Government Executive - Authors - Shane Goldmacher

Republican Debate Turns Spectacle and Leaves Trump on Top

Shane Goldmacher and Alex Roarty, National Journal — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 10:10:58 -0400

CLEVELAND—Donald Trump dominated the night, but the first prime-time Republican presidential debate of 2016 provided ample space for other contenders to make a mark on an uncomfortably crowded stage.

In fact, the first 90 seconds of Thursday's explosive main event were more entertaining than all 90 minutes of the earlier B-list debate that featured seven candidates who failed to qualify for the night-time show.

All eyes were on Trump coming in, and anyone who thought the real-estate mogul would take a softer tone on the debate stage than he has on the campaign trail was quickly disappointed. "We don't have time for tone," Trump said at one point. "We have to go out and get the job done."

After saying he might yet run as an independent—drawing boos from the audience and provoking an attack from Rand Paul—Trump was at the center of several surreal exchanges, including one in which moderator Megyn Kelly asked him about a history of misogynistic attacks on women.

"You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,'" Kelly began. Trump interrupted: "Only Rosie O'Donnell."

Several thousand spectators inside Quicken Loans Arena roared as he dismissed her, and it was clear, less than 10 minutes into the event, that all rules and decorum governing typical presidential debates would not apply.

Other winners emerged: John Kasich capitalizing on the hometown crowd, Chris Christie emerging as a force on the big stage, and the three candidates perceived by many to be the likeliest eventual nominees—Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Scott Walker—staying on message and ignoring the mayhem unfolding around them.

But the night was about Trump.

There was no shortage of opportunities to attack him, and the Fox News moderators—Kelly, Bret Baier, and Chris Wallace—seemed intent on provoking such altercations. At one point, after Kasich refused to criticize Trump's comments about the Mexican border, Wallace said he hoped to "do better" with Rubio and teed up the same question for the Florida senator.

They pushed Trump and Bush to tangle directly when Bush declared, "Mr. Trump's language is divisive."

"I want to win," Bush said. "We're going to win when we unite people with a hopeful optimistic message."

Even when he wasn't attacking or being attacked, Trump, with his relaxed demeanor and from-the-hip style, produced many of the debate's most memorable moments.

When he was quizzed repeatedly on his past support of Democratic causes and politicians, Trump explained nonchalantly that he was essentially manipulating politicians to do what he wanted. He also defended his past giving to Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. Asked what he got for his money, Trump said, "With Hillary Clinton, I said, 'Be at my wedding,' and she came to my wedding."

Trump explained his past support for a single-payer health care system by saying, "It works in Canada."

Paul tried to jump on Trump for that remark, but he was cut off. "I don't think you heard me," Trump retorted. "You're having a hard time tonight."

The most heated exchange of the night, however, did not include Trump. It came when Paul and Christie went head-to-head on the tension between civil liberties and national security. It was clear that both men, who were perched at the stage's edges after fading from the top tier in the polls, relished the chance to do battle on the big stage.

"I want to collect more records from terrorists, but less records from innocent Americans," Paul declared.

"That's a completely ridiculous answer," Christie jumped in. "How are you supposed to know?"

"Use the Fourth Amendment! Use the Fourth Amendment!" Paul shouted, as they spoke over one another. "Get a warrant!"

Then Christie unleashed one of the night's most memorable lines: "Listen, Senator, you know, when you're sitting in a subcommittee, just blowing hot air about this, you can say things like that."

Indeed, Paul often found himself outnumbered in policy disputes. But he consistently asserted his voice on stage—which is more than could be said for Huckabee or Ben Carson, both of whom disappeared for long stretches of the debate and did not enjoy any memorable moments. When Carson got only his second question, nearly 45 minutes into the debate, he joked, "Thank you Megyn, I wasn't sure I was going to get to talk again."

Cruz, the much-touted collegiate champion debater, was similarly absent, scoring few notable blows for his anti-Washington message.

Bush and Rubio were confident and detailed in their responses. One of Bush's better moments was a response to questioning about his support for Common Core, and he earned sustained applause when arguing for high standards.

At one point, Wallace pitted them against each other, asking Rubio whether he could make a better president than Bush despite no executive experience.

Rubio deflected and launched one of the sharpest attacks on Clinton. "This election cannot be a résumé competition. It's important to be qualified, but if this election is a résumé competition, then Hillary Clinton's gonna be the next president, because she's been in office and in government longer than anybody else running here tonight," he said.

Rubio repeated his thematic line about 2016 being "about the future," then added: "If I'm our nominee, how is Hillary Clinton gonna lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck? I was raised paycheck to paycheck. How is she—how is she gonna lecture me—how is she gonna lecture me about student loans? I owed over $100,000 just four years ago."

Another big winner Thursday night was Kasich, who was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation at the beginning of the debate and enjoyed what Wallace called "a home-field advantage" throughout. Kasich on several occasions appeared to be shadowing Bush, touting reforms made in Ohio that elevated people from poverty. Kasich also dealt effectively with a tough question on opposing gay marriage by declaring he'd recently attended a gay wedding and would support his children if they are gay, earning enthusiastic cheers from the hometown audience.

But in many ways, the night ultimately belonged to Trump. Despite some early provocations and statements that drew scattered boos, the billionaire businessman did not commit any serious errors. He was forceful with his answers and was consistently rewarded by the crowd for his spontaneous one-liners attacking Washington and career politicians. He even received some validation from his rival candidates.

"Here is the thing about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is hitting a nerve in this country," Kasich said. "People are frustrated. They're fed up. They don't think the government is working for them. And for people who want to just tune him out, they're making a mistake."

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Chris Christie's Maneuver to Put Himself Right of the 2016 Field

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 10:44:45 -0400

NASHUA, NH—When Chris Christie told his son he would be in New Hampshire this weekend, the kid's reply was exactly the kind of pointed retort that has made his dad famous.

"Your new home state," the governor's son jabbed.

As Christie has sunk in the polls and faded from the top tier of presidential contenders, he's betting his still-unofficial presidential hopes on this northeastern state with a famed streak for elevating underdogs. He took two trips here last week and held the first two of what he says will be many town halls, the freewheeling format where his brash, no-nonsense personality first helped him break through on the national stage.

But if the format and location were familiar, Christie's message was new.

On Tuesday, he detailed plans to overhaul Social Security and Medicare. By grabbing hold of what has long been considered the third rail of American politics, Christie hopes to rekindle his reputation as a truth-teller. Perhaps more importantly, his political team thinks the entitlements gambit will allow the blue-state Republican to finally find a way to move to the right of a conservative GOP field.

"We need to have strength and clarity and hard truths. And that's why I started by talking about entitlements," Christie told a crowd of hundreds of activists at a Republican Party summit in Nashua on Friday. "There is no political advantage to talking about those issues."

But Christie, of course, was finding an advantage by doing just that. He issued a warning to his would-be Republican rivals who lean on the vagaries of cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. "What amazing leadership," Christie mocked. "Anybody who comes up here and says that, boo them off the stage." Christie is billing his own appearances across the state as the "Tell it Like it Is" tour.

"I think it was courageous," said Juliana Bergeron, the Republican National Committeewoman for New Hampshire, of Christie's specifics. "A lot of people said a lot of things here, but they didn't say what they'd do."

Talking entitlements, Christie's political team hopes, will help the more moderate governor break through with primary voters in an unusually crowded field of far-right conservatives. And they appear to be betting that New Hampshire, with its small 1.3 million population, is where Christie will make his stand.

Christie barnstormed the state after his initial entitlements speech, with nine organized events over three days—and that doesn't include the impromptu stops, like working the crowd outside Ben and Jerry's on free-cone day. His talent for retail-level politics is almost unrivaled in the GOP field, pulling college Republicans in for selfies here, grabbing the shoulders of potential supporters with two-handed authority there. "Man," one Republican walked away beaming after shaking Christie's hand in Nashua, "Chris Christie's got a great grip."

Still, Christie faces headwinds back home as he tries to make inroads in New Hampshire. There have been reports that indictments loom in the scandal surrounding the closure of bridge lanes and New Jersey's credit rating was downgraded for a ninth time last week.

And nationwide, polls indicate he has a problem with the GOP base. In Iowa, where social conservatives are dominant, 46 percent of expected GOP caucus-goers said Christie was too moderate for them, according to a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll earlier this year. It was the highest figure in the field. Nationally, 49 percent of self-identified conservatives had an unfavorable opinion of Christie, and only 28 percent saw him favorably in a recent Washington Post/ABC News survey.

Christie's embrace of entitlements has already affected the race. Days after Christie's proposal, Jeb Bush said in Manchester that he would support raising the Social Security retirement age. Marco Rubio talked about the idea here in Nashua. And Mike Huckabee came out against it.

Democrats were downright giddy about the issue's sudden emergence. "God bless Chris Christie if he wants to lead Republicans down this path," said Brad Woodhouse, president of American Bridge, a Democratic super PAC that tracks Republican candidates. "Once they've done it, we'll have them on record in the general election."

For Christie, it was a chance just to be back in the conversation. In the last 16 months, the New Jersey governor has gone from being an early GOP front-runner to more of an afterthought. Bush's entry robbed Christie of his natural base—not just in the GOP establishment class, but the Wall Street financiers who could underwrite his campaign. More ominously, a growing faction of Republicans simply doesn't like him. A March Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll had 57 percent of Republican primary voters saying they couldn't see themselves backing Christie.

Today show host Matt Lauer pointedly asked Christie last week if his moment had passed. "I don't know," Christie replied, "and neither do you."

Christie is betting his comeback hopes on the combination of New Hampshire town halls that showcase his charisma ("Nobody threw a beer at me," he congratulated himself at the end of a town hall at a pub in Exeter) and the notion that he's bolder than the rest of the field when it comes to entitlements.

"The real idea is not to say, 'Like, well, I think we should do something on Social Security, and I'll get back to you.' These are real ideas," Christie said. "And, you know, I've had a lot of people say, 'Well, why would you possibly want to suggest those things?' Because we have to—we have to. If you want to start a national conversation, let's start one that matters."

Christie's plan would eliminate Social Security for individuals with more than $200,000 per year in retirement income and would cut benefits for those earning $80,000 or more. The retirement age would rise to 69. Payroll taxes for seniors who choose to work would be slashed. Wealthier seniors would have to pay more for Medicare, and the eligibility age would rise.

"I'm not looking to be the most popular guy in the world. I'm looking to be the most respected one," Christie said. "And the way you do that is by putting out real ideas."

In the GOP field, though, he is looking to be the most popular guy. And putting out a real idea—a conservative one—is underpinning his efforts to do just that.

(Image via L.E.MORMILE / Shutterstock.com)

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Meet the Senate Candidate Already Collecting a Congressional Pension

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 10:36:09 -0400

If Ted Strickland wins a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2016, he would, at age 75, be the oldest freshman ever elected to the chamber by popular vote. The Ohio Democrat would also arrive in Washington with something else unusual for a freshman senator: He's already collecting a congressional pension.

The pension is a benefit accrued during two separate stints in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1993 to 1995, and from 1997 to 2007. And Strickland began collecting pension payments in 2008 while serving as Ohio's governor, according to financial documents filed during his governorship.

Strickland's annual pension was worth $31,668 in 2009, according to a Columbus Dispatch report detailing the tax returns he released during his 2010 reelection bid.

If elected, Strickland would apparently not be able to simultaneously draw both a $174,000 Senate salary and his House pension, according to federal retirement rules. Presumably, he would collect the larger salary. His campaign spokesman did not answer questions about Strickland's plans.

"Although the congressional retirement checks stop coming when an ex-lawmaker reenters the House or Senate, the benefits will only be sweeter when he or she retires again," noted Pete Sepp, president of the National Taxpayers Union, which tracks congressional pensions.

Strickland's pension highlights both his advanced age and his long career as a politician—two facets of his biography that Republicans relish pointing out.

