop to $642 billion this year, congressional budget analysts said Tuesday. That’s still too high, but it’s the lowest level since the economic crisis hit in 2008, the Washington Post reported. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the deficit will fall below 3 percent of the overall economy by 2015 but will rise again by the end of the decade as more baby boomers retire.
Good for Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., for helping break the long political stalemate over the four vacancies on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by announcing his support Wednesday for President Obama’s nomination of Sri Srinivasan (in photo), who grew up in Lawrence and currently is principal deputy solicitor general. “I have found Sri to be a highly qualified candidate with a distinguished career in the private sector and in the Departments of Justice of the Bush and Obama administrations,” Moran said in a statement. “Srinivasan is one of Kansas’ most accomplished legal minds and among the nation’s leading appellate lawyers.” Srinivasan won unanimous approval Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee; his nomination now goes to the full Senate.
“It has been only a few days since two administration scandals – the IRS harassment of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records – dropped into the Republicans’ lap,” Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post. “But instead of turning public outrage to their advantage, Republicans have already begun overreaching, turning legitimate areas of inquiry into just some more partisan food fights.” Among several examples of overreach Milbank cited was Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., saying it is “more than reasonable” to ask whether the Obama administration will deny health care to people “based upon a person’s political beliefs or their religiously held beliefs.”
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., was one of only 27 senators to vote Monday against the Internet sales tax bill. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan, missed the vote because of speaking commitment but supports the measure. As Moran noted earlier, the bill is about leveling the playing field between online retailers and brick-and-mortar vendors. States also lost $23 billion in sales tax collections last year on out-of-state Internet, catalog and mail order sales, according to a study by the National Conference of State Legislatures. The bill faces tougher odds in the House, where many lawmakers are afraid to vote for anything that might be considered a tax increase. But as Moran has said, “The legislation will not impose a new tax on the Internet or anyone. It will, however, protect small businesses and empower states with the ability to control fiscal policy as they see fit.” The Kansas House delegation should back
Benghazi will be back in the news this week, as a U.S. House committee will hold more hearings on the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya. Testimony by State Department whistleblowers is expected to contradict some earlier accounts by Obama administration officials. For example, Gregory Hicks, the deputy The deputy of slain U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, maintains that a team of Special Forces prepared to fly to Benghazi during the attacks was forbidden from doing so by U.S. Special Operations Command South Africa, CBS News reported.
Good for Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., for leading an effort to provide more oversight of pharmacy compounding, which now is mostly unregulated. Roberts has been working for more than 10 years to strengthen regulations regarding the mixing of medications, but the issue received more urgency after dozens of people died last year from an outbreak of spinal meningitis linked to contaminated steroid injections prepared by a compounding company in Massachusetts. “It really is unfortunate that 53 people have to die and 700 get sick before we have the will to do this,” Roberts said. Though Roberts is normally leery of more regulations, he recognizes that this is needed for public safety. “We just have to get it done,” he said. He’s right.
The professionals at the Kansas State Department of Education have invested significant time and money in helping develop the Common Core standards, a multistate effort to align standards and progress measures on English and math. And it looks like the standards may escape a legislative attempt to scrap them in Kansas. But Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., was among nine GOP senators who signed a letter last week asking for language in an appropriations bill that would bar the use of funds to develop, implement or evaluate state-level education standards. Also last week, Kansas Reps. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, Kevin Yoder, R-Overland Park, and Lynn Jenkins, R-Topeka, and 31 other House members sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan complaining that the “burdensome and misguided” Common Core standards “fail to address the specific needs of our states,” and raised concerns about how the federal government collects and distributes student data. The Common Core standards have been adopted by 45 states, including Kansas, and the District of Columbia, and officials have said it would cost Kansas $30 million to develop other standards and tests at this point.
Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., issued no formal statement about his April 17 vote against bipartisan legislation meant to strengthen background checks for gun buyers. But he told the Baldwin City Rotary Club this week that he didn’t think the measure would have prevented criminals from getting guns and he feared it would have burdened law-abiding citizens. “I have no problem with anyone who is in the business of selling firearms having to do a background check on whomever they sell to. The question is, how do you get to the dad handing the gun off to the son, which is not what we’re after,” said Moran, as quoted by the Baldwin City Signal. (The proposed legislation would not have affected a gun transfer from father to son.) Moran also spoke of the need for more emphasis on mental health at the state and federal levels, calling community-based programs “woefully underfunded.”
