Author: David Dayen

Tamyra d'Ippolito

I just spoke with Tamyra D’Ippolito, the candidate who was already running in the US Senate primary as a Democrat in Indiana before Evan Bayh ended his re-election bid today. D’Ippolito’s potential presence on the primary ballot complicates the ability for Indiana Democrats to handpick a nominee. If nobody qualifies for the primary, Indiana Dems can choose the candidate. But if D’Ippolito qualifies, then she would be the only candidate on that primary ballot, and Brad Ellsworth or Baron Hill or whoever would have to run a write-in campaign to defeat her in that primary in May.

So, how’s D’Ippolito doing? She’s collected 3,500 of the 4,500 signatures, 500 in each Congressional district in Indiana, which are needed by noon tomorrow in order to qualify. D’Ippolito said that she’s particularly short in IN-08, in the Terre Haute/Evansville area of the district. Her campaign manager has contacted all of the heads of the county Democratic parties asking them if they would help her get on the ballot.

But she’s not getting the sense that they want to be helpful in that effort. “Politics in Indiana is the old boy’s school. They’re getting ready to put one of their own in,” D’Ippolito, a cafe owner in Bloomington who gained experience in politics running a primary campaign for Gretchen Clearwater in 2006. “My gut feeling tells me they’re meeting in a room, I don’t know if they’re smoking cigars,” D’Ippolito said, basically working under the assumption that Bayh’s announcement was timed so the state party could pick the nominee by themselves. “The timing of this is amazing.”

D’Ippolito told me she is the first woman to ever run for the US Senate in Indiana. Her impression from working on prior campaigns and from this one is that Indiana political culture is a “tight old boys school, it borders on sexism.” In a state where the population is 52% women, D’Ippolito says “in the future, we women of Indiana are not going to tolerate” the chummy, insider culture.

She’s heard the rumors of Brad Ellsworth or Baron Hill, both US Congressmen, jumping into the race. D’Ippolito ran the campaign of Gretchen Clearwater against Baron Hill in a primary in 2006, which Hill won.

Far from being chagrined by the lack of help from the state party, D’Ippolito was enthused by the attention being paid to the race. “Today is a very exciting day in Indiana politics,” she said. Even if she didn’t make the ballot this time around, she vowed to run in 2012 for the Senate against Richard Lugar, which would represent an improvement. Lugar ran unopposed in 2006.

You can download a petition for state primary ballot placement here.

I have to confess that this is a major surprise.

Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh will not seek re-election this year, a decision that hands Republicans a prime pickup opportunity in the middle of the country.

“After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so by serving in Congress has waned,” Bayh will say.

The biggest reason this surprises is because of the ferocity with which Bayh operatives and the DNC have attacked the entry of Dan Coats into the Senate race. Coats’ residency in North Carolina and damaging work as a Washington lobbyist got major attention, suggestive that national Democrats were working hard to push him out of the race. And now, as that was gathering success, Bayh decides to retire.

Democrats sort of have a bench here, and Barack Obama barely took Indiana in 2008, but this turns what looked like a pickup into a very difficult seat to hold. Whether Republicans go with Dan Coats or former Rep. John Hostettler, they’re going to be favored. No Democrat was eyeing this race because nobody possibly believed that Bayh would leave.

Putting IN-Sen in play seriously raises the possibility of a Republican takeover of the Senate in November. It’s still a long shot, but definitely in the realm of the possible.

UPDATE: The ballot deadline to file in Indiana is THIS FRIDAY. Bayh really has screwed the Democrats here (what else is new?). Possible candidates include Reps. Baron Hill, Brad Ellsworth and Joe Donnelly.

UPDATE II: What a pathetic child this guy is. Here’s part of his speech:

“Two weeks ago, the Senate voted down a bipartisan commission to deal with one of the greatest threats facing our nation: our exploding deficits and debt. The measure would have passed, but seven members who had endorsed the idea instead voted ‘no’ for short-term political reasons,” he said. “Just last week, a major piece of legislation to create jobs — the public’s top priority — fell apart amid complaints from both the left and right. All of this and much more has led me to believe that there are better ways to serve my fellow citizens, my beloved state4 and our nation than continued service in Congress.”