In fact, Strickland may be eligible for, or even already collecting, a second public pension from his work in Ohio, where he served one term as governor and also worked as a consulting psychologist for a state prison and as a professor. Ohio retirement rules require five years of state service; it's not clear if his prior jobs count toward that total. Strickland's campaign did not say if he was eligible or collecting a state pension.

The former governor is considered a top Democratic recruit in one of the battleground Senate races of 2016. National party strategists believe he is the Democrat best positioned to take on Republican Sen. Rob Portman in a race Democrats likely must win to take back control of the Senate. A recent poll from Quinnipiac University showed Strickland already leading Portman.

For years, Strickland has campaigned on his humble Appalachian roots, as the son of a steelworker and the eighth of nine children. His family, as his campaign biography notes, once had to live in a chicken shack when their house burned down.

In 2006, his last year in Congress, Strickland ranked 365th out of 435 members with an estimated net worth of $97,502, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In contrast, Portman ranked 15th in the Senate in 2013, with an estimated net worth of $16.8 million.

Strickland's pensioner status could emerge as a political issue in the primary, long before he can take on Portman. He currently faces opposition from P.G. Sittenfeld, a 30-year-old Cincinnati city councilman who is one of the youngest Senate candidates in the country. Sittenfeld reported raising $750,000 in the first quarter of 2015, slightly more than the $670,000 Strickland raised in about a month less time.

It is not unusual for members of Congress to layer taxpayer-paid pensions from state and local government atop taxpayer-paid federal salaries—a practice some criticize as "double-dipping." A National Journal investigation in 2013 found nearly 100 lawmakers doing so.

If Strickland is collecting a state-level pension, he would be entitled to receive it in addition to his Senate salary. Records from his governorship show Strickland layered his congressional pension on top of his gubernatorial salary in 2008, 2009, and 2010.

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Rand Paul, Reluctant Warrior, Makes No Promises on Increased Defense Spending

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 10:29:57 -0500

Sen. Rand Paul defended his desire to keep America disentangled from international conflagrations Tuesday, casting himself as a reluctant warrior who—as a likely candidate for president in 2016—could tap into a war-weary electorate.

"If I'm ever commander in chief, I will not want to take the country to war," Paul said Tuesday during an appearance at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council. "It will be a last resort and only when the country says we are united, and we must fight, and we will fight. But it won't be an eagerness on my part."

Paul said intervening, particularly in the volatile Middle East ("It's a mess there," he said) is a risky proposition that he would seek to avoid. "Intervention has unintended consequences," he explained. As an example, he said, "Iraq's worse off now," citing lost stability brought under former dictator Saddam Hussein.

In a suit, white shirt, and a red tie, Paul swiveled back and forth in his chair throughout 30 minutes of intense questioning from Paul Gigot, the editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, one of the most influential conservative platforms in the nation.

Despite repeated questions, Paul refused to promise to increase defense spending if elected president. Paul called defense the "No. 1 priority" of the government but also said, "I truly believe that our No. 1 threat to our national security is our debt."

"It has to be done by cutting other parts of government," he said of funding growing security spending. Unlike some in the Republican Party, Paul later added, "I am not all in, everything no matter what" on increasing the defense budget.

He sought to cast himself as a foreign policy centrist, compared to his more hawkish Republican colleagues, most notably Sen. John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee. "I want less [war]," Paul said. "McCain wants more. He wants 15 countries more. He wants 15 wars more."

Paul was most at ease discussing civil liberties and the rise of the surveillance state. He did say he had far fewer concerns about companies, not the government, storing mass amounts of consumer information. "Google's not going to put me in jail," he said.

The event, at the Four Seasons hotel in Washington, came only hours after Paul had formally announced that he is running for reelection in Kentucky and signaled how much of his focus is already on the White House.

"He'll make that decision in the early spring," Paul's chief political strategist, Doug Stafford, said about a presidential run in a conference call with reporters earlier in the day.

(Image via Flickr user Gage Skidmore)

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Rand Paul Rips Hillary Clinton: Not 'Fit to Lead the Country'

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Mon, 04 Aug 2014 10:55:22 -0400

MARSHALL COUNTY, Ky.—Sen. Rand Paul delivered an unusually harsh rebuke of Hillary Clinton in Kentucky on Friday night, declaring that his potential 2016 rival is not "fit to lead the country."

Paul, who is laying the groundwork to run for president in 2016, began his speech by mockingly saying he was losing sleep over Clinton's money woes. Clinton, who is far atop the polls among potential 2016 Democratic candidates, had said during her recent book tour that she and President Clinton left the White House "dead broke."

Paul facetiously asked the crowd to observe "a moment of silence" for her finances.

"Somebody must have been praying for her," the Republican said seconds later, "because she's now worth 100, 200 million. I tell you it was really tough giving those speeches."

At least, Paul jabbed, she didn't have to suffer alone: "She had her limo driver with her for the last 17 years to commiserate."

"I hope she can deal with only 100 million [dollars]," he added. "I certainly wish that maybe she becomes preoccupied with something else because I don't think she's fit to lead the country."

Paul's red-meat speech came before several hundred GOP activists gathered in a converted indoor tennis court in far western Kentucky. It could be a warm-up act for Iowa, the state that kicks off the 2016 presidential nominating process, where Paul is headed next week.

Here in Marshall County, the Kentucky GOP crowd cheered repeatedly over their plates of fried catfish and baked beans.

Paul attacked his potential Democratic rival at length for her handling of security at the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed in 2012. Clinton was secretary of State at the time.

She treated the consulate "as if it were Paris. Benghazi's not Paris. Benghazi is a lot like Baghdad," he said.

Paul lashed out at Clinton, a more hawkish Democrat, even as his libertarian-infused international perspective has put him at odds with much of the traditional GOP foreign policy establishment.

In Benghazi, Paul blamed Clinton for ignoring requests for a plane and additional security, citing all the other things the State Department had purchased during that time: "$100,000 for an electrical charging station" in Vienna, "$650,000 on Facebook ads," and "$700,000 on landscaping for the Brussels embassy" among them.

And Paul said the excuse that her deputies handled requests from Benghazi was no excuse at all.

"If you don't read the cables from one of the most dangerous spots on earth, frankly, you preclude yourself from ever being our commander in chief," Paul declared.

Michael Czin, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, responded to Paul's comments, saying: "Rand Paul voted to shut down the government, wants the U.S. to retreat from our responsibilities around the world, opposes commonsense legislation like the Violence Against Women Act and equal pay legislation, and thinks employers ought to have the right to discriminate. With that record, he's got no credibility on the issue of who is fit to lead."

(Image via Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com)

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Darrell Issa Subpoenas Top Obama Political Aide

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Fri, 11 Jul 2014 14:36:56 -0400

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa said Friday he was subpoenaing a top administration official, David Simas, the director of the White House's Office of Political Strategy and Outreach, and demanding that he testify next week.

Issa, who has been one of the Obama administration's fiercest critics in Congress, has pressed the White House for more information about the political office that Simas runs since it was reopened earlier this year.

In a March letter to White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Issa wrote that the decision to reopen the political office "heightens concerns about the illegal use of taxpayer funds to support congressional campaigns during the 2014 midterm elections."

Apparently, Issa has been unsatisfied with the Obama administration's responses to his repeated inquiries for documents and more information. In a letter to Neil Eggleston, counsel to the president, dated Friday, Issa stated he was holding a hearing next week and wrote, "I am left with no alternative but to use compulsory process to require Mr. Simas to appear." The hearing is scheduled for July 16.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the oversight panel, wrote a letter to Issa Friday urging him not to subpoena Simas, calling it "an abuse of authority" as there has been "no evidence of any wrongdoing relating to this official or the office he directs." Cummings accused Issa of going on a "subpoena binge," noting Issa has issued more subpoenas than the three previous oversight committee chairmen combined – "in less than half the time."

"Over the past several weeks—ever since House Speaker John Boehner took the Benghazi investigation away from the Oversight Committee and transferred it to the new Select Committee—you have been engaged in a subpoena binge, issuing more unilateral subpoenas than at any point during your tenure, and all with no debate or votes by our Committee," Cummings wrote.

Issa left some wiggle room, writing to Eggleston that if a briefing for the committee by White House officials leaves "no outstanding questions for Mr. Simas, I will reconsider whether it is necessary for him to appear."

If forced to attend the hearing, Simas would represent one of the highest-ranking Obama officials that Issa has compelled to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

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Ethics Chair: House Will Reverse Itself on Disclosure of Free Trips

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 13:41:09 -0400

House Ethics Committee Chairman Mike Conaway said Thursday that his panel would undo its controversial decision to delete the requirement that lawmakers list free trips they receive on their annual disclosure reports.

"We will reverse that decision," Conaway said during an appearance on a local radio talk show in his Texas district. "Heard first in Brownwood, Texas," the Republican told listeners, one of whom provided a recording to National Journal.

National Journal first reported earlier this week that the Ethics Committee had quietly deleted the disclosure requirement behind closed doors and without any public announcement. Watchdog groups criticized the maneuver and, amid public criticism, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said it "must be reversed."

Conaway, who had previously avoided any public comment on the matter, said there had been "no malicious intent" and declared Thursday, "It was a wrong decision and we're going to fix it."

The Ethics panel is one of the few committees in Congress equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. Conaway said he and ranking member Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., who had previously signed off on the change, had jointly decided to re-implement disclosure of free trips on annual forms.

"Linda and I have reversed the decision," Conaway said. He said lawmakers would have between 15 and 30 days to amend their filings to include the free trips that they received from private sponsors in 2013.

Even in reversal, Conaway defended the change as part of "an overall look" at disclosure as lawmakers move to an electronic-filing format. He noted that even with the change the free trips are still disclosed separately, and sooner, to the House's Office of the Clerk, where they are posted online.

"This report on an annual basis is redundant, it's duplicative," Conaway said. " ... So it's out there, we're not hiding anything from anybody."

Watchdog groups and some transparency advocates in Congress, however, have noted that the yearly forms are the most scrutinized document on lawmakers' finances. "The bottom line is it sends a bad message. With the public's trust in Congress at an all-time low, you don't want to send a message that it can be more difficult to find out information," Rep. Michael Quigley, D-Ill., said in an interview earlier this week.

Conaway said the firestorm occurred "only because one reporter who makes a living jacking people up about these trips" wrote about the issue.

"We had gotten not one complaint from the public," he added of the unannounced change. "Not one person had looked for this information except this reporter."

Conaway expressed greater frustration with Democrats in Congress who had criticized the change after the National Journal report.

"What I do get upset with is my colleagues throwing Linda and I under the bus over a decision that was made months ago," he said.

He specifically named "Mrs. Pelosi and a guy named [Rep.] Mike Fitzpatrick, who set their hair on fire—their righteous indignation would be a lot more believable if they'd have said something in May when they didn't file—when they filed their return without that disclosure."

Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, had sent a public letter to Conaway and the Ethics Committee urging them to reverse the change on Wednesday.

(Image via Taras Vyshnya/Shutterstock.com)

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Pelosi Says Decision to Delete Reporting Requirement for Free Trips 'Must Be Reversed'

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 10:15:31 -0400

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday that the House Ethics Committee's decision to stop requiring lawmakers to publish the free trips they take on their annual disclosure forms "must be reversed." But while Pelosi was quick to condemn the reduced disclosure, members of her own party had previously signed off on the change.

The Ethics Committee is one of the few panels in Congress divided equally between Republicans and Democrats. That means that ranking member Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., and her Democratic colleagues (Reps. Michael Capuano, Yvette Clarke, and Ted Deutch and Del. Pedro Pierluisi) had to have approved the deleted disclosure requirement, along with Republicans led by committee Chairman Michael Conaway of Texas.

"Rep. Pelosi's staff needs to talk to her representative on the Ethics Committee, who signed off on this bipartisan change to reduce duplicative paperwork," said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner.