According to a Huffington Post article about the 61 of 82 vacant federal judge slots in the U.S. that don’t even have nominees, President Obama “put forward fewer nominees at the end of his first term than his two predecessors. But a closer look at data on judicial nominees, and conversations with people involved in the nomination process, reveals the bigger problem is Republican senators quietly refusing to recommend potential judges in the first place.” Two of those mentioned GOP senators are Kansas’ Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts, “neither of whom has put forward nominees for a district court slot there that has been vacant for 1,246 days.” When Huffington Post asked the GOP senators mentioned in the article why they hadn’t submitted names for long-vacant seats, only one responded, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
The proof of Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran’s effectiveness as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee won’t be known until the midterm elections in November 2014. But it doesn’t reflect well on Moran that the NRSC raised $6.9 million in the first three months of the year, while the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee raised $13.7 million. According to the Hill newspaper, the NRSC was slow to hire fundraising staff after Moran took over in November. “We’re confident we’ll have the resources needed to win in 2014,” NRSC spokeswoman Brook Hougesen told the Hill.
Praise is due Sens. Pat Roberts (left) and Jerry Moran (right), R-Kan., for trying again to do something about the 11 natural-gas storage fields in the state that have gone without government inspection since a 2009 court ruling. Like their similar 2011 bill, the latest legislation should be a no-brainer – “allowing states to step in when the federal government fails to monitor natural-gas storage sites,” as Moran said in a statement. Anyone wondering why this matters should check with residents in Hutchinson, the site of a 2001 tragedy in which migrating gas underground caused explosions that killed one couple and destroyed a block of downtown businesses. The longer Congress waits to respond to the federal government’s inaction and to restore the state’s authority to regulate interstate gas storage, the greater the risk of more explosions.
At least Congress proved last week that it still has the ability to pass legislation when a crisis arises, in this case the sequestration cuts that prompted furloughs of air traffic controllers and many flight delays. Both chambers quickly passed a bill giving the Obama administration flexibility to move money among Transportation Department accounts. As Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., a dogged critic of the Federal Aviation Administration’s sequestration decisions, said Thursday night: “This bipartisan solution is a victory for air travelers and communities nationwide.” Still, it was hard to disagree with comments along the lines of this tweet: “Sequester Head Start classrooms, deny cancer patients, reduce Meals on Wheels, but don’t delay a senator’s flight!”
“After more than four years in the Oval Office, the president has rarely demonstrated an appetite for ruthless politics that instills fear in lawmakers,” noted a New York Times article about how President Obama is unlikely to “punish” lawmakers who voted against gun-control legislation. “That raises a broader question: If he cannot translate the support of 90 percent of the public for background checks into a victory on Capitol Hill, what can he expect to accomplish legislatively for his remaining three and a half years in office?”
No surprise that Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Fowler, starred in another clash of the House Republicans – or “Fight Club on the Hill,” as the headline of Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post dubbed it. Huelskamp and others rebelled this week against an effort by Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., to help people with pre-existing health problems get insurance, which Huelskamp dismissed as “expanding Obamacare.” As part of a “Making Life Work” agenda meant to move the party “beyond the fiscal debate,” Cantor also has sought changes to comp and flex time and worker retraining. But he shelved the insurance bill Wednesday. Huelskamp said: “In August, we’re going to hit the debt ceiling and we can’t avoid that. We’re running out of money, and as Republicans, we have to get ready now and talk about the vision of what we have to do to get our country on a 10-year plan to balance the budget,” adding that theme “is the kind of message that gets lost in little things.” Milbank responded: “So helping workers and the sick are ‘little things’? Cantor can forget warm and fuzzy for now; he has enough trouble just making his colleagues sound humane.”
Despite being publicly rebuffed by Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., on a December vote on the United Nations treaty on the rights of the disabled, former Sen. Bob Dole (in photo) endorsed Roberts’ re-election bid next year. “No one fights harder or more effectively for the people of Kansas than Pat Roberts,” Dole said in a statement Wednesday. “He never stops working for our values and our concerns.” Roberts also has been endorsed by the state’s four members of the U.S. House as well as five statewide officeholders.
Predictably, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was a star witness at Monday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Gang of Eight’s immigration reform bill, fearmongering about its potential to lead to more attacks like the Boston Marathon bombings. But another witness, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist (in photo), surprised some with his testimony in favor of reform, arguing that “people are an asset, they’re not a liability,” and that those who would make the nation less immigrant-friendly “would also make us less successful, less prosperous and certainly less American.” Afterward, Norquist tweeted: “Anti-immigrant witnesses @ Senate Judiciary hearing were quite weak. The communities of faith, farmers and business guys are all with Reagan.” When Norquist visited Topeka in January with a similar message for conservative legislators, Kobach responded that Norquist “has no legal expertise in immigration law.”