Nobody likes my bold ideas to cut taxes for billionaires and force seniors onto cat food, so… buh-bayh.

…More in Bayh’s statement here.

UPDATE III: There’s some confusion over the timing of the filing deadline in Indiana. Most people were under the initial impression that Democrats had until Friday to field a candidate. Others are reporting that the deadline is actually tomorrow at noon. And, Ben Smith tweets that Indiana Dems could fill a primary vacancy anytime between now and June 30th. So it’s unclear what the reality is here.

There’s more. . .

(photo: tizzie)

At first glance, it seems like Harry Reid is catching a huge break:

Sun columnist Jon Ralston is reporting that the Tea Party has qualified as a third party in Nevada and will have a candidate in the Senate race to battle for the seat held by Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The party has filed a Certificate of Existence but needs to get 1 percent of the electorate to vote for its candidate in November to permanently qualify, according to the report.

Ralston reported that Jon Ashjian will be the Tea Party’s U.S. Senate candidate on the November ballot. Ashjian still must declare his candidacy.

Let’s break this down a bit. The Tea Party in Nevada is probably closer to the Ron Paul anti-government, foreign policy isolationist ideal than it is in some other states. Paul did very well in the 2008 Republican primary in Nevada, finishing second behind Mitt Romney (and if there wasn’t a Mormon candidate in Mormon-heavy Nevada, who knows?), and Paul-ites almost captured the Republican Party in 2008 before the GOP establishment stepped in. Heading that GOP establishment was then-state party chair and one of the GOP Senate candidates, Sue Lowden, who is bitterly opposed by the Paul faction in the state.

Lowden may not win; Danny Tarkanian, son of famous former UNLV basketball coach, is also running, and the two are running even. But if Lowden pulls it out, and even if she doesn’t, you could see a significant portion of Nevada Paul-ites switch to the Tea Party candidate just out of spite. That would make this third-party run different than most, capable of pulling 10-15% of the electorate. And I don’t think any of that would come from Reid’s number, which would make him viable to win with 40-45% of the vote.

Reid has $8.7 million in the bank and is out fundraising in California this weekend. So he can blitz the state with advertising from now to the election. Presumably the DSCC will pump a lot of money into that race to try and save the Majority Leader. Until now, it was probably futile. But if the Tea Party candidate can attract a legitimate number of votes, Reid actually has a plausible path to victory.

I don’t want to be seen as some kind of apologist for China, given its horrendous human rights record. I think the President meeting with the Dalai Lama despite Chinese warnings sends the right message and is eminently responsible.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from how China is reacting to the recession – with quick and massive stimulus that is succeeding in creating jobs and growth.

The world’s largest human migration — the annual crush of Chinese traveling home to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which is this Sunday — is going a little faster this time thanks to a new high-speed rail line.

The Chinese bullet train, which has the world’s fastest average speed, connects Guangzhou, the southern coastal manufacturing center, to Wuhan, deep in the interior. In a little more than three hours, it travels 664 miles, comparable to the distance from Boston to southern Virginia. That is less time than Amtrak’s fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston just to New York.

Even more impressive, the Guangzhou to Wuhan train is just one of 42 high-speed lines recently opened or set to open by 2012 in China. By comparison, the United States hopes to build its first high-speed rail line by 2014, an 84-mile route linking Tampa and Orlando, Fla.

China spent $88 billion dollars on high-speed rail investment in 2009 alone, a substantial increase from previous years. It rivals the construction of the interstate highway system in America in the 1950s for its audaciousness and use of public monies to spur jobs and growth. And it’s working:

As China upgrades and expands its rail system, it creates the economies of large-scale production for another big export industry. “The sheer volume of equipment that they will require, and the technology that will have to be developed, will simply catapult them into a leadership position,“ said Stephen Gardner, Amtrak’s vice president for policy and development […]

Officials drafted a plan to move much of the nation’s passenger traffic onto high-speed routes by 2020, freeing existing tracks for more freight. Then the global financial crisis hit in late 2008. Faced with mass layoffs at export factories, China ordered that the new rail system be completed by 2012 instead of 2020, throwing more than $100 billion in stimulus at the projects.