An aide to Pelosi confirmed that she was unaware of the new policy until National Journal reported lateMonday that the Ethics panel had quietly deleted the requirement that all-expenses-paid journeys funded by private groups be published on lawmakers' annual financial-disclosure forms.

Sanchez's office referred questions to the Ethics Committee on Monday and did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Lawmakers' privately sponsored trips must still be reported separately to the House's Office of the Clerk within 15 days of travel and published online there. But the yearly forms of lawmakers are the primary source of financial information on them, and among the most scrutinized. Free trips for lawmakers have been reported there since the form's creation in the late 1970s.

"While the committee's aim was to simplify the disclosure process, Congress must always move in the direction of more disclosure, not less," Pelosi said in her statement Tuesday.

The House Ethics Committee had declined to comment on Monday why it made the change. But in a rare public statement on Tuesday, Tom Rust, the committee's chief counsel, said that "the committee's nonpartisan staff recommended a number of changes to the financial-disclosure forms, including eliminating the need to report less information about private travel than the traveler had already publicly disclosed."

Along with Pelosi, other Democratic lawmakers disagreed with the removed disclosure requirement on Tuesday. "The bottom line is it sends a bad message," Rep. Michael Quigley, D-Ill., a cochair of the Congressional Transparency Caucus, said in an interview. "With the public's trust in Congress at an all-time low, you don't want to send a message that it can be more difficult to find out information."

Quigley declined to criticize his Democratic colleagues on the Ethics panel who had signed off on the reduced disclosure. "I don't think they were trying to do something inappropriate," he said. "I just think they had a different point of view."

Quigley said "duplicative" reporting isn't a bad thing and that "one-stop shopping" is critical for complete public disclosure. "Very few people are so savvy that they know how to find things and they should all be in one spot as a result," Quigley said. "They're not like, 'I've looked at his personal disclosure and now I have to look at the clerk's site to get this information.' "

Rep. Dave Loebsack, D-Iowa, said in a statement Tuesday that he will introduce legislation to reverse the rule upon the House's return from its July 4 congressional recess. "These kinds of backroom deals and changing of the rules in the middle of the night is exactly why Congress has a lower approval rating than cockroaches and traffic jams," he said.

Pelosi added that if the Ethics Committee does not reverse itself on its own, "we will call upon the speaker to allow a vote on legislation to reverse this decision."

Steel's statement that this was a "bipartisan change to reduce duplicative paperwork," however, suggests such a vote is unlikely.

The deletion of the requirement to report trips on yearly financial forms comes as lawmakers are increasingly traveling the world on private groups' dime. In 2013, lawmakers and their aides participated in nearly 1,900 trips at a cost of more than $6 million, according to Legistorm, which compiles travel records.

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Congress Quietly Deletes a Key Disclosure of Free Trips Lawmakers Take

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 12:05:43 -0400

It's going to be a little more difficult to ferret out which members of Congress are lavished with all-expenses-paid trips around the world after the House has quietly stripped away the requirement that such privately sponsored travel be included on lawmakers' annual financial-disclosure forms.

The move, made behind closed doors and without a public announcement by the House Ethics Committee, reverses more than three decades of precedent. Gifts of free travel to lawmakers have appeared on the yearly financial form dating back its creation in the late 1970s, after the Watergate scandal. National Journal uncovered the deleted disclosure requirement when analyzing the most recent batch of yearly filings.

"This is such an obvious effort to avoid accountability," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "There's no legitimate reason. There's no good reason for it."

Free trips paid for by private groups must still be reported separately to the House's Office of the Clerk and disclosed there. But they will now be absent from the chief document that reporters, watchdogs, and members of the public have used for decades to scrutinize lawmakers' finances.

"The more you can hide, the less accountable you can be," Sloan said of lawmakers. "It's clear these forms are useful for reporters and watchdogs, and obviously a little too useful."

House Ethics Committee Chairman Michael Conaway, R-Texas, did not return a call for comment; ranking member Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., referred questions to committee staff. The committee declined to comment.

The change occurs as free travel, which critics have criticized as thinly veiled junkets, has come back into vogue. Last year, members of Congress and their aides took more free trips than in any year since the influence-peddling scandal that sent lobbyist Jack Abramoff to prison. There were nearly 1,900 trips at a cost of more than $6 million last year, according to Legistorm, which compiles travel records.

Now none of those trips must be included on the annual disclosures of lawmakers or their aides.

The tabs for these international excursions can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. One trip to Australia earlier this year cost nearly $50,000. Lawmakers are often invited to bring along their husbands or wives, fly in business class, and stay in plush four-star hotels. In the wake of the Abramoff scandal, lobbyists were banned from organizing or paying for these travels. But some of the nonprofits underwriting them today have extremely close ties to lobbying groups, including sharing staff, money, and offices.

The only indication that these trips no longer need to be disclosed on annual reports came in the instructions booklet issued to lawmakers in 2014. The guidelines for the new electronic filing system tell lawmakers and staff they "are no longer required to report privately sponsored travel" on the form.

Perhaps because the ethics committee's edict was issued so quietly, disclosure remained uneven.

For instance, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who led a GOP delegation of lawmakers to Israel last summer paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, which is closely tied to the pro-Israel lobby, did not include the trip on his annual form. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, who led a similar trip for Democrats, did include it on his form. But some of the rank-and-file members who went on the trip with Hoyer did not.

Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the consumer group Public Citizen who closely tracks the international travels of lawmakers and the actions of the Ethics Committee, said he was "completely unaware" of the change until contacted by National Journal.

"There's seems to be no reason I could imagine why the Ethics Committee would minimize the amount of information that gets reported," Holman said.

Holman took solace in the fact that the post-Abramoff reform law included mandatory disclosure of such trips on the clerk's website. But he said he was still was concerned about their absence from the annual reports, which he called "a critical element for understanding the finances of our elected representatives."

"It's always good to have more disclosure than less," he said. "It just seems a little odd that the Ethics Committee would pass such a rule change."

(Image via MC_PP/Shutterstock.com)

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Why Do Washington's Women Leaders Make Less?

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 09:35:23 -0400

Click here to see National Journal's interactive chart on how male and female pay stacks up in Washington.

This past Tuesday marked a reunion of sorts at the White House as President Obama brought back Lilly Ledbetter, whose fight for equal pay has made her a feminist icon. Ledbetter, the namesake of the first bill Obama signed into law, looked on as the president inked two executive orders intended to promote women's pay equity. Obama repeated, as he has all year, the much-debated statistic that American women make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Yet even as the government takes steps to reduce the pay disparity nationwide, the gender gap remains a reality at the highest-paying jobs at Washington's top trade associations, professional societies, think tanks, labor unions, and public-interest groups. Men overwhelmingly hold more of the top jobs—and they're better paid for their efforts.

Those are the findings of National Journal's latest biennial salary survey of the CEOs who run nonprofit organizations with a footprint in Washington. Women made up just 22 percent of the 644 current and former CEOs in the survey. And those female executives were generally paid less than their male counterparts. No women were among the 25 highest-paid executives on the list; only five women landed in the top 50; and just 13 women were in the top 100. Overall, the median compensation of female CEOs with a full year of earnings was 15 percent lower and $59,063 less than that of their male counterparts. (The earnings figures include executives' base pay, bonuses, and other compensation for the 2012 tax year.)

With their sizable salaries, these CEOs don't necessarily make for the most sympathetic figures in the pay-equity fight. (The highest-paid woman on the list, Pamela Bailey, who is CEO of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, made $2.06 million.) But the gap is nonetheless instructive, as it shows how America's lack of pay equity permeates into the highest-paying jobs—including those with links to the nation's capital.

The share of women in charge of associations, think tanks, unions, and other nonprofits does exceed—by a few percentage points—their ratios on Capitol Hill. (Women hold 18 percent of seats in the House and 20 percent in the Senate.) An American Enterprise Institute analysis earlier this year found near-parity in the number of employees inside the White House—229 women to 232 men—but it also showed that women there earned 88 cents for every dollar men were paid. Washington nonprofits, meanwhile, appear to be performing far better than their corporate cousins when it comes to gender equity: At Fortune 500 companies, the percentage of women chief executives still hovers below 5 percent.

The pace of progress at D.C.-linked organizations has been mixed. In the 2004 National Journal survey, women ran 16 percent of the organizations; that number has inched up to 22 percent in the decade since. "God, it's still low. Ten years. That's not a lot of progress," says Pamela Kaul, who helps place CEOs in jobs as president of an executive head-hunting company, Association Strategies, which she founded 27 years ago. "I'm surprised it has not risen faster."

In the 2008 survey, median compensation for male CEOs was $338,678 compared with $260,064 for women—a 30 percent disparity. Now the gap is 15 percent. In 2008, only four women were among the 68 CEOs who topped the $1 million compensation mark. That number has tripled to 12, out of 91 who were paid for a full year's work.

Yet major disparities persist. The question is why. Why are so many fewer women occupying leadership positions at major Washington organizations? And why are those women who do get to the corner office generally making less than their male peers?

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

Lisa Rickard has been president of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform for more than a decade and is among Washington's highest-compensated female executives. Her $1.6 million in 2012 compensation ranked fourth-highest among women. She is optimistic that more women will be joining her on the CEO list. "Within the next, say, 10 to 15 years, we'll probably—hopefully—be looking at 50 percent representation," Rickard says.

She is bullish because she says the biggest stumbling block for women becoming CEOs has been the lack of female vice presidents, directors, and other lower-level organizational leaders. As she sees it, women have been absent from many rungs of the leadership ladder that prepare people to become CEOs. "You do have to move through a talent pipeline in order to accumulate the experience that qualifies you for these jobs," she says.

One challenge that could be preventing women from reaching the CEO level is that some women opt out of the workforce for a time to raise children. A 2013 study from Vanderbilt economics professor Joni Hersch found that women M.B.A. graduates from top schools were more likely than women from less competitive schools to take time away from work—which, Hersch speculated, could have "a direct effect on the number of women reaching higher-level corporate positions as well as an indirect effect due to a smaller pipeline of women available to advance through the corporate hierarchy."

Women are now in that pipeline, Rickard says, ticking off all the powerful female executives at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (where she's also an executive vice president)—the general counsel, the chief of staff, the chief administrative officer. "The senior level, just here within the chamber, is full of high-ranking, serious, experienced, well-compensated women professionals," she says. (The chamber's longtime CEO remains Tom Donohue, who, at $5.45 million, had the second-highest haul of any executive on the list.)

Denise Grant, a CEO headhunter who is the managing partner of the Washington office of the executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates, speaks similarly of a women's "talent pipeline" that is far fuller than a decade ago. Today, "more women get more experience that is relevant to these roles," Grant says.

Plus, those doing the hiring increasingly want someone other than an older white man. "Every slate we prepare for our clients has diversity in it," Grant says. "It's not just the same old, same old in the candidate pool."

DISPARITY IN WAGES

The small share of female executives is only part of the gender gap, however. The other element is their lagging pay. One factor may be that women are leading smaller organizations. Roughly 44 percent of groups headed by women had revenue of less than $20 million, according to the National Journal survey, compared with about 33 percent of those headed by men. Meanwhile, men more often run the largest groups: 34 percent of men headed groups that collected more than $50 million, versus only 23 percent of women who ran groups of that size.

But even among similar-sized organizations, there is often a pay gap. Women CEOs of groups with less than $20 million in revenue earned $76,147 less than men, at the median. And the gender gap was even bigger—$206,856—among groups with more than $100 million in revenues. (Pay was nearly equitable among the 268 organizations that fell in between, with less than $4,000 separating men's and women's compensation.)

Perhaps more interesting than size are the types of groups that women lead. Women held only four of the 26 top spots (15 percent) in the banking and finance realm—the highest-paid sector, besides sports and insurance. In contrast, women ran more than 25 percent of public-interest groups and more than 34 percent of those in education, arts, and science—both among the lowest-paying sectors.