The National Rifle Association won the legislative fight against new gun-control measures but lost one of its prominent members. Adolphus Busch IV, who has been an NRA member since 1975, asked that his name be removed from the NRA membership roles. “The NRA I see today has undermined the values upon which it was established,” he wrote in a letter to NRA president David Keene. “Your current strategic focus places a priority on the needs of gun and ammunition manufacturers while disregarding the opinions of your 4 million individual members” (74 percent of whom, he noted, support universal background checks).
Is there a bigger disconnect between Congress and the public than on expanding background checks for gun purchases? National polls show 90 percent or more of the public support expanded checks. Locally, 84 percent support requiring every gun buyer to go through a criminal background check, according to a SurveyUSA poll conducted for KWCH, Channel 12. Yet a carefully crafted measure failed in the U.S. Senate Wednesday, with Kansas Sens. Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran among those voting against it.
Is there more Congress can do to respond to the Boston Marathon bombings? “I don’t think so,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Tuesday, while noting that law enforcement officials “are going to have all the resources they need.” Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, predicted that cuts to police departments will become a big issue in the months ahead, and suggested the U.S. can better reallocate resources to reflect modern warfare. “Last month, the last M1 tank departed Europe for the first time since D-Day,” Pompeo told Politico. “We probably should’ve done that 10 years ago – we’re slow to change to the evolving threats.”
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has four vacancies, including, unbelievably, the one created when Chief Justice John Roberts left that bench in 2005. President Obama is hoping his latest nominee for that court, Sri Srinivasan, will avoid a GOP filibuster. Srinivasan, who played basketball in high school with Danny Manning while growing up in Lawrence, is the Obama administration’s principal deputy solicitor general and has been endorsed by the likes of Kenneth Starr. He had an uneventful hearing Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Bernstein called the Srinivasan nomination the “moment of truth” for Obama’s nominations to the court, which is often seen as a stepping-stone to the Supreme Court. “If 41 or more Republicans simply will not vote for anyone to the left of John Roberts, the only option left to Democrats will be Senate rules reform,” Bernstein wrote. “On the other hand, if Srinivasan can be confirmed, Republican claims that they have objected only to specific nominees for specific reasons can be taken more seriously.”
Kansas Sens. Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts were quick to blast the budget blueprint that President Obama released Wednesday. Though Moran acknowledged that Obama proposed some entitlement reforms (a move that has upset many Democrats), he complained that the blueprint “is far from the serious, reform-oriented budget our country so desperately needs.” And after applauding the proposed funding for the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Roberts said he was “very disappointed that the budget once again includes a misguided proposal to increase taxes on the business aviation industry” and that the blueprint “is not the right formula to grow jobs and create stability in the economy.” Roberts’ statement came a few hours before he joined 11 other GOP senators and Obama at the White House for a nearly three-hour dinner of steak, salad, sauteed vegetables and coconut sorbet.
President Obama unveiled a $3.78 trillion budget plan Wednesday that has people on the left and the right complaining – which could mean that it is the start of a meaningful compromise. Republicans don’t like some of the spending increases and nearly $800 billion in new taxes. Liberals are mad about the more than $1 trillion in cuts, including to Social Security and Medicare. But Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., was encouraged, saying that the plan “cuts the growth in federal spending, makes targeted investments to strengthen the economy, and it passes the test of fairness by including specific, phased-in reforms to entitlement programs.”
As President Obama steps up his call for an up-or-down vote on gun restrictions in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School carnage, Kansas Sens. Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts and 11 other Senate Republicans are threatening to filibuster any such vote. The senators, led by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in a letter Monday to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that they “intend to oppose any legislation that would infringe on the American people’s constitutional right to bear arms, or on their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance.” But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he didn’t understand the filibuster threat: “The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand.” McCain asked: “What are we afraid of?”
After Complex magazine listed “The 40 Hottest Women in Tech,” Pando Daily responded with a less-serious “The 41 hottest guys in tech,” which included Jeff Bridges in “Tron” and “Al Gore’s beard (deceased).” Coming in at No. 34 was Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., accompanied by this comment: “Hottest advocate for high-skilled immigration that Capitol Hill has seen since John Adams.” Moran recently attended the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin to promote his Startup Act 3.0, which would create visas to allow educated and entrepreneurial immigrants to stay in the country, accelerate the commercialization of university research and serve other high-tech goals.
The Republican Party wisely recognizes the need to broaden its appeal, but it keeps being undermined by yahoos who say something stupid or offensive. Last week Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, used a derogatory term for Latinos and then was slow to apologize. Also last week, Republican National Committeeman Dave Agema from Michigan promoted an article on Facebook labeling the homosexual lifestyle as “filthy,” then declined to take down the post. Though top Republicans – including House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio – strongly condemned these comments, the damage was done.