Administrators mobilized armies of laborers — 110,000 just for the 820-mile route from Beijing to Shanghai, which will cut travel time there to five hours, from 12, when it opens next year.

You can do this far more quickly in a command economy, of course. But it’s the priority order that is striking. China needed economic stimulus, and rapidly accelerated public investment. The US (which actually has added more in stimulus than most countries in Europe) took a balanced approach based more on tax cuts. Aside from the question of what approach works better in terms of economic activity, look at the end result – practically all of China will be served by high-speed rail within a matter of years.

It’s not perfect. Some Chinese have complained about the fare costs. And again, a single decision-maker rather than a phalanx of competing interests makes decision-making that much easier. But there’s something that can be learned here. If you want to create jobs, rather than the Rube Goldberg approach of tax breaks and nudges toward private investment, just go ahead and create the jobs. In the long run you’ll have higher growth and a better quality of life for the nation.

time clock by House of Sims (flickr)

If we do see a jobs bill from the Senate, the main component (accounting for 87% of the spending at this point) would be the Schumer-Hatch job creation tax credit. This would give businesses a break on their half of payroll taxes (6.2% of salary) for every worker they hire in 2010 who has been unemployed at least 60 days. It would also offer incentives – $1000, I believe – for every year the employee remains with the company beyond 2010. The projected cost is $13 billion dollars.

Some liberal economists have actually supported a job creation tax credit. One is the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute. However, they are not warming to Schumer-Hatch. Here’s Timothy Bartik of EPI:

Awarding credits for hires can be very expensive. Over a one-year period, the number of hires, as a percentage of total private employment, is over 40% even during a recession. To pay for hires that would have occurred anyway will be expensive and won’t necessarily increase total private-sector employment. The Schumer-Hatch design tries to avoid some of these large costs in several ways. First, credits are limited to hiring the unemployed, apply only to the rest of 2010, and are only worth 6.2% of the new hire’s payroll costs. The retention bonus is of modest size and is delayed. While these limits control costs, they also hamper the credit’s benefits.

Limiting the credit to hiring someone unemployed at least 60 days makes the credit less attractive to employers. Not only does the credit become more complicated to claim (which reduces its effectiveness), But it restricts the employer’s hiring to a more limited pool of workers.

Past experiences (for example, with the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit, the Work Opportunities Tax Credit, and the Welfare-to-Work Tax Credit) suggest that tax credits to encourage employers to hire disadvantaged workers usually elicit little employer interest, and have little effect upon employer behavior. Employers are happy to claim such credits if they happen to meet the credit’s rules, but they are reluctant to change their behavior in response to such targeted tax credits.

EPI estimates that this credit would create no more than 200,000 jobs in 2010. At a price tag of $13 billion, that comes out to about $65,000 per job created. There are more efficient options out there.

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) calls it money for nothing:

We know from a vast body of research on the minimum wage that employment is not responsive to moderate changes in the cost of the labor. This is why a a 15-20 percent increase in the minimum wage does not lead to any measurable impact on employment.

If a 15-20 percent rise in the cost of labor does not reduce employment, then no one can believe that a 6.2 percent decline in the cost of labor (only for the rest of 2010) would increase employment. In other words, there is little reason to believe that the Schumer-Hatch tax credit would create any noticeable number of jobs. It truly is money for nothing.

Baker’s design of a tax credit to create jobs would promote work-sharing, which would pay companies to keep employees at shorter hours, encouraging additional hiring to make up the workload. This credit is working in Germany and the Netherlands.

Another option, promoted by Marshall Auerback of the Roosevelt Institute, would be direct job creation through a job guarantee program.

The U.S. government can proceed directly to zero unemployment by offering a universal job guarantee available to anybody through the thick and thin of the business cycle. Furthermore, by fixing the wage paid under this job-guarantee program at a level that does not disrupt existing labor markets (a wage level close to the existing minimum wage, for example), price stability can be largely achieved. Other benefits could be provided, including vacation and sick leave, contributions to Social Security, and, most important, health-care benefits, providing scope for a bottom-up reform of the current patchwork health-care system […]

The job-guarantee program would in effect create a “buffer stock” of “shovel ready” labor, which could be employed by the private sector, as private-sector output improves in line with an improving economy. Additionally, the program would allow for the elimination of many existing government welfare payments for anyone not specifically targeted for exemption and would command greater political legitimacy, as society places a high value on work as the means through which individuals earn a livelihood. Minimum-wage legislation would no longer be needed as it would be established via the job-guarantee program. Labor would welcome the safety net of a guaranteed job, and business would recognize the benefit of a pool of available labor it could draw from at some spread to the government wage paid to job-guarantee employees.