"You see women in the causes—in the human services and social services—and the pay can be lower," says Kaul, the veteran executive headhunter. Wendy Pangburn, who specializes in placing top local executives at associations and nonprofits as executive vice president of DHR International's Washington office, agrees. "In general terms, you tend to see women executives more toward mission-oriented organizations," she says.

Is that by choice, or the result of gender typecasting? "I think women have had more of an interest in joining organizations where they really feel a connection to the mission and the cause," Kaul says.

Another possible factor leading to the CEO pay gap is that women may be getting locked into lower salaries at earlier points in their careers—and are never able to make up the difference, even as they climb toward leadership positions. As a recruiter who represents employers, Pangburn is privy to the salaries of those seeking top posts. She says women often arrive earning less than men. "It starts from receptionist to researcher to an analyst to a junior VP to a senior VP," she says. "At all steps of the salary-compensation ladder, you generally see women paid less."

LEAN IN

Carolyn Miles runs what was a $576 million organization in 2012. She is CEO of Save the Children, a nonprofit that ranked in the top 10 for revenues of all groups in National Journal's survey. But when it comes to Miles's compensation package—she pulled in $403,857 in 2012—she is decidedly middle of the pack. She ranked 320th of the 560 CEOs paid for a full year's work. Miles is aware of her relative rankings and doesn't care. "That's not why I do what I do," she says.

"Could I ask my board to pay me more? I guess I could," Miles says. "But I don't. I do think there's something about men and money—and women and money—that's different."

Call it the Lean In factor, after Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg's best-selling book. Sandberg set off a national conversation last year about whether women are less aggressive than men in seeking higher pay and opportunity in the workplace. "If we want a world with greater equality, we need to acknowledge that women are less likely to keep their hands up," she wrote in one oft-quoted passage.

Could that apply to CEO pay too? Pangburn thinks so. She's been at the negotiating table on behalf of associations and nonprofits and has seen women executives take less than they could have gotten. "We blink when we shouldn't," she says. "I can say this as a female because we don't represent ourselves as well as we should. We should draw a line in the sand."

To be sure, the sectors that have drawn more women—more charity-focused groups such as Save the Children—are also a factor in how hard a bargain a candidate might drive. Demanding more money from an association representing Wall Street banks is different than doing the same from a group that serves developing-world children. (Of the five organizational categories in the survey—associations, professional societies, public-interest groups, think tanks, and labor unions—women had higher median earnings than men in only one: public-interest groups, by 5 percent.)

"You go into the nonprofit sector, and the expectation should be that you're not going to be paid like you're working in the corporate sector, and I think that's OK," says Miles, who years ago worked at American Express. "To me, it also has something to do with the work that we do. I'm paid a very fair salary.… It's astronomical compared to the people we serve."

THE FUTURE

The women interviewed agreed on one thing: Times are improving. "It's gotten a lot better," says Grant, one of the headhunters. Kaul, another recruiter, predicts "a big jump" in the next two to five years, as women have risen to vice presidencies and are on the precipice of the big chair.

Women are taking leadership roles in traditionally male-dominated sectors, such as energy, where 15 of the 17 CEOs in our survey were men. In December 2012, less than a month after Rep. Jo Ann Emerson won reelection to her Missouri seat, she announced unexpectedly that she would resign to become CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. If Emerson is paid the same as her male predecessor, former Rep. Glenn English ($1.89 million), it would put her in the upper echelon of executive earners. And just this month, Sue Kelly took the helm of the American Public Power Association. Her predecessor, Mark Crisson, collected $705,412 in 2012.

Of course, ground is lost as it is gained. The two incumbent women CEOs in the energy sector in 2012—Regina Hopper of America's Natural Gas Alliance ($885,313) and Denise Bode of the American Wind Energy Association ($589,964)—have both since departed.

Indeed, there's a long way to go to achieve full equality. If the pace at which the percentage of women CEOs has increased in the past 10 years holds steady, then equal representation would still be decades away.

Peter Bell contributed to this article.

(Image via fstockfoto/Shutterstock.com)

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Everyone Won the Government Shutdown

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 10:43:00 -0500

What if you shut the federal government down and everyone was better off for it?

Take John Boehner, R-Ohio, who was on the loser ledger of any serious accounting in the immediate aftermath of the shutdown. The House speaker had led his troops into a battle he knew—and had told them—they couldn't win. Sixteen days later, with the Republican brand bloodied and at all-time lows, he would have to back down, almost unconditionally.

Then a funny thing happened. The GOP rank and file began to coalesce around him. Boehner's tea-party antagonists in the House appreciated his fight; his allies appreciated that he was right. "A leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk," Boehner later told funnyman Jay Leno. Boehner was done with lonely walks.

"In the long term, it has definitely turned out to be a turning point, and a positive turning point, for the Republican Conference," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. Boehner has since helped muscle through a bipartisan budget, a bipartisan farm bill, and a debt-limit hike without losing control of his famously fractious conference.

"I'm not going to say it was worth it," King continued. "Things have turned out for the better, I'll put it that way."

It's been 150 days since congressional Republicans forced the closure of the federal government in a last-ditch effort to derail and defund Obamacare. They failed spectacularly at achieving that goal. But as each day passes, it's getting harder to find a political figure—Boehner, President Obama, Ted Cruz, House Democrats, Harry Reid—who didn't benefit in some way from the fight.

Five months later, the Great Government Freeze of 2013 is proving an appreciating asset.

This is not to discount the federal workers who suffered from a delayed paycheck or the Americans who were denied needed services. (Or the panda lovers blocked from their beloved live video feed from the National Zoo.) But the political obituaries written last October are turning out to be premature.

The shutdown renewed Washington's hand-wringing about gridlock, but the gears of government have actually begun to turn more efficiently ever since. Congress passed its first bipartisan budget in years. The long-stalled farm bill reached the president's desk. And playing chicken with the debt limit, which had left the markets frustrated, gave way to a relatively drama-free lifting of the borrowing cap in February.

"There are no winners here," Obama insisted as the government reopened last October. He specifically cited the "completely unnecessary damage on our economy" from the shutdown. Yet early economic indicators suggest the impact of the shutdown was far from devastating, and it certainly didn't drive the U.S. economy back into recession. "I don't call the shutdown a good thing," said Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican and a Boehner confidant. He said the government closure obscured more than two weeks of a broken HealthCare.gov website, and "absent the Obamacare debacle, we'd still be bleeding." But Cole did say the shutdown has changed the dynamics in the House for the better. With hindsight, he said, Boehner was "unquestionably a big winner."

Then there are the obvious political victors: Obama, whose unyielding stance broke the back of the GOP opposition and chilled the precedent of using must-pass legislation as political hostages; Reid, who got the fight he'd been demanding, and won; and House Democrats, who raised gobs of money.

Rep. Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an email that Republicans still have "never adequately recovered," and argued that the shutdown "just reinforced their brand as reckless, irresponsible, and out of touch." The DCCC's best day for online fundraising in 2013 was the 24 hours leading up to the shutdown. And in the week after Cruz's 21-hour filibuster, the committee hauled in $2 million online.

The shutdown fight certainly helped Cruz cement himself as a household name. The freshman Republican senator from Texas is now a hero to the tea party, if not its de facto 2016 presidential standard-bearer. "It was a huge boost to Ted, because the frustration with a lot of the Republicans and conservatives [is], it seems like Republicans are never up for a fight," said Sal Russo, chief strategist for the Tea Party Express.

Cruz's advisers firmly believe the shutdown will continue to pay dividends when the health care law falters, which they see as inevitable, and the public remembers Cruz as the man who fought hardest to stop it. "In terms of whether we should've stood and fought on Obamacare, I think the proof is in the pudding," Cruz told CBS's Bob Schieffer in late January. "Millions of people across the country have seen now why we were standing and fighting, because Obamacare's a disaster."

Meanwhile, the outside conservative groups that agitated for a showdown added reams of new members. The Senate Conservatives Fund collected more than 2 million signatures on its defunding petition, pocketing an army of new activist email addresses. In December, the group hawked "Ted Cruz Was Right" bumper stickers to try to turn those email addresses into donors.

And while such groups have seen their influence wane somewhat in the halls of Congress since the shutdown, they won a more cynical victory. The most lasting impact of the shutdown may be how it further eroded Americans' faltering trust in their government—a boost to the tea party's limited-government ethos.

Faith in the institution has almost never been lower.

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Congress Took More Free Trips in 2013 Than in Any Year Since Lobbying Reforms

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 17:46:00 -0500

Members of Congress and their aides took more free trips around the world in 2013 than in any year since new restrictions were put in place after the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling scandal.

The website LegiStorm, which compiles congressional travel records, said Monday that lawmakers and their staffs took a combined 1,887 free trips last year for a total cost of almost $6 million.

That amount is more than double the sum private groups spent on congressional trips in 2008, the first full year that the tightened travel rules of 2007 went into effect. The total number of trips has bounded upward by more than 60 percent since 2008 as well.

Last year, lawmakers enjoyed all-expenses-paid journeys to Ireland, Morocco, France, South Africa, Israel, Turkey, and many more destinations, according to House travel records.

Lobbyists and those who employ them have not been allowed to directly finance privately funded congressional travel abroad since 2007. But as National Journal documented earlier this year, many of the private interests footing the bill for international congressional travel are tied closely to lobbying operations in Washington.

Some even share staff and office space with lobbying shops. The America Israel Education Foundation, which spent $1.7 million on congressional travel in 2013, more than any other group, shares an address with the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee, for instance.

Overall, Israel was the most popular destination, accounting for $2 million in travel—more than one-third of the total travel expenses to all destinations.

The total number of congressional trips still hasn't reached the peak of 2003 through 2005, when there were more than 4,000 annual congressional voyages at an average cost of about $10 million.

But the number has been steadily climbing since Congress began tightening its rules close to seven years ago, as the stigma of flying abroad on a private group's dime has dimmed. The previous high, under the current rules, was 1,621 trips that cost $5.88 million in 2011, according to LegiStorm.

Lawmakers are allowed—and often do—bring their spouses along on the trips, adding to the allure. While the itineraries must be approved in advance by the House Ethics Committee, the trips don't always sound too stressful.

In one of the last trips a lawmaker took in 2013, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., and his wife headed to Puerto Rico in December. They stayed at the El Conquistador Resort, a Waldorf Astoria property "uniquely nestled on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea," according to its website.

The Council of State Governments Eastern Regional Conference picked up the tab. The annual meeting's theme was "Succeeding in a Time of Austerity."

(Image via sangaku/Shutterstock.com)

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Paul Ryan Says Conservative Attacks Are a 'Strange New Normal'

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 13:25:02 -0500

For years, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan has been hoisted on a pedestal by conservative think tanks and activist groups as the paragon of conservatism in Congress. But all the accolades bought him zero goodwill this week, as he crafted his first bipartisan budget pact.

The Cato Institute called the package a "huge Republican cave-in." The Club for Growth lamented it as "budgetary smoke and mirrors." Heritage Action said it was "a step backward." And FreedomWorks called it a "surrender."

It's quite the turnabout for a politician whose rapid rise was fueled, in part, by the backing of such groups.

"It's a strange new normal, isn't it," Ryan said with a laugh Wednesday, after he presented the package to his House GOP colleagues. "It is what it is. It's funny, isn't it?"

Ryan said he was confident, despite the outside rabble-rousing, that a majority of House Republicans will back the package.

"I don't let that stuff bother me anymore. Groups are going to do what they want to do," Ryan said. "What matters to me is: Am I doing what I think is right? Am I sticking to my principles? And am I listening to my colleagues who actually have a voting card?"

He said conservatives need to accept that their preferred agenda will not pass through so long as government is divided. "I think we need to win some elections before we can actually truly fix this problem," the 2012 losing vice presidential candidate said of the nation's debt.

