Capitol Briefing

By Ben Pershing
As the Senate continues its debate over health-care legislation, a grass-roots conservative group is launching a $1 million ad campaign to persuade key senators to oppose the reform measure.

Keeping Small Business Healthy, a project run by the advocacy group Institute for Liberty, will begin airing ads Wednesday targeting five Senate Democrats in four relatively conservative states -- Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Kent Conrad (N.D.) and Byron Dorgan (N.D.). The ads mark the latest salvo in the record-breaking battle of the airwaves over health-care reform, in which groups on all sides of the debate have combined to spend more than $170 million, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group.

Each ad features small-business owners from the specified state warning of the dire consequences if Democrats' health-reform proposals become law. "Raising taxes and mandates on small business will kill Nebraska jobs," says one such person in the ad targeting Nelson. The Nebraska ad also warns that "premiums will go up" and "your family might have to buy government forced insurance."

Democrats would dispute the ad's depiction of their reform plans. A Congressional Budget Office study of the Senate bill released Monday found that insurance premiums for most Americans would either stay the same or be lower if the Senate measure becomes law.

By Paul Kane
In a sign of the odd couplings created by the politics surrounding the Afghan war, President Obama received a ringing endorsement Tuesday from Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) for his proposal to send tens of thousands of additional troops to the battlefield.

Three months after shouting "you lie" as Obama delivered a health-care address to Congress, an outburst that drew a rebuke from the House, Wilson issued a statement in advance of the president's speech before cadets at West Point.

The lawmaker applauded the president for adhering to his generals' request for more troops. The praise came with a few caveats, but it's as cheerful as Wilson -- who raised more than $2 million in campaign donations after his shout at Obama -- has been of late for any action taken by the president.

Here's Wilson's full statement:

"I applaud the President's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. While this decision is long overdue, I'm pleased that the President has listened to our commanders on the ground as they aggressively pursue a multi-dimensional counter-insurgency strategy to secure Afghanistan.

"Success in Afghanistan should be we win, they lose. I hope the President will use his speech to the American people tonight to outline the roadmap to winning. The speech I'd like to hear tonight would focus on the Administration's commitment to listen to our commanders on the ground, properly define the role of Afghan National Security Forces, and recognize we face a determined enemy who plan to test our resolve.

"For the sake of our mission, American families at home, and our brave men and women in uniform, I hope the President will rally Congressional leaders behind his strategy and our troops' mission in Afghanistan."

By Paul Kane
President Obama won endorsements Tuesday from leading congressional hawks for his proposal to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, but antiwar liberals denounced the policy and vowed to fight the effort when the war-funding legislation arrives on Capitol Hill.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) voiced support for the general parameters of the emerging proposal, which Obama will formally announce Tuesday night before thousands of Army cadets at West Point. Lieberman, who supported McCain over Obama in the 2008 election, called the president's proposal the "right decision" that comes very close to matching Gen. Stanley McChrystal's initial request for 40,000 troops, which Lieberman supported.

"Over 30,000 is a significant American commitment," Lieberman said.

Support from Lieberman and Republicans is likely to be critical for the White House, given the uprising of liberal Democrats against the proposal.

Obama and congressional leaders have not decided how the increased deployments -- which will put the total number of troops at more than 100,000 on the ground in Afghanistan -- would be funded, but the leading idea was sending a supplemental war-funding request to Congress early next year. If liberals on both ends of the Capitol lived up to their current rhetoric, they would have more than enough votes to kill the war funding unless a large bloc of Republicans joined Obama in supporting the effort.

By Ben Pershing
Forty-five years after Congress first began publishing its expenditures, the House took another step into the modern age Monday by putting those numbers somewhere the public can actually find them -- the Internet.

After years of lobbying by watchdog groups and other critics, the House has finally begun posting electronic copies of its Statement of Disbursements, a detailed accounting of how every House office -- including those of members, committees and support organizations -- spends its money. The numbers include everything from staff salaries to expenses for mundane office items such as water and magazine subscriptions.