Of course, that wouldn’t be bipartisan. So there’s that.

Harold Ford Jr. speaking at Tulane Univ. (photo: Tulane Publications via Flickr)

It just gets worse and worse and worse for Harold Ford.

When it comes to his shadow run for Senate, Harold Ford is a New Yorker through and through. When it comes to paying taxes, though, he’s still a Tennessean — he’s never filed a New York return.

Ford claims to have moved to New York three years ago, and says paying “New York taxes” makes him a New Yorker. But his spokeswoman confirms to Gawker that he’s never filed a New York tax return — meaning that he’s never paid New York’s income tax, despite keeping an office and a residence in New York City as a vice chairman of Merrill Lynch since 2007: “He pays New York taxes and will file a New York tax return in April for the first time,” Ford’s spokeswoman Tammy Sun told Gawker. “He will file all necessary personal disclosure and tax forms that candidates are required to file if he chooses to run.” (According to Sun, Ford admitted to the tax dodge yesterday at a press availability in Albany, but we can’t find any news accounts mentioning the remarks.)

Hey, at least they’re getting out in front of the story, right?

There are at least a couple reasons why Ford would keep his residency in Tennessee. One, he was considering a run for Tennessee Governor in 2010 until as recently as last April. Two, Tennessee doesn’t have a state income tax on wages. And three, he’s just a tax cheat. New York State law requires part-time residents and nonresidents to pay income tax on whatever salary they earn in the state. Ford has certainly earned three years’ worth of salary in New York with Merrill Lynch and MSNBC. So you can add “tax dodger” to the resume, right next to “head of the DLC.”

For additional comic relief, there’s a Draft Ford site out there which, until today, had 11 signatures, and the ones that have come in since then include “Ukant B. Zerius,” “Deuce Bagg,” “Ima Hogg,” and “Farold Hoarde.” Seriously.

AFL-CIO Leader Richard Trumka

Richard Trumka, the President of the AFL-CIO, just posted a vow to bombard the White House with calls, demanding recess appointments for key nominees to get the National Labor Relations Board working again.

In contrast to reports that labor was staying muted during this fight, Trumka called the deal in the Senate last night to pass a handful of Obama nominees while leaving others like Craig Becker in limbo “a big loss for working people.” Trumka added that the NLRB has had only two members on its five-person board for over two years, rendering it non-functional.

We’re used to the Republicans playing the role of Lucy and yanking the football away each time Charlie Brown tries to kick it. We’ve seen it on health care, jobs legislation, you name it.

President Obama has to end this farce.

Becker already received majority approval from the Senate, but apparently majority rule isn’t good enough any more. A Republican filibuster — joined by Democrats Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) — blocked his nomination from going forward. By contrast, when President Bush made his initial appointments to the NLRB, a package of nominees including three management lawyers was approved unanimously.

So today and every day through the congressional recess, union members and other activists from working America will be calling the White House and demanding a recess appointment now for Craig Becker and Mark Pearce.

Note that Trumka is putting the pressure squarely on the White House, not the Senate, to get the job done during the recess by appointing Becker and Pearce. Importantly, no Republican has raised any vocal objection to Pearce being seated; there was a deal previously to seat all three outstanding nominees for the NLRB (including Republican nominee Brian Hayes, a former staffer to Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) – there’s always a 3-2 partisan split on the board based on which party holds the Presidency) at once. So failing to seat Becker means that the NLRB can effectively do nothing.

Trumka added that it has been 13 months since the Inauguration, and both Congressional representatives and the President should be made aware “that protection of workers’ rights is one of the first and most important changes working people expected to see when they voted in 2008.”

We’ll see what kind of activism campaign the AFL-CIO comes up with, as suggested by this article.