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The Next Budget Crisis Is Only 90 Days Away

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 12:53:09 -0400

Before the ink was even dry on the plan to end the government shutdown and avoid busting the nation’s debt limit, there were growing doubts that Congress could avoid another fiscal showdown in only 90 days.

The package to reopen the government runs only through mid-January, and lawmakers have pinned hopes to avert a repeat performance on a new bipartisan, bicameral conference committee. The last similar panel, the so-called super committee of 2011, deadlocked and adjourned in disagreement.

The new panel, to be led by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., will begin its talks amid a poisonous and partisan atmosphere after the first government shutdown in 17 years.

If the policy gulf between the two parties was not challenging enough, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are questioning whether anyone -- even Ryan, the most respected voice on fiscal matters among House Republicans -- can truly represent a fractious conference that pushed a government shutdown against its leadership’s wishes and then rejected its own speaker’s proposal to reopen the government.

“We’re ungovernable,” Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, said Wednesday. “There is no doubt in my mind that the last three weeks have made anything achievable in the House more difficult.”

For the conference committee to succeed, both parties must trust that the other is negotiating in good faith and can sell a compromise-laced package to their respective caucuses. It’s not clear anyone currently has that ability when it comes to the restive House Republicans.

“That’s a legitimate concern based upon recent history,” said Sen. Robert Casey, a moderate Pennsylvania Democrat. “Not much we can do about that other than have them disprove it.”

Boustany agreed that the challenge will be especially acute for House GOP conferees. “Any time a conference committee convenes to try to solve some of these problems—whether it’s a farm bill, or a deficit-reduction package, or anything—if you can’t rely on the fact that the rank-and-file members have your back and will go along with it then that makes it impossible to govern,” he said. “And that’s largely where we are today, and it’s not a good place to be.”

In public on Wednesday, top lawmakers tried to sound a positive note, even as leadership aides in both parties, and on both ends of the Capitol, were skeptical.

“You have two very good negotiators who are far apart in their views, but both wish to defang the worst parts of sequestration,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said. “Hope springs eternal.”

Two main assumptions underpin those Democratic hopes. The first is that Republicans, wounded politically in the current shutdown bout, will not want to rehash another government-shutdown battle in only 90 days. The second is that GOP hawks will come to the table to discuss unwinding the automatic cuts in place due to sequestration because the defense sector will take a bigger share of cutbacks in 2014 than it did in 2013.

Both assumptions could prove false. Democrats have consistently overestimated the current, tea-party-infused Republican Party’s willingness to negotiate away sequestration because of defense spending. And plenty of House Republicans, even amid plummeting poll numbers, did not sound ready to give up the fight.

“The battle is over,” Rep. Austin Scott, a Georgia Republican elected in the 2010 wave, said on Wednesday, “but the war has just begun.”

Lawmakers are already busy defining down success for the budget conference committee. Almost no one is discussing the kind of “grand bargain”—a mixture of revenues sought by Democrats and entitlement cutbacks sought by Republicans—that has proved elusive between President Obama and congressional Republicans for almost three years.

House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday that “raising taxes is not a viable option,” while Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi ruled out any changes to Medicare and Social Security without fresh revenues. “Why should granny pay the price when we won’t even touch one hair on the head of the wealthy in the country?” she said on MSBNC.

Instead, discussions for the conference committee are around simply keeping the government open through September 2014, the rest of the current fiscal year. Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., called that a “reasonable expectation.”

“I would acknowledge that the insiders here probably have low expectations,” he said, “so let’s exceed it.”

Ben Terris contributed to this article.

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Senate Republicans Float Plan to Open Government, Lift Debt Limit

Shane Goldmacher and Michael Catalini, National Journal — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 17:02:00 -0400

Senate Republicans emerged from a more than 90-minute meeting with President Obama on Friday more bullish than they have been in recent days on the chances to end the government shutdown, now in its eleventh day, and avoid breaching the nation's debt limit next week.

In the meeting, lawmakers said that Sen. Susan Collins, the moderate Republican from Maine, presented to Obama a plan that would lift the debt limit until the end of January and keep the government operating for six months. Lawmakers would then use that time to craft a broader fiscal agreement.

"He seems open to some of the suggestions that I made," Collins said.

Her package, as presented, would also include the rolling back of a tax on medical devices that helps fund the president's health care law. Obama did not embrace the package but numerous Republicans, including Collins, said the conversation was "constructive."

Other Republican senators have suggested different lengths of time for both the debt limit and government operations, but they broadly agreed that talks were on track toward a solution, perhaps for the first time since the crisis began.

"I think we're on a pretty good course right now – I do," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., after the meeting.

Broadly speaking, multiple Republicans said they were encouraged the negotiations had shifted from dismantling the health care law to addressing fiscal matters.

"He feels very strongly about the Affordable Care Act," said Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb, "and he's not going to give on that."

Instead, Republicans hope to use the short-term debt-limit increase to negotiate a broader package of changes to entitlement programs.

Traps remain. Collins noted that Obama – who has declared definitively that he refuses to negotiate over reopening the government and lifting the debt limit – seemed reticent to package those items with anything else.

"It seems to be one of timing for him," Collins said. "The problem is if you don't put it all together in one plan I don't know that we will be able to get sufficient support to reopen government and to extend the debt limit. That's why I think it's better to combine them in one plan."

Not all Republicans were encouraged. "I'm not sure that it had any major material effect one way or the other," said Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa.

And Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, was hardly positive. In a prepared statement, he said "what could have been a productive conversation was instead another predictable lecture from the president that did not lay out a new path forward."

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In Congress, It's the Fresher Faces Pushing for Vote on Syria Strike

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 09:28:18 -0400

The push for a congressional vote ahead of any military strike in Syria is being spearheaded largely by lawmakers who were not in Congress during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

As of Wednesday, Republican Rep. Scott Rigell had collected the signatures of 140 House members demanding that President Obama call Congress back into session to vote before launching an offensive in Syria. And roughly three-quarters of the signers, including Rigell himself, a former Marine elected in 2010 who represents the military-heavy area around Norfolk, Va., came to Congress after the Iraq war had begun. More still had arrived after the Iraq war resolution passed in late 2002.

The same is also true in the Senate, where first-term senators have been among the loudest voices pushing for explicit congressional authorization.

Much of the Congress has turned over since the early 2003 invasion of Iraq, with three wave elections in 2006, 2008, and 2010 sweeping away lawmakers and redistricting eliminating the seats of still others in 2012.

Only 32 current senators served in 2002 during the fall vote on the Iraq war resolution and only 38 were there when American troops launched the invasion in the spring of 2003. In the House, roughly 40 percent of current members -- 172 of them -- were sworn in at the time of the 2003 invasion.

That means that, for many in the current Congress, this is the first time they've experienced the drumbeats of war, outside of the strikes that Obama authorized against Libya earlier in his presidency. And instead of marching in line, the fresh faces are among those most loudly demanding a public debate.

"The U.S. should not take military action without congressional authorization," Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said this week.

"When and if President Obama makes a decision on Syria, he must immediately call a special session of Congress and persuade the American people that what he proposes is critical to the defense of our nation," Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, added.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Thursday on CNN's New Day that "getting congressional approval is in my view constitutionally required. "

Kaine, Murphy, and Cruz are all Senate freshmen.

When Obama was running for president, he embraced the power of Congress to authorize military strikes, telling The Boston Globe, "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

On Thursday, Obama called House Speaker John Boehner to brief him about the developments in Syria, and his top aides prepared to brief congressional leaders on relevant committees in the evening.

It is not clear what is causing the divide between the old guard of Congress and the new, but it is pronounced. Members who were not in Congress pre-Iraq are signing on to Rigell's letter at a faster clip.

For instance, the current chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, elected in 2004, has signed the letter calling for congressional input. In contrast, his predecessor as chairman, GOP Rep. Pete King of New York, elected in 1992, has said, "I believe the president can take this action without authorization from the Congress."

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Democrats: New Documents Definitively Show 'Progressive' Groups Targeted Too

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 17:24:43 -0400

The document drip in the Internal Revenue Service probe continued on Tuesday, with top congressional Democrats releasing new information that they said definitively shows the tax agency applied heightened scrutiny to both progressive and conservative groups.

Democrats and Republicans have engaged in a series of strategic leaks since the probe of the IRS began months ago.

On Tuesday, newly released internal minutes from 2010 show that "progressive" was listed alongside "tea parties" as criteria that "should be flagged for review."

In a letter to congressional Democrats, the IRS said that other, previously undisclosed, search terms used included "ACORN successors" and "Emerge" (there is a national progressive group, Emerge America). The auditor who set off the scandal has said that tax authorities had singled out tea-party groups for extra scrutiny.

"This new information should put a nail in the coffin of the Republican claims that the IRS's actions were politically motivated or were targeted at only one side of the political spectrum," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The chairman of the panel, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, is unlikely to be deterred in his probe, however. Earlier this month, Issa said he was expanding his inquiry to look into possible improper coordinate between the tax agency and the Federal Election Commission.

"How many times have Congressional Democrats now tried to declare the IRS targeting investigation over? " said Issa spokesman Frederick Hill. He said there was "no comparison" between the agency's treatment of Emerge and tea party groups. "The fact that Emerge was initially approved for tax exempt status, but had it revoked after its improper behavior came to light, underscores how much more stringent the IRS was with Tea Party applicants."

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Push for a Government Shutdown Over Obamacare Falls on Hard Times

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 10:08:28 -0400

The GOP drive to defund Obamacare is leaking oil.

From the leaders of the GOP establishment to usual tea-party allies, a growing number of Republicans are splitting with movement conservatives who are pushing to shut down the federal government if funding is not cut off for President Obama's health care law at the end of September.

The growing concern is that the tea-party activists and a handful of senators, led by the troika of Mike Lee, R-Utah, Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., are marching into battle without a plan for victory short of Obama reversing himself on his signature domestic achievement—an almost unimaginable outcome.

"Next to impossible," said one tea-party favorite, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., last week.

Even Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has signed onto the defunding push, questioned whether it would actually work. "I may not be able to guarantee victory," Paul told Sean Hannity last week on Fox News.

The infighting has left Republicans battling each other instead of the Democrats over internal political tactics heading into the next fiscal fight.

"I think it's the dumbest idea I've ever heard of," Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina said late last month. "Listen, as long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act is going to be law."

Conservative groups accuse the GOP establishment of adopting a defeatist attitude. "You can't win if you don't fight, and the Republican Party—and the leadership in the party—has done nothing but cave, cave, and cave," said Matt Hoskins, executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, a tea-party-aligned group that supports the defunding push.

Hoskins pointed particular blame at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has not joined in the defunding push or even taken a public position. McConnell is up for reelection in 2014 and faces a new tea-party challenger, Matt Bevin. In a fundraising e-mail to supporters Friday with the subject line "McConnell Surrenders to Reid on Obamacare," the Senate Conservatives Fund said it was raising money for a statewide campaign to make McConnell "feel the heat."

"This issue is a major test for Mitch McConnell and he has failed conservatives time and time again," Hoskins said in an interview.

In the Senate, Lee, Cruz, and Rubio are trying to buttonhole colleagues to pledge to oppose keeping the government running past Sept. 30 unless funding for the health care law is cut off. Lee has repeatedly called it the "last best chance" to stop the health care law.

But so far they have the signatures of only 13 senators. "The only place that this effort is controversial is inside the Beltway," said Brian Phillips, a Lee spokesman. A total of 41 Republican senators would have to vow to block a government funding measure to guarantee success in the Senate.

"Yeah, OK, it doesn't look like we're going to get to 41 but there is a whole lot of time," Phillips said. "We're in the ring. We've got a full 12 rounds to go and we get to punch back."

With momentum stalled in Washington, proponents of "defund or shutdown" know they must rally the base during the current August recess and are ramping up pressure. "We need to activate another grassroots army," Cruz said in a taped message he released earlier this month. Heritage Action, the activist arm of the Heritage Foundation, has organized a nine-city "Defund Obamacare" town-hall tour, beginning Monday in Fayetteville, Ark.

