One environmental concern about piping Canada’s oil sands to U.S. refineries is all the petroleum coke that will be left over from the refining process. The Environmental Protection Agency no longer allows new licensing permits for burning the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste product, the New York Times reported. As a result, most petroleum coke is sold to Mexico and China, which don’t have as many pollution rules. Companies associated with Koch Industries and Bill Koch are leading exporters of the product. Another concern is where to store the petroleum coke before it is exported. The Times reported on a three-story pile of petroleum coke that covers an entire city block in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit.
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.”
The U.S. Justice Department badly abused its authority last year when it secretly obtained two months’ worth of telephone records of journalists working for the Associated Press. The records were apparently part of an investigation into the leak of classified information, but the number of people and records targeted – which included the personal phone records of some AP employees – is unprecedented in recent years. “There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of the Associated Press and its reporters,” AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt wrote in a letter this week to Attorney General Eric Holder (in photo). As Pruitt noted, the records could “disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”
Despite its continued resistance to anything associated with Obamacare, Kansas is set to benefit from it. Up to 9,000 jobs are expected to be created at Medicare call centers in six states, including one in Lawrence. The call centers will answer inquiries related to the federally run insurance marketplaces. Kansas will get an even bigger economic boost if it allows the federal expansion of Medicaid. A study by the Kansas Hospital Association concluded that the expansion would inject more than $3 billion into the state’s economy and create 4,000 jobs over the next seven years.
President Obama joined the criticism of IRS officials who targeted tea party groups for special scrutiny, saying it was “outrageous” and “contrary to our traditions and people have to be held accountable.” Obama added: “I have got no patience with it. I will not tolerate it, and we’ve got to find out what happened with it.” An inspector general’s report on the matter has yet to be released.
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.
President Obama is fading, “failing to lead, to break through, to show he’s not at the mercy of events but, to some degree at least, in command of them,” Peggy Noonan wrote. Still, she concluded: “It’s too early to write him off as a lame duck because history has a way of intervening. A domestic or international crisis that is well-handled, or a Supreme Court appointment, can make a president relevant. There are 44 months left to Mr. Obama’s presidency. He’s not a lame duck, he’s just lame.”
That didn’t take long. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (in photo) informed Gov. Sam Brownback that part of a new state gun law is unconstitutional — the provisions saying guns made in Kansas are immune from federal regulation and prohibiting federal officials from enforcing those regulations. “In purporting to override federal law and to criminalize the official acts of federal officers, (the law) directly conflicts with federal law and is therefore unconstitutional,” Holder wrote. State lawmakers were told by the Kansas Attorney General’s Office that the law was unenforceable, yet they passed it anyway, and Brownback signed it into law. Now taxpayers will get stuck paying the legal bills in a losing attempt to defend the law.
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.
After he leaves office, President Obama might consider a second career as a comedian. (Yes, I know, many of you already consider him a joke.) He had great timing during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner last weekend. Among his many jokes: “These days, I look in the mirror and I have to admit, I’m not the strapping young Muslim socialist that I used to be.” “I know Republicans are still sorting out what happened in 2012, but one thing they all agree on is they need to do a better job reaching out to minorities. And look, call me self-centered, but I can think of one minority they could start with. Hello? Think of me as a trial run.” “My charm offensive has helped me learn some interesting things about what’s going on in Congress – it turns out, absolutely nothing.” “We need to make progress on some important issues. Take the sequester. Republicans fell in love with this thing, and now they can’t stop talking about how much they hate it. It’s like we’re trapped in a Taylor Swift album.”
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?”
“We don’t have the money to keep the towers open. We simply don’t,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told a House committee last week. But the fight against LaHood’s plan to close 149 air-traffic control towers is strong and bipartisan, spanning the likes of Sen. Jerry Moran (in photo), R-Kan., and actor and pilot Harrison Ford. “General aviation is more than guys in corporate aircraft,” Ford told Bloomberg. “It’s police and fire services. It’s EMS. It’s a guy flying his fish to market. It’s tractor parts getting to a rancher or a farmer. It’s a broad range of businesses that are affected.” On the administration’s plan, Moran told Bloomberg: “There’s a rural aspect to it that certainly catches my attention, but it’s more a belief in government doing its job responsibly as compared to seat of the pants.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius noted during a program at Harvard University last week how the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act and the re-election of President Obama haven’t ended the attacks on Obamacare. “The politics has been relentless and continuous,” she said. “We find ourselves still having sort of state-by-state political battles.” That includes in Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback still hasn’t decided whether to allow a federal expansion of Medicaid. Sebelius cited some of the benefits of ACA that are already in place (such as 6 million young adults being able to remain on their parents’ insurance policies and more than 70 million people receiving preventive health services without a co-pay). She also argued that many critics won’t acknowledge how much our health care system needed reform. “Prior to the Affordable Care Act,” she said, “America spent just about twice as much as any developed country per capita on health care, and our health results looked like we were a developing country.” But is ACA fixing that or making it worse?