(image: vintagecat)

I actually gave Harry Reid too much credit yesterday in counting up the remaining elements of the jobs bill. I said it would be a $50 billion bill, but the Section 179 fix allowing small businesses to write off capital expenditures would cost the government $35 MILLION, not $35 billion. So this is actually a $15 billion dollar bill to deal with a giant unemployment problem in a $13 trillion economy. I know this is the first step in a jobs agenda, but that’s not going to do a thing.

Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, said he would take four core job-creating initiatives from the bipartisan proposal — including tax breaks for businesses that hire unemployed workers and increased public works spending — and seek to move those rapidly through the Senate.

“We feel that the American people need a message,” Mr. Reid said. “The message that they need is that we’re doing something about jobs.”

Actually, they don’t need a message, they need jobs. And this won’t get it done.

Economists, journalists and commentators are pretty unified on this point. Actually, so is the Obama Administration.

Even the Obama administration acknowledges the legislation’s centerpiece – a tax cut for businesses that hire unemployed workers – would work only on the margins.

As for the bill’s effectiveness, tax experts and business leaders said companies are unlikely to hire workers just to receive a tax break. Before businesses start hiring, they need increased demand for their products, more work for their employees and more revenue to pay those workers.

The best CBO estimate of the impact of this measure says it would create between 104,000 and 234,000 jobs throughout the course of a year, a drop in the bucket.

But it could be worse than that. I asked Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute to explain this further. He said that the Schumer-Hatch job creation tax credit, which would eliminate the 6.2% payroll tax for the employer for any hire of someone unemployed at least 60 days, and offer cash incentives to keep that person on the jobs past 2010, is fatally flawed. “Schumer-Hatch provides a credit for any hire. So, someone quits and is replaced, they get a credit. There’s tremendous turnover each year, with hires nearly 40% of employment. So this rewards activity almost all of which would occur anyway and means the credit is stretched very thin,” Mishel said. EPI actually supported a job creation tax credit, but theirs provided eight times as much money and would have had a much greater impact. The 6.2% of payroll may be too small to induce any hiring. Mishel concluded, “So, a small incentive, thinly spread with a complicated design. Yuch.”

As for the other pieces in the bill, the Section 179 write-off for capital expenditures is not seen as a job creator, “but business loves them,” said Mishel. The Build America Bonds leverage just $2 billion from the feds to state and local governments for infrastructure projects, and Mishel said that “It is hard to believe that $2 billion worth of help for bonds does much for jobs.” As for the one-year extension of the Highway Trust Fund, that actually adds $19.5 billion for other local infrastructure, even though the cost is netted out through some accounting maneuvers. So that’s a decent amount of spending. But it’s hard to imagine that the Trust Fund wouldn’t have been extended anyway.

If you’re charitable, you can say this is a $35 billion dollar jobs bill. But that’s not going to cut it.

“You can’t force companies to create jobs if they don’t need them,” said John Challenger, the president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a group that specializes in work force issues.

This would not provide the public spending to create the demand that would force the need for businesses to hire; it’s as simple as that.

And it’s not clear that this scaled-back bill will go very far. Reid is trying to “hotline” the bill, to get it to the floor immediately without going through committee, but that would require unanimous consent. He also wants to add one amendment which would extend some key policies set to expire on Feb. 28 by one week, presumably to give himself time to pass extensions of those policies in later bills. These include unemployment insurance, the Medicare “doc fix” and the COBRA subsidy, along with a few other priorities. But that would also require full consent, and given Chuck Grassley’s objections through the media, I don’t see that happening:

“Senator Reid’s announcement sends a message that he wants to go partisan and blame Republicans when Senator Grassley and others were trying to find common ground on solutions to help get the economy back on track and people back to work,” said Jill Kozeny, a spokesperson for Grassley.

Kozeny added that Reid killed the bill just as it was gaining bipartisan momentum.

“Senator Reid did this just as Republican senators were saying they liked things in the Baucus-Grassley draft, which would have prevented billions of dollars in tax increases and offset any spending,” she said. “The Majority Leader pulled the rug out from work to build broad-based support for tax relief and other efforts to help the private sector recover from the economic crisis.”