"This has always been a strategy relying on people going home in August and listening to constituents," said Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action.

The activists claim they have the momentum, but so far, the Republican leadership in Washington isn't feeling the pressure. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor reached out to the conservative National Review last week to proclaim that "no one is advocating a government shutdown."

"To get 60 votes in the Senate, you need at least 14 Democrats to join Republicans and pass a [measure] that defunds Obamacare," Cantor said. "Right now, I am not aware of a single Democrat in the Senate who would join us. If and when defunding has 60 votes in the Senate, we will absolutely deliver more than 218 votes in the House."

Beyond the town halls, Heritage Action recently released polling to try to convince GOP leaders that they could win a defunding fight in the court of public opinion. The Heritage survey, done in 10 competitive House districts, showed nearly 60 percent support for shutting down the government to slow the health care law. The poll question, however, didn't use the word "shutdown" but instead asked about "a temporary slowdown in nonessential federal government operations." A plurality of voters said they'd place most of the blame on congressional Republicans, not Obama, if the government shut down.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., a Cantor ally, went so far as to suggest a government shutdown over the health law could cost Republicans the House majority.

The possibility of a Republican-precipitated shutdown does have Democrats licking their political chops. "This is destructive not only for the country and for health care but it's also, I think, something that would boomerang on them politically," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., a former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Logistically, the defunding push has to begin in the GOP-controlled House, where the defunding backers hope that Republicans will muscle through a measure to fund the government into October with a provision preventing any of the money from being spent on the health care law. Then, they want the GOP minority in the Senate to filibuster any spending bill that would give funds to implement the law.

"At that point," Ted Cruz told the Daily Caller, "we simply have to continue to stand together and not blink."

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The Republican Plan to Exploit the IRS Scandal (Even Without a Smoking Gun)

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 17:09:55 -0400

Republicans still haven’t found that smoking gun tying the White house to the IRS's targeting of tea-party groups. But that won't stop them from selling the scandal to voters as evidence Democrats cannot be trusted in Washington.

The public’s dislike of the IRS is so visceral and details of the scandal are so easily digestible that top Republican operatives say it fits neatly into their budding 2014 narrative against liberal big government, with or without proof of President Obama’s involvement.

“Of all the scandals, of all issues, this thing touches everyone’s life. Nobody likes the IRS,” said GOP strategist Scott Jennings, a former top adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “It will have staying power, and it will be used—and it should be—in political campaigns.”

The House GOP leadership sent rank-and-file lawmakers home for the July Fourth holiday with a packet full of scandal-related talking points about how the tax agency is symptomatic of “an out-of-control, irresponsible government.” It includes a potential Facebook flyer for lawmakers to post that reads: “Target Conservatives by Day – Party & Dance by Night! #IRS”

The National Republican Congressional Committee, meanwhile, is preparing a paid media campaign in August to link the IRS and its troubles to the rollout of Obamacare. It will be timed for the next time lawmakers are back in their districts.

“The scandal has legs,” said NRCC Communications Director Andrea Bozek. And with multiple investigations ongoing in the Congress, it has the “potential to make more news,” she said, and put more “smiles on Republican operatives’ faces.”

The party has pushed to broaden the scope of its attacks on the IRS to include not just the improper targeting of conservatives but its lavish conferences, a costly Star Trek spoof video produced on the public’s dime, and the tax agency’s role in implementing the new health care law. The goal: Undermine trust in government, especially one run by the Democrats.

And what better agency to flog than the IRS, “this thing that everybody already hates,” Jennings said.

Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who was a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said the IRS story line is already “deeply embedded in the psyche of many voters, and I think it will remain there all the way until 2014.”

The notion of tax authorities gone rogue “fits right there perfectly with a lot of the anger that voters have with Washington,” Madden said. “They looked at that and saw it as a summary indictment of what’s wrong with Washington: It’s inefficient, it’s wasting time and money, and its overly partisan.”

Democrats had hoped they had politically kneecapped some of that story line last week, with fresh revelations that progressives, along with tea-party groups, were on the controversial “be on the lookout” lists generated by the tax agency.

That fact “completely undermines the misguided political attacks congressional Republicans have sought to wage against the White House,” Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement to National Journal. “Hopefully, the new information—combined with the continued findings that no one outside of the IRS was involved and that there is no evidence of political bias—will focus Republicans’ attention on helping to fix the problems of mismanagement at the IRS and establish oversight so this does not happen again.”

Republicans note that progressives didn’t receive the same kind of scrutiny as their tea-party counterparts, even if they were on a “BOLO.” The Treasury inspector general whose audit spurred the scandal has agreed. (Levin, for his part, has called into question the IG’s credibility, saying he authored reports that were “flawed in a fundamental way.”)

“Whatever muddying of the waters they want to do is really a temporary thing” said Frederick Hill, a spokesman for Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the chair of the House oversight panel who has been the most aggressive congressional investigator.

Issa began his inquisition openly looking for evidence to tie the scandal to the top tiers of the Obama administration. “This was the targeting of the president’s political enemies effectively and lies about it during the election year, so that it wasn’t discovered until afterwards,” Issa said on CBS. On CNN, he called White House spokesman Jay Carney a “paid liar” and declared, “This is a problem that was coordinated in all likelihood right out of Washington headquarters and we're getting to proving it.”

But Republican strategists feel they’ve hit political pay dirt even without evidence the scandal reached into the White House.

“The IRS scandal has people across the ideological spectrum asking whether the government has become too powerful, too intrusive, and has gone too far,” said Brad Dayspring, communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Those questions are the staying power of the scandal, and eat at the core of the modern Democratic Party and the rationale for reelecting Democratic candidates.”

But Justin Barasky, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Republicans were misreading the landscape from their perch in the nation’s capital.

“Our view remains unchanged. Not two months ago, not now, voters don’t view Senate races through the lens of D.C.,” Barasky said. “People in Montana or people in Colorado or people in North Carolina, they’re going to vote for someone who they think is working for real solutions in the economy, fighting for jobs.”

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Nearly 1 in 5 Members of Congress Is Paid Twice

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 09:23:09 -0400

To solve the debt crisis, Americans—who are already suffering in these tough economic times—will have to make even more sacrifices, Rep. Mike Coffman told his House colleagues last year. So, leaning on his military service, the 58-year-old Colorado Republican argued that members of Congress should take the first step and abolish their congressional pensions. “If there’s one thing I learned in both the United States Army and the Marine Corps about leadership, it was leading by example,” Coffman lectured them, pointing to his chest at a committee hearing. “Never ask anyone to do anything that you yourself would not be willing to do.”

What Coffman left unsaid that day in a speech about his bill’s “symbolic” importance was that he was collecting a $55,547 state-government pension in addition to his congressional paycheck. Having spent two decades as an elected official in Colorado, he has received retirement benefits since 2009, the year he arrived in Congress.

Coffman is not alone. About 90 members from both chambers collected a government pension atop their taxpayer-financed $174,000 salary in 2012, National Journal found in an examination of recent financial records. Including a dozen newly elected freshmen who reported government pensions last year, the number now stands above 100. That’s nearly one-fifth of Congress. One lawmaker, freshman Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, received $253,323 from her government pension last year—a sum that, combined with her congressional salary, will make her better paid than President Obama this year.

Congressional pensioners span the ideological spectrum, from tea-party conservatives who rail against government waste to unabashed liberals. They are among the richest members (Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., with a net worth of at least $42.8 million in 2011) and the poorest (Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., who reported between $15,000 and $50,000 in the bank and at least $600,000 in mortgage and loan debts). Overall, Democrats draw government pensions more often than Republicans—by a ratio of 2-to-1. Some lawmakers draw on multiple public retirement packages, including the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, John Cornyn of Texas, who collected $65,000 from three different pensions in 2012.

All told, current members of Congress pocketed more than $3.6 million in public retirement benefits in 2012, the investigation found. The actual figure is almost certainly even higher because disclosure is uneven. Some lawmakers reported retirement earnings in ranges; others listed pensions but no amounts at all. This analysis, which included historical data from the Center for Responsive Politics, also does not include most military retirements, because lawmakers are not required to report them (although those who voluntarily did so were included). Members who served last year but are gone now were not included; freshmen who reported collecting pensions as candidates in 2012, such as Beatty, were included.

The practice of piling a pension atop a paycheck is legal, if unsavory to many. Taxpayer groups and some conservatives have condemned the practice as “double-dipping”; they say elected officials shouldn’t simultaneously draw a public pension while cashing a government paycheck, because taxpayers ultimately foot at least part of the bill for both. “You’re paying them twice,” says Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.Fixed pensions are a fading memory for most American workers, who are still smarting from losses to their 401(k)s during the credit crisis—even if those accounts have since recovered. The fact that federal lawmakers can draw large retirement payments atop generous taxpayer-funded salaries only helps fuel the widespread sense that the ruling class in Washington puts its own interests first.

UNCOMMON RICHES

Many states and municipalities forbid the practice of retiring and then taking a full-time job within the same governmental system. But those rules don’t apply to members of Congress when they are drawing a federal paycheck and, typically, a state or local pension. “It’s a hard nut to crack as far as addressing it, because it’s different jurisdictions,” Ellis says. And federal lawmakers who have served before on the state level can garner gold-plated retirement benefits, because state legislators often write their own generous rules to allow earlier retirement or fatter pensions.

Take Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, 57, who has been collecting her Louisiana pension since late 1997, the year she joined the Senate. She was only 41. (Louisiana voters had passed a constitutional amendment to ban pensions for new state legislators in 1996, the year before. But Landrieu, who had spent eight years as a legislator, could withdraw hers because she was grandfathered in.) The average Louisiana state worker hired in recent years, by contrast, can’t retire with a full pension until age 60. Landrieu lists her annual pension payout as between $15,000 and $50,000. “They’re two different levels of government, and it’s completely permissible,” says Landrieu, who served two terms as state treasurer after her time as a state legislator. “I have every intention of maintaining it and continuing.”

Like Landrieu, most lawmakers collecting public pensions say they deserve the payout because they put in the time and contributed to their retirement from their own paychecks. “I’m just saying I worked hard 33 years,” says Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., a former detective who helped hunt down the Green River serial killer and retired as King County sheriff. He earned a $109,101 pension in 2012—fourth highest in Congress. “Anyone who looks at a 33-year career and watches someone retire and says they don’t deserve that retirement, I would vigorously disagree with that.”

Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 House Democrat, accepted a $55,000 pension last year. “I spent over 30 years working in state government and receive a pension just as all other qualified state retirees do,” he said in a statement. Clyburn, the state’s former human-affairs commissioner, has collected roughly $1 million in pension benefits since joining Congress in 1993.

Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union, says such packages can erode public trust in an institution where it’s already in short supply. “Retirement packages remain a concern for taxpayers because they naturally invite comparison to their own situations,” he says. And there aren’t many Americans earning a six-figure paycheck and a five- or six-figure pension.

Or, in Beatty’s case, a quarter-million-dollar pension. Beatty spent more than eight years in the Ohio Statehouse, including a stint as Democratic leader, before landing a job in 2008 as the senior vice president of outreach and engagement at Ohio State University. It was a plum post that came with a $320,000 salary, plus benefits, that vastly inflated her pension. At the time, Ohio used the three highest years of salary to calculate pension payouts; Beatty was in the university job for three years and 20 days. Beatty’s spokesman, Greg Beswick, says she began collecting the money last year, when she was a candidate.

Among Republicans, the biggest retirement package belongs to Rep. Ted Poe of Texas, who has cashed more than $300,000 in combined pay and pensions in each of the last five years. Poe is only 64. He was a Texas prosecutor and a judge, so he has received two pensions since his arrival in Congress in 2005. They were worth $139,382 in 2011. (An “accounting error” that provided him only 11 months of payments from one pension dropped the total to $126,743 last year, according to Poe spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes.) “Under the law of the State of Texas he has earned a pension for his public service to both the county and the state,” Hynes said in an e-mail. In his first eight years in Congress, Poe earned more than $1 million in retirement pay.