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.”
Thursday’s ceremony at the White House, in which the Father Emil Kapaun was awarded the Medal of Honor, was moving and long overdue. As our Friday editorial noted, Kapaun, who died in a Chinese-run prison camp during the Korean War, responded to danger and deprivation with courage and selflessness, saving lives, sustaining hopes, and even blessing and forgiving his captors. President Obama noted that though Kapaun didn’t fire a gun, he wielded the mightiest weapon: love. Sixty-two years after his death, Kapaun remains an example of how to live and how to serve others.
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?”
The efforts of Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., to curb Federal Aviation Administration cuts under sequestration and keep 149 airport control towers open were highlighted in a Wall Street Journal editorial blasting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Moran “proposed replacing $50 million of FAA sequester cuts with savings from unspent balances, which are a kind of agency slush fund, and by reducing other low-priority spending. Great idea. How did the vote turn out? There wasn’t one. Majority Leader Reid blocked the amendment from ever getting to the Senate floor.” The editorial noted that “Moran also couldn’t get a vote to restore funding for White House tours by cutting $2.5 million for new uniforms for airport screeners.”
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., was characteristically vivid in describing the meeting that he and other Senate Republicans had last week with President Obama. “He’s smothering us with the milk of human kindness and hoping it doesn’t curdle,” Roberts said. The Kansan also said that Republicans “tried to stress that it’s extremely helpful for the president to weigh in on some of these big-time issues. We have to have him if we’re going to get anything done.” After Obama’s previous visit to the Senate GOP caucus in 2010, Roberts famously told reporters that the president needed “to take a Valium” and had some “pretty thin-skinned” moments.
A Reuters article examines the impact on Wichita of President Obama’s bad-mouthing of business jets and push for a seven-year depreciation schedule for private-plane buyers. “I’m certainly disappointed that he would do something of this nature. As long as you’re doing something to threaten my aviation industry … I’ll continue to speak out against it,” Mayor Carl Brewer told Reuters, which noted Brewer is a Democrat who has Obama’s portrait on his wall. Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, said: “It’s so frustrating. All the aviation manufacturers want is for him to stop talking down their industry. Don’t write them a check, don’t give them a tax credit, don’t hand them a subsidy. Stop bashing them.”
Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., was among the lawmakers who met with President Obama this week, as the White House tried to ease the partisanship that has paralyzed Capitol Hill. Moran told Politico there was agreement between Obama and Senate Republicans that “there might by an opportunity for common ground” on corporate tax reform, but that when entitlement reform came up, “the president responded with the need for revenues.” Overall, Moran said, “I really think it was rather a bland conversation. No fireworks on either tone. This wasn’t memorable; it was the opposite of that.”
Kansas Sens. Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran and Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, deserve credit for tenacity in protesting the Air Force’s recent decision to pass over Wichita-based Beechcraft and instead give a $427.5 million light-air support contract to Sierra Nevada Corp. and Brazil-based Embraer. That order, which will supply 20 airplanes to Afghanistan’s air force, would have given Beechcraft a big boost post-bankruptcy. The Kansans sent a letter Friday to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel requesting a “thorough, compelling explanation for your decision” and saying the award “raises significant concerns for the entire U.S. defense industrial base.” It’s awkward, however, that just two weeks ago the two Kansas senators voted against Hagel’s confirmation as defense secretary.
One environmental concern about piping Canada’s oil sands to U.S. refineries is all the petroleum coke that will be left over from the refining process. The Environmental Protection Agency no longer allows new licensing permits for burning the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste product, the New York Times reported. As a result, most petroleum coke is sold to Mexico and China, which don’t have as many pollution rules. Companies associated with Koch Industries and Bill Koch are leading exporters of the product. Another concern is where to store the petroleum coke before it is exported. The Times reported on a three-story pile of petroleum coke that covers an entire city block in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit.