Only one volume is online so far at disbursements.house.gov, covering July 1 through Sept. 30. At close to 3,400 pages, the document is available in one massive (9.4 MB) PDF file or three smaller ones. Unwieldy as the electronic files might be, they still represent a stark change from the old (and still available) version of the disbursements, which came only in thick, expensive books full of tiny type.

The House has been publishing its disbursements since 1964, but only this past June did Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) finally order the chamber's Chief Administrative Officer to begin posting them online. In a statement issued by her office Monday, Pelosi said, "The continued publication of these statements online will expand accountability to taxpayers and the press."

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit watchdog group, said on its blog that the posting Monday showed "a proactive stance from the US House" but is "just a first step." The foundation and other groups hope eventually for the data to be released more quickly and in a format easier to search and digest than a giant PDF.

LegiStorm, a private Web site, already publishes some congressional expenditures online, allowing users to look at salary data for Hill staffers. But the site does not publish the complete Statement of Disbursements in one file, as the House now does.

The Senate is also working toward putting its expenses online, though that effort is not expected to bear fruit until 2011.

Updated 3:40 p.m.
By Lori Montgomery
The Senate's plan to overhaul the health insurance system would increase premiums in the individual market, but purchasers would get better coverage than under current law and six in 10 would see their premium payments reduced by new federal subsidies, congressional budget analysts said Monday.

The impact of the legislation would be much less dramatic on most people, who receive coverage through their jobs, according to Douglas Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Such people's premiums would be unchanged or slightly lower once insurance reforms proposed under the Senate plan were fully implemented, Elmendorf wrote in response to a request from Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.).

The letter was released hours before the Senate is expected to open debate on the $848 billion health package crafted by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). Bayh and other centrist Democrats are deeply concerned about its impact on the cost of health care for the government and for individuals, who would be required for the first time to obtain coverage starting in 2014.

The CBO report offers the first detailed analysis of those effects, which would fall most heavily on the relatively small individual market, where people who do not have access to affordable coverage from an employer purchase insurance directly from insurance companies.

By 2016, two years after the Senate reforms are to take effect, the CBO projected that premiums for 32 million people in that market would be driven as much as 30 percent higher because insurance companies would be required to offer better coverage than they do now. But that increase would be partially offset by lower costs for insurers, who would have access to a new pool of younger, healthier customers who might previously have gone without insurance.

By Paul Kane
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told a group of key congressmen Thursday that President Obama was engaged in a "thoughtful process" of deciding on his request for additional troops in the region.

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), in a telephone interview from Afghanistan, said that McChrystal declined to criticize Obama's nearly three month review of the general's request to send up to 40,000 more troops into the war-torn nation. Instead, McChrystal - whose opinion has been treated as sacrosanct by many Republicans - told the group that the U.S. forces could still achieve the mission of routing the Taliban.

"He believed that the mission was accomplishable," Price said after meeting the general and other top U.S. officials Thursday in Kabul. Some of the lawmakers pressed McChrystal on Obama's lengthy process, but the general described it as a "thoughtful process and wouldn't go any further," Price said. "I was a little surprised he didn't voice frustration with the delay."

Price is with a congressional delegation of Georgians, including Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) and Reps. John Barrow (D) and Lynn Westmoreland (R). The lawmakers also visited U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry.

The visit could serve as an early bellwether of how much support Obama can hope to receive from congressional Republicans when he makes his announcement about the next phase of the war in Afghanistan Tuesday night at West Point.

During the eight years of the Bush administration, GOP support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was nearly universal. Despite their decided minority status in the House and Senate, Republicans could be key to Obama's effort to send what could be an additional 30,000 to 35,000 more U.S. soldiers into the battlefield because of waning support among Democrats.

Price is the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 100 conservatives. No ally of the White House on any key issue so far this year, Price's support of the new effort in Afghanistan would signal that a large number of Republicans would back Obama, but the lawmaker remains undecided until he hears the specifics of the president's plan next week.