Some double-dippers occupy congressional leadership posts. Besides Cornyn and his three pensions, Sen. Roy Blunt, the Republican Conference vice chairman, collected $36,721 in retirement benefits last year from his previous service in Missouri. Records show that Blunt, 63, has collected a pension since 2005. In the House leadership, besides Clyburn, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat, received $20,481 from a pension last year. He has been collecting since 1999 from his dozen years in the Maryland Legislature.

Although the House Ethics Committee’s guidelines say “you must disclose” pension payments as earned income, congressional disclosure is inconsistent. Some lawmakers, such as Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Fla., list their pensions but not how much—or even if—they withdrew. (Brown’s office did not return calls for clarification.) Others leave their pensions off their forms entirely for years at a time. In a series of amended filings last year, for instance, Cornyn reported that he’d been receiving one of his three pensions as far back as 2006. During his failed Senate campaign, former Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., had to update a decade of disclosures to reflect a state pension he’d previously hidden from public view. He called it an “unintentional oversight.”

NEED VS. WANT

Those collecting pensions range from some of the poorest in Congress to Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., whom the Center for Responsive Politics ranked as the third-wealthiest senator in 2011. (His net worth was between $79.6 million and $120.8 million.)

That didn’t prevent Blumenthal from cashing his annual $47,000 state pension, even as Connecticut’s depleted pension fund has struggled. A 2012 study by the Pew Center on the States said the state had barely half the money it needed to pay its long-term retirement obligations, the third-worst ratio in the nation.

Blumenthal bristles when asked about whether his personal wealth and congressional salary allow him to forgo the pension. “The benefits I’m receiving from the state were earned over more than two decades of public service, and they’re two separate entities, two separate governments, and … they’re being paid according to law,” he says. “I’m not going to comment as to any aspect of my financial disclosure. I would just say, I seek to give back through public service and other ways such as the charitable contributions that my wife and I make.”

Feinstein is the second-wealthiest lawmaker to draw a pension, according to CRP’s rankings, which estimate the California Democrat’s net worth at between $42.8 million and $98.7 million. Her pension, worth $54,925 in 2012, is from her time as mayor of San Francisco. She has collected about $850,000 in retirement benefits since she joined the Senate two decades ago. Feinstein declined to comment for this story.

Feinstein is hardly the longest-tenured congressional pensioner. That honor falls to 90-year-old Rep. Ralph Hall, the oldest member of the House, who spent a decade in the Texas Legislature before taking a seat in Congress in 1981. The Republican (who was a Democrat until 2004) has been collecting a Texas state pension ever since. In those 32 years he earned some $1.3 million in retirement benefits. (Many years in the 1980s he didn’t list specific amounts; this analysis presumes his pension remained flat during those years.) His 2012 pension was $65,748. “I didn’t write the law,” Hall said in a statement. “I complied with the law, and I contributed as was allowed under the law during my official service in Texas.”

Not every member of Congress who is eligible for a pension chooses to collect. Rep. Chris Gibson, R-N.Y., a retired Army colonel who won his seat in 2010, says he writes a check every month for his full military pension, minus taxes owed, to the U.S. Treasury. It was a decision he came to jointly with his wife. “The salary that we get as a congressman is very generous,” Gibson says. “We did not want to double-dip on the taxpayers in a time of fiscal challenge.”

The Gibsons aren’t rich by congressional standards. They hold no stocks, bonds, or mutual funds—only a single bank account with between $100,000 and $250,000. It earned less than $1,000 in interest last year. Still, he declined to judge his better-off colleagues who are collecting twice. “It’s a personal decision people have to make,” he says.

Rep. William Keating of Massachusetts, who pulled $110,743 from his pension in 2012—second-largest of any Democrat—donates all of it, after taxes, to a nonprofit that assists child-abuse victims. “The work done by the caring professionals there is priceless,” Keating, a former legislator and district attorney, said in a statement.

SPECIAL PRIVILEGES

Many states offer especially sweet pension packages for their elected officials.

Take the curious case of Rep. Trey Gowdy. The conservative Republican served for a decade as a district attorney in South Carolina, where the retirement system requires 24 years of service to qualify for a pension. But a controversial perk allows solicitors and judges to purchase extra years of service without actually working them. The practice, called “airtime,” lets employees draw bigger pensions if they fork over a lump sum on the front end.

It appears Gowdy exercised this option. (His office refused multiple requests to clarify his activity.) His financial records report a loan in 2009 of between $250,000 and $500,000 for “purchase of SC solicitors and judges retirement.” So, in 2011, the year after he rode the tea-party wave into Congress promising to slash government spending, he reported $88,432 in pension income—one of the 10 largest in Congress. He was 46.

Last year, Gowdy reported a far smaller pension. His spokesman, Nicholas Spencer, says Gowdy listed the package in a different section of the report “because pensions are not reportable as outside earned income,” citing advice from “Ethics counsel.” The House Ethics panel’s published guidelines, however, say pensions should be reported as income.

In Maine, special rules allow former governors to collect a pension no matter how many total years of state service they’ve accrued. That’s how Angus King, who served two terms as governor and now is the state’s independent U.S. senator, collected a $30,488 pension last year. “It’s under the law, and it has no relationship to whatever I do after,” King says. As for the idea of forgoing it because of his $174,000 Senate salary, he says, “I don’t quite see the argument.”

In Pennsylvania, former state legislators can start collecting their pensions a decade earlier than most other state workers. That’s how Republican Rep. Charlie Dent started collecting his $16,000 pension in 2010, the year he turned 50. And how Rep. Allyson Schwartz, a Democrat, garnered her legislative pension beginning in 2005, the year she was sworn into Congress. She was 56 at the time. Schwartz is currently running for governor and would decline her $18,340 pension if elected, her spokesman Greg Valada says.

In 2001, Pennsylvania state legislators boosted their own pensions by 50 percent. The same state law lifted teacher and rank-and-file state worker pensions by only half that. Both Dent and Schwartz were among those who voted against the Pennsylvania pension bump. But Republican Rep. Jim Gerlach, 58, voted for it, and now he’s a beneficiary. He has collected a legislative pension since 2003. It was worth $15,400 last year and became the subject of attack ads by his Democratic opponent. He e-mailed a statement: “Again, this is information that has been shared with my constituents countless times and has been fully disclosed every year.” Gerlach noted that he paid into the system for 12 years.

“It’s really unconscionable—the fact that they’re collecting a pension while drawing a salary for service at the federal level,” says Leo Knepper, executive director of Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania, a conservative group that fashions itself as a state version of the Club for Growth. “Our pension system is $48 billion underfunded. Honestly, I don’t know how they can look voters in the eye.”

Knepper reserved his biggest rage for Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., who served in the Statehouse for 24 years, and brought home $90,867 in retirement benefits last year. A member of the conservative Republican Study Committee, Pitts has received $1.4 million from his pension since he joined Congress in 1997. His office says his pension tops $90,000 annually because he combined his service in the military and as a teacher. Knepper says he’s galled that Pitts “really represents himself as a conservative” to voters while “absolutely double-dipping.”

Not all tea-party activists are in agreement. Sal Russo, chief strategist for the Tea Party Express, one of the nation’s most active groups, doesn’t begrudge federal lawmakers who make use of the current pension system. “An employee is going to take advantage of any benefits they’re provided—it’s just human nature,” Russo says. Instead, conservatives should focus on enacting broader change, he says. “The person who gets the benefit didn’t create the system.”

BIG GOVERNMENT BENEFITS

Reforming that system, Coffman says, is the point of his legislation to eliminate congressional pensions. “The part that I oppose is having a defined-benefit retirement plan for members of Congress—and have argued against a defined-benefit program when I was at the state level,” he tells National Journal.

But isn’t he taking part in a defined-benefit program?

“I am,” he replies. “I am.”

Coffman’s $55,547 retirement benefit is a pittance in the scheme of the state’s pension-fund finances, but, as he argued when he presented his pension-axing bill in committee, symbolism matters. Colorado’s pension fund has been under duress in recent years. State workers there must now contribute more, work longer, and receive less after retirement under a 2010 law, says Katie Kaufmanis, a spokeswoman for Colorado’s retirement system.

A former state treasurer who had a seat on Colorado’s pension board, Coffman had previously taken on the most extreme cases of “double-dipping” at the state level, in which state or school employees would retire, collect a pension, and then be rehired by the exact same employer. “The state’s pension fund is bleeding red, and the little things like this are aggravating it,” Coffman told the Colorado Springs Business Journal in 2004. “Maybe we should suspend pensions [when people go] back to work,” he added.

Coffman’s situation isn’t exactly the same: He’s collecting state benefits and a federal paycheck, not double-dipping with the same employer. (“I’m a military retiree too,” Coffman notes. He resigned his state treasurer post in 2005 to rejoin the Marines and serve in Iraq.) Still, he stumbles in defending his decision to draw both a paycheck and a state pension. “I fought for reform when I was in state, and I’m fighting to reform the system now,” he says. “At states, they ought to end the defined-benefit portion programs.… I’m certainly a beneficiary of it, but at the state level that’s unsustainable, too, and that’s going to have to change.”

Other Republicans, too, have introduced legislation to limit congressional pensions while collecting a public retirement benefit. Rep. Richard Nugent, R-Fla., the former Hernando County sheriff, earned $72,339 from his pension last year; he introduced legislation in 2011 and 2013 to let House members opt out of their congressional pension (it’s currently mandatory) and titled it the Congress Is Not a Career Act. Nugent presented his measure to the same committee on the same day as Coffman made his proposal.

Nugent says he introduced the bill so he could decline a congressional retirement because “as you point out, I already have a pension.” He further saves taxpayers money by declining federal health insurance coverage, he says. But he objects to the suggestion that he could or should bypass taking his local-government pension while in Congress. “Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t I?” he asks. “After 38 years in law enforcement, I worked hard, stuck it out, and I retired, which is kind of what I signed up for.”

Nugent explains that while cops deserve a pension, members of Congress may not. So what about all his colleagues pulling in pensions for state legislative service? “I don’t begrudge anyone. That’s a personal choice on their part,” Nugent says, adding, “That’s between them and their constituents.”

Conservative solutions for America’s finances, in turns out, don’t always correlate with conservative solutions to lawmakers’ personal finances. Cornyn, the triple-pension-collecting senator from Texas, has regularly railed against government waste. Rep. Bill Posey, a Florida Republican, touts on his official website his votes to reform and cut congressional pensions. He makes no mention of his $14,495 state pension. And Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican and a tea-party-style conservative long before the term existed, has railed against a bloated public sector—and the looming pension crisis in his home state—for years. Yet when he arrived in Congress in 2009, he began collecting two taxpayer-supported state pensions, worth $9,579 in 2012. Why didn’t he pass on them? “You’d have to take up that question with Mrs. McClintock,” he says.

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How Many Times Can You Retire From Government?

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:04:24 -0400

Texas Republican John Cornyn supplemented his Senate salary with a trio of public pensions last year from his days as a Texas judge and elected official—a practice some fiscal watchdog groups have attacked as “double dipping.”

Cornyn, who is the minority whip and the No. 2 ranking Republican in the Senate, reported collecting $65,383 in public retirement benefits in 2012 in addition to his $174,000 salary as a U.S. senator.

Cornyn’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Elected to the Senate in 2002, Cornyn is a former district judge, Texas Supreme Court justice, and state attorney general. In 2012, he collected pensions from three separate state retirement programs.

The biggest of Cornyn’s pensions—$48,807— is from the Judicial Retirement System of Texas. He served on the state Supreme Court from 1991 to 1997.

He reported another $10,132 in retirement benefits last year from the Employees Retirement System of Texas—the pension fund for state elected officials and workers. Cornyn served as Texas attorney general from 1999 to 2002.