So, a tiny bill, too small to do very much, that nonetheless probably won’t get through.

Lovin’ this Congress.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand described on Thursday the Congressional strategy to end the military discharges of gay and lesbian service members under the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, saying that a repeal or an 18-month moratorium would move inside the defense authorization bill later in the year.

Gillibrand spoke on a conference call for supporters of the progressive advocacy group the Courage Campaign, joined on the call by Lt. Dan Choi, who has become a leading advocate for repealing the policy after coming out as a gay soldier on The Rachel Maddow Show last year.

Gillibrand, who has stepped into the lead on repealing the policy, said that she spoke today with Carl Levin (D-MI), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He maintained that the most effective way to advance this forward is to put an 18-month moratorium into the defense authorization bill, where it would take 60 votes to remove it, and where it would be more safely attached to a must-pass measure funding the Pentagon. The reason that this could take the form of an 18-month moratorium on discharges, as opposed to repeal, is because that would accommodate the Pentagon’s proposed one-year study of the impact of eliminating the policy, and some Senators may be more willing to vote for a moratorium to respect that process rather than a repeal. This would allow for that implementation lag, while ending the policy of discharging gay and lesbian service members.

The other option would be a bill Gillibrand has proposed to cut off funding for implementation of the DADT policy (it costs roughly $20-$30 million a year in prosecution and retraining). That cannot go through Armed Services because they don’t have jurisdiction, so Gillibrand is looking for a separate legislative vehicle for that. “I don’t want to see one more man or woman kicked out,” the Senator from New York said. “Whether it’s a moratorium, cutting funding, or full repeal, whatever can go the quickest and get the most votes is what I want to do.”

Gillibrand expressed confidence that she would ultimately have the votes for whatever final strategy, saying that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen’s powerful testimony “left no room for any Democrat to vote for anything less” than getting rid of the policy. “I can go back to Senators and say, ‘What’s your excuse now,’” Gillibrand said, adding that she was completely surprised by Mullen’s testimony. She thought that a few Republicans would be in play to vote for repeal or a moratorium, citing Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine as well as “one or two” others. As for the Democrats, “Nobody has said to me they’re against repeal. Some have said they’re undecided. But that’s means all of them are open to the record we are building” on the need to end the policy.

Responding to a question from FDL News about a Politico article citing nervous Democrats worried about the lack of a detailed strategy for repeal from the White House, Gillibrand dismissed that it was the President’s responsibility to do that. “I think Congress needs to take the lead,” she said, saying that while the President could do a stop-loss order to stop the discharges, ultimately Congress had to end the policy. And she said that she’s attacking the problem on multiple fronts to find the best one available for passage.

Choi supported Gillibrand’s efforts, saying that she is treating the problem like a commander would by focusing on stopping the bleeding. Choi did not want to see a compromise where the implementation is simply made kinder and gentler, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed by ending investigations of third-party outings. “I don’t accept that compromise… Implementing the policy better is not a substitute. We don’t want to lie anymore,” said Choi. He told supporters on the call not to let their political leaders get away with a compromise.

Choi responded to a question about his military status, after having returned to his National Guard unit for training over the weekend. He said that his discharge case is still pending in the Pentagon. “They’re being very closeted about my case. I wish they’d come out one way or the other,” Choi joked. In the meantime, though the discharge still looms, he reported for duty over the weekend because his unit is getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan, and they need every able-bodied soldier, and he was keeping his promise to the military. He corrected some news reports by saying that he is actively serving in the National Guard, not on active duty. And he planned to continue to speak out about the wrongness of the DADT policy. “I’m not being silenced,” Choi said.

Gillibrand, incidentally, did not stop at repealing DADT. “After this, we have to go after DOMA, and then get a fully-inclusive ENDA law,” she said. The junior Senator from New York is increasingly becoming the national political leader on gay rights.

Mike Stark captured a good interview with Chris Dodd yesterday about the dysfunctional Senate and how it has to change. What’s crucial here is that Dodd is basically a lion of the Senate, someone who for years has preferred the institutional rules that slow things down. He’s defended the filibuster, and other Senate rules. And now

Dodd: This is all evidence of a dysfunctional institution. So I’m saddened in a way. The reason the Senate works is because of the chemistry of the members to make it work. That’s why it takes unanimous consent to do almost anything. And the essence of the Senate was basically a longer, slower look at things. Which I fundamentally agree with, I think that’s important, otherwise you create two chambers and a unicameral system. Because that’s the point where they get rid of one of the chambers, why would you constantly have two chambers to do what you can do in one… because we’re frustrated right now over an abusive use of a historic vehicle that led to the essence of what the Senate is, we’re about to abandon the essence of the Senate.

This all came in a defense of the Senate and its “essence” and its rules. Now, I actually agree with Dodd about moving to a unicameral system, although that’s not what he argued. But he talked about abandoning the essence of the Senate as if it’s a foregone conclusion.

It’s interesting seeing all these warhorses coming to grips with the fact that the Senators on the other side aren’t respecting the rules laid out for themselves, and how time may just be marching on by such rules. Joe Biden has a similar perspective.

I was a senator for 36 years. I got there when I was 29 years old. So I’ve been through seven presidents — eight now. And I’ve never seen a time when the operating norm to get anything passed was a super majority of 60 votes. No matter what — no matter what the bill is, it’s filibustered. It’s required to get 60 votes.

You can’t rule by a super majority. You can’t govern if you require a super majority. And I think it’s getting to the point where it’s been abused, this idea of the filibuster or the threat of extended debate.

And I think the public is taking it out — the — the Congress as a whole, Republicans and Democrats, are — are extremely low on the polls, in the Congress.

Neither Biden nor Dodd, who is retiring, will determine the future of the Senate rules process. Dodd may get a vote on Tom Harkin’s plan to gradually lower the threshold for filibusters over a period of weeks, but such a rule change would take 67 votes in the middle of a session, and if we could get that many votes, there wouldn’t be any need for the rule change. Harry Reid said as much today.

The only way you’re really going to change this is by allowing the Senate to set their own rules at the beginning of the next Congress, similar to what Tom Udall is proposing. But the talks that even the old warhorses are having amongst themselves, the internal dialogues being made public, allude to the fact that even they know a change has to come.

Harry Reid, in a rare bit of liveliness, has taken control of the jobs bill in the Senate, paring it down to its essential parts.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is rewriting a jobs bill after Democrats complained of too many concessions to Republicans.

Reid announced Thursday that he would cut back on the jobs bill Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) introduced only hours earlier, essentially overruling the powerful chairman.

“We’re going to move this afternoon to a smaller package than talked about in the press,” Reid said.

The bill now include four components: tax credits for employers who hire new workers; a provision allowing businesses to write off the cost of capital investments; Build America Bonds, which allow state and local governments to lower their borrowing costs; and a one-year extension of funding for transportation programs in the Surface Transportation Act.

Reid is absolutely right that hanging a bunch of unrelated items onto the bill, like tax extenders and Patriot Act extensions and the rest, would just add to the criticisms about process and distract from the real message. That said, what is the bill now?

Reid is slicing off the top four job-creation provisions from the Baucus bill. That would be the Schumer-Hatch job creation tax credit, the one-year extension of the Highway Trust Fund, the investment in Build America Bonds to encourage state and local infrastructure spending, and the write-off for small business capital expenditures. According to Baucus and Grassley’s numbers, the total price tag for such a bill would be $50 billion.

Reid set aside the social safety net spending, extending unemployment benefits and the COBRA subsidy, into a separate bill. That would net another $25 billion. Reid has promised to take that up later in February, after the Senate recess.

So you’re talking about a $50 billion jobs bill ($48 billion for the tax credit and capital expenditure write-off, so basically 96% tax breaks), with $25 billion in safety-net spending later.

There’s your “jobs bill.”

I’m happy for the small pleasure of seeing Reid tell Max Baucus to STFU. But really, this isn’t much of a bill, even pared down to its alleged job-creation elements.

UPDATE: It should be noted that this is part one of what Reid is calling a “jobs agenda,” and I do appreciate keeping it simple. But, you know, actually do something about the problem, too.

(photo: jdlasica)

Today, hundreds of thousands of Iranians appeared at rallies