Price said he wants the president to voice full-throated support for the effort to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. "Then he'll have the full backing and support of the Republican conference," Price said.

He said it would be a "disaster" if, in sending more troops there, Obama also sent a signal that they would be coming home shortly if the mission is not successful immediately, because that would let the Taliban think they could wait out Obama and then take up the battle once the U.S. and NATO forces leave.

Price's biggest complaint has been the amount of time that Obama has taken in reaching a decision, beginning when McChrystal submitted his report on Aug. 30. He thinks that the time it has taken to reach the decision has been time that troops could be on the ground already in battle. "The president has taken more time than is necessary. Maybe that will be time well spent," Price said.

By Paul Kane
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that Democrats face "serious unrest" over President Obama's possible expansion of tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.

Pelosi, in a conference call with economists, said House Democrats were concerned about the "opportunity costs" of steering billions of dollars toward the troop increase as compared to "our ability to invest domestically with an eye to fiscal soundness." The issue of financing new troops in the region has come to a head in advance of Obama's decision, to be announced next week, as a handful of senior Democrats have proposed a "war tax" on the nation's wealthiest wage earners and some corporations to finance the war.

Pelosi deflected questions about her support for such a tax-hike proposal but noted that an expensive new war plan faces very high hurdles in her 258-member Democratic caucus, about two-thirds of whom were largely opposed to the Bush administration's 2007 "surge" of troops into Iraq and have voiced doubts about increased troop levels in Afghanistan.

"Let me say that there is serious unrest in our caucus about, can we afford this war?" Pelosi said in a Tuesday morning call, just hours before she met Obama in a closed-door meeting at the White House.

Senior Democratic aides said no decision would be made on how and when to fund the expected troop request until Obama spells out his plan. One option would a supplemental spending bill that could be considered early next year. Another would be to add the funding into the must-pass omnibus appropriation bill lawmakers are trying to pass by the end of this year to provide funding for most of the federal government for fiscal year 2010, though that would be contingent on the plan being ready soon and Obama believing he has the votes lined up for it.

Republicans pounced on the proposed tax increases, accusing leading Democrats of spending too freely on domestic issues and running up the current $1.4 trillion annual deficit. They questioned the appropriateness of raising taxes during a recession that has been hampered, in part, by a lack of consumer spending. "Our country needs real fiscal discipline, not tax hike schemes in the midst of a recession," said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Politically, raising taxes just months before the 2010 midterm elections would be a very difficult legislative task, particularly with Republicans already criticizing individual Democrats for the mounting national debt. During the health-care debate, one of Pelosi's committee chairmen initially proposed a tax on households earning at least $350,000, but Pelosi faced a rebellion, particularly from freshman and sophomore Democrats representing wealthy suburban districts that had previously been represented by Republicans. She negotiated a compromise in the House-approved legislation to only impose the tax on families earning $1 million.

But the war tax proposals from top Democrats have served as a marker for the difficulty Obama will have in securing support from Democrats for the expected troop expansion.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has suggested a tax on individuals earning more than $200,000. "We've got to find revenues, particularly in the upper brackets that have done so well.... It's important that we pay for [the new troops] if we possibly can," Levin told Albert Hunt, host of Bloomberg News' "Political Capital" TV show.

Reps. David Obey (D-Wisc.) and John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) -- the top lawmakers overseeing the Pentagon's budget -- and other top Democrats have introduced legislation that would issue a tax on almost all income earners, with those in the highest brackets facing the steepest tax hikes.

Pelosi's remarks Tuesday tried to walk the line between dozens of Democrats from moderate-to-conservative districts who would be opposed to such a plan and her closest allies in leadership. "I know that the impact on our investments at home and our fiscal soundness are an important part of his decision," she said.

By Valerie Bauman, Associated Press
ALBANY, N.Y. -- The Conservative Party candidate conceded a race in upstate New York for a U.S. House of Representatives seat for the second time Tuesday, saying he doesn't have enough votes.

Last week, Doug Hoffman withdrew his election night concession to Democratic Rep. Bill Owens, saying the race was close enough that absentee ballots could change the outcome.

Now Hoffman says he has no hope of winning.

The final ballot count hasn't been tallied and certified, but Owens was leading Hoffman Tuesday by about 3,000 votes out of more than 136,000 cast.

Owens was sworn in Nov. 6.

Hoffman had started the race as a long-shot candidate labeled as a spoiler. With support from big-name Republicans including Sarah Palin, Hoffman built enough support to force the Republican Party's candidate out of the race.

Hoffman sent a letter to supporters last week seeking money for a legal challenge of the outcome. The Federal Election Commission said recount funds are legal, but the contributions would have to meet campaign finance limits, and if the money isn't used for a recount it would have to be refunded.

A spokesman for Hoffman said the campaign didn't know whether it had received any funds or would be returning any money.

The rural upstate region had been represented by Republicans for more than a century.

By Paul Kane
Leaving Democrats one vote short with hours to go, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) declared Saturday she will support a key procedural step to advance President Obama's health-care legislation.

In a Senate floor speech just before 1 p.m., Landrieu said she would support the motion to begin debate on the legislation, ending days of silence on the matter. Landrieu's move leaves just Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) as the only undeclared Democrat, with the other 59 senators in the Democratic caucus backing this early step.

"My vote today to move forward ... should in no way be construed" as signaling what her final vote will be, Landrieu said, indicating that she wants to work on amending the bill on the Senate floor. "Much work needs to be done."

Her remarks came during a rare Saturday session during which the Senate launched the final hours of debate leading up to a nighttime vote that serves as a critical early test for President Obama's health-care proposal.

"Doing nothing is not an option," Landrieu said. Her support was garnered in part by a provision in the bill that would deliver higher Medicaid payments to Louisiana health-care providers.

Shaping up as a cliffhanger, all but one of the 60 senators in the Democratic caucus have indicated their support for this early vote, which, if successful, serves to begin what will likely be several weeks of debate on dozens of amendments before a possible final vote before Christmas.

Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) needs the last holdout, Lincoln, to reach the 60-vote threshold to move forward with the debate. No Republican senator is expected to vote for this initial step.

In line with Lincoln's demand for a 72-hour period to read the legislation, the key vote is expected at 8 p.m. Saturday, exactly 72 hours from the point Reid unveiled his health-care proposal Wednesday night.

Debate began at 10 a.m., with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) - a 35-year veteran of the Senate - discussing the decades-long effort to achieve national health-insurance. Leahy quoted from Obama's address to a joint session of Congress two months ago, just after their close friend, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), died after a lengthy fight with cancer.

Leahy urged his colleagues to pass the legislation in Kennedy's honor. "What we face above all is a moral issue," Leahy said of Kennedy's wishes.

By Paul Kane
In a rare Saturday session, the Senate launched the final hours of debate leading up to a nighttime vote that serves as a critical early test for President Obama's health-care proposal.

Shaping up as a cliffhanger, all but two of the 60 senators in the Democratic caucus have indicated their support for this early vote, which, if successful, serves to begin what will likely be several weeks of debate on dozens of amendments before a possible final vote before Christmas.

Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) needs the last two holdouts - Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) - to reach the 60-vote threshold to move forward with the debate. No Republican senator is expected to vote for this initial step.
In line with Lincoln's demand for a 72-hour period to read the legislation, the key vote is expected at 8 p.m. Saturday, exactly 72 hours from the point Reid unveiled his health-care proposal Wednesday night.

Debate began at 10 a.m., with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) - a 35-year veteran of the Senate - discussing the decades-long effort to achieve national health insurance. Leahy quoted from Obama's address to a joint session of Congress two months ago, just after their close friend, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), died after a lengthy fight with cancer.

Leahy urged his colleagues to pass the legislation in Kennedy's honor.

"What we face above all is a moral issue," Leahy said of Kennedy's wishes.