In a series of financial-disclosure amendments that he began filing last July, Cornyn disclosed that he had actually been collecting that $10,132 annual pension as far back as 2006. He had not listed it on his original disclosure reports from 2006 to 2010.

Cornyn also reported a $6,444 retirement distribution from the Texas County and District Retirement System. He was a state district judge from 1985 to 1989, according to his official bio, when the governor appointed him presiding judge for the Fourth Administrative Judicial Region of Texas, where he oversaw judicial administration for a 22-county region.

Cornyn, 61, is not the first or only prominent Texas Republican to draw both a public pension and a public salary. In December 2011, it was revealed that Texas Gov. Rick Perry was supplementing his $150,000 governor’s salary with a state pension of more than $92,000.

“I think it would be rather foolish to not access what you’ve earned,” Perry said in the midst of the 2012 presidential primary.

Cornyn, unlike Perry, is drawing his pensions and salary from different levels of government. His salary is supported by the federal government, while his pensions come from state and local government.

Cornyn is up for reelection in 2014.

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Lawmakers Continue to Probe IRS

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 08:45:48 -0400

Congress returns from a weeklong recess with inquiries into the Internal Revenue Service still atop its agenda, as three more hearings have been set and a lawsuit has been filed in federal court.

On Monday, President Obama’s new pick to run the embattled tax agency, Danny Werfel, will make his first appearance since taking over the IRS at a House Appropriations subcommittee. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George, whose audit set off the scandal, will also appear.

On Tuesday, the House Ways and Means Committee will hear from conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status and were targeted for extra scrutiny by IRS officials in recent years. Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., says the hearing will give “a voice to those Americans who wound up under the IRS’s political microscope on the basis of their beliefs.”

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., will also hold a hearing Thursday that examines the IRS’s spending on conferences, based on a report coming from George.

“The IRS is an agency in crisis,” Issa said in a statement. “The American people expect that their tax dollars will be used responsibly and not for financing lavish hotel suites and entertainment for government employees.”

Meanwhile, the IRS will continue to scramble to answer numerous congressional demands for information. Both the Ways and Means panel and the Senate Finance Committee have demanded documents and memos that lawmakers hope will shed light on how the targeting began, who approved it, and how it was allowed to continue for so long.

But lawmakers aren’t waiting for the IRS documents to get answers. Behind the scenes, investigators from both the Ways and Means and Oversight and Government Reform Committees are working in tandem to conduct interviews with at least four IRS tax officials, according to aides familiar with the investigation. Issa has said he conducted one such interview with Holly Paz, who works at the tax-exempt division.

The controversy has also spilled into federal court. The American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative organization, filed suit against the IRS and the Obama administration last week on behalf of 25 groups, alleging they were unfairly targeted and seeking monetary damages.

“We are now in the litigation phase,” said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel to the ACLJ.

Sekulow said the list of those suing is likely to grow by “up to another dozen” this week. At least some of Sekulow’s clients will be among those testifying at the Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday about the hardships the IRS imposed upon them.

Republicans are keen to keep the IRS scandal in the spotlight, even if they have yet to tie the targeting directly to the White House.

In a memo to GOP lawmakers Friday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said the chamber’s committees held more than 100 oversight hearings in May and will continue the work—which he called “a vitally important check and balance to the Obama administration”—over the coming months.

“We will continue our work to determine who directed IRS employees to target conservative groups, why it was done, and who knew about it,” Cantor wrote. “We will follow the facts and continue in our efforts to uncover the truth behind the attacks in Benghazi. We will explore DOJ’s actions in seizing phone records and e-mails of the news media. We will also continue our oversight of the implementation of Obamacare and the administration’s energy policy.”

Polling shows that of the trio of potential scandals that drew attention in May—the IRS, Benghazi, and the targeting of journalists by the Justice Department—the tax-agency scandal has most captured the public’s interest. A Quinnipiac poll last week showed that 44 percent of voters believe it is the most significant of the three, 20 percentage points ahead of the next-closest issue.

This article appears in the June 3, 2013, edition of National Journal Daily as Lawmakers Will Continue to Probe IRS.

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Meet the Man Who Set Off the IRS Firestorm

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:28:47 -0400

J. Russell George paused for just a moment before he took his seat at the witness table. He wanted to take it all in. The Treasury inspector general whose audit of the IRS had set off a national firestorm had been in this very room before—three decades earlier.

That was back when George was a precocious teenager who had worked his way onto the staff of then-Sen. Bob Dole, the powerful Republican chairman of the vaunted Finance Committee. Then, he’d sorted mail and made carbon copies. Now, he was about to testify before the same panel, to present the findings of an explosive audit that found wayward tax agents who had targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny.

“I could never have dreamed [about this] as a 17, 18-year-old,” George said in a wide-ranging interview with National Journal, one of his first since the audit. “It’s kind of moving for me in that regard.”

Two heads have already rolled in the scandal. One of them, the outgoing acting commissioner of the IRS, Steven Miller, was seated next to George. Pictures of the two of them, their right hands raised, taking the oath, ran in papers across the nation after the scandal’s first congressional hearing last week.

All the attention was new, but George has operated in these halls of power his entire career. He worked for Dole, and then in President George H.W. Bush’s White House. In between, he attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1988 alongside a young Michelle Obama (then Michelle Robinson).

They weren’t in the same section—the academic groupings that Harvard uses to divide its students—but George said they traveled in some of the same social circles, including the Black Law Students Association.

“I think he actually dated Michelle at one point,” said former Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, who worked with George when he was staff director for a House oversight subcommittee in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“That is overstating it,” George said. But the two students did socialize in group settings. “Michelle was a lovely person, and down to earth,” he said. “…The BLSA went out for pizza; we would go out together.”

He paused, for a beat. “Don’t get me in trouble,” George said.

George, 49, has been a lot better at finding success than trouble throughout his career. He grew up in New York City, where his father worked for the transit authority and his mother was a secretary. At the age of 10, he was publishing a neighborhood paper, according to a congressional good-bye speech his old boss, former Rep. Steve Horn, R-Calif., gave in 2002.

From an early age, George was fascinated by celebrities. He’d line up outside the stage door of the biggest shows on Broadway to collect stars’ autographs, “Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton …” he said, fondly, “I could go on and on.”

He moved to Washington to study at Howard University, the historically black college, but his fascination—he calls it a “hobby”—with fame followed. And in Washington, the famous were on Capitol Hill. So he decamped to the corridors outside the Senate clutching a piece of cardboard, “with my goal to get every member of the U.S. Senate to sign a single placard,” he said.

That’s where he met Bob Dole. “Who are you missing?” Dole asked George, after scribbling his name. Dole then “went into the Senate chamber and started bringing out, one by one, all these great lions of the Senate,” George recalled. Lions like Ted Kennedy, who would add his name to the signatures of Jesse Helms and Barry Goldwater.

George called Dole the next day to ask for a job. Dole’s staffer asked what party he was with. “I’m 17,” George said. “I’m not registered as anything.” They said he could come in once a week, unpaid. Soon enough, though, he had a full-time job.

Two of the senators whom George would have stalked in the halls in the early 1980s (although they likely weren’t high on his star list then) were among his inquisitors on Tuesday: Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the panel’s top Republican.

George, a recent board member of Washington’s tony University Club who can now count himself among the political celebrities he once pursued, can’t remember if he got their signatures. The placard is “at my parent’s house in New York,” he said, likely accumulating dust. “I don’t think I got all 100, because some of them snuck out the side door.”

After Harvard Law, George had a brief stint as a New York prosecutor, before returning to Washington to work for President George H.W. Bush, as a lawyer in the budget office, then as associate director for policy in the Office of National Service. The Clinton era ushered him back to New York, into private practice.

In 1995, with Republicans in control of the House and Speaker Newt Gingrich ascendant, George returned to Washington as chief counsel of a House oversight subcommittee, where he stayed until 2002. There, he won plaudits for his impartiality from both sides of the aisle.

“Russell was a straight-shooter,” said Phil Barnett, then chief counsel to Rep. Henry Waxman of California, who was the top Democrat on the House oversight panel at the time.

“You can take what he does from an objectivity point of view to the bank,” said Davis, the former GOP House member. He said George has the perfect temperament for the current IRS maelstrom. “You couldn’t ask for a more fair umpire in this,” Davis said, “He’s not a fiery Republican type, but obviously he’s not beholden to the administration.”

The second President Bush tapped George for an inspector general role in 2002 (Dole administered the oath to George) and then his current post in 2004. At his confirmation hearing, then-Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., introduced George as a “good friend.” “Credibility, integrity, and competence, those are among the very first words that come to mind,” he said.

With his rounded features, baritone voice and thin-rimmed glasses that rest low on his nose, George has emerged from the witness table unscathed. Of course, it helps that the toughest, most outraged questions aren’t slung his way but at the IRS officials who oversaw the agency as the targeting occurred.

Also working in George’s favor: Some of his congressional questioners know him from his staffer days. George ticked off the names: Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ark., among them. Count Joe Scarbough, the host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, as among those who worked with George in the House, too.

It probably doesn’t hurt that the communications director at George’s side, Karen Kraushaar, has weathered a Washington scandal storm herself. In 2011, Kraushaar was one of the first women to be named publicly after accusing GOP then-presidential candidate Herman Cain of sexual harassment.

“Truth-telling requires strength of character," said Kraushaar, who has worked for the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration' Office since 2010.

As tax-administration inspector general, George manages a staff of nearly 800 employees charged with monitoring the IRS. He counts the audit his team produced as among his biggest achievements in nearly two decades as a federal government watchdog.

“Americans need to have trust that the agency, which has so much of their personal information—and has an ability to affect their lives in so many different ways—is operated with the highest degree of integrity,” George said.

In the last week, George has testified before three different congressional committees. That’s likely just the start. At Tuesday’s Finance hearing, he suggested that his office was undertaking a review of nonprofits—known as 501(c)(4)s—that have played in the electoral arena, an issue that Democrats have cried out to be addressed.

In the interview, George wouldn’t address that, specifically, but he said, “As a result of the work that was conducted in preparation of this audit, we have uncovered areas that need further review.”

Or, as he told senators Tuesday, “Suffice it to say, this matter is not over.”

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Top IRS Official to Invoke Fifth, Issa Issues Subpoena

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:15:00 -0400

Lois Lerner, the IRS official who headed the tax-exempt division when the targeting of tea-party groups took place, plans to invoke her Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions before Congress on Wednesday.

But Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House oversight committee where Lerner was to appear, has issued a subpoena to Lerner anyway.

The subpoena was delivered after the committee received the letter from Lerner's attorney, a committee aide said.

Her attorney, William Taylor, said in a letter obtained by National Journal, that Lerner had "not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation" but that she would decline to testify at a House hearing on Wednesday.

Taylor further asked for his client to be allowed not to show up at all. "Because Ms. Lerner is invoking her constitutional privilege, we respectfully request that you excuse her from appearing at the hearing," Taylor wrote to Issa.

Taylor had written that "requiring her to appear at the hearing merely to assert her Fifth Amendment privilege would have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her."

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Top White House Aides Informed of IRS Troubles, but Didn’t Tell Obama

Shane Goldmacher, National Journal — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:29:40 -0400

Top White House aides, including chief of staff Denis McDonough, were informed of the forthcoming report on the IRS’ targeting of tea party group but decided not to inform President Obama in advance, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Monday.

Previously, the White House had said that the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, had been told of the coming report from Treasury’s inspector general but no other aides had been mentioned.

The acknowledgement is not central to the question of whether the Obama administration knew far in advance about the misbehavior at the IRS, but rather raises questions about how the White House has managed what has emerged as the biggest crisis moment of the second term.

Democrats on Capitol Hill have quietly lamented that the White House didn’t move fast enough to condemn the actions at the tax agency. Carney defended the decision not to inform the president on Monday.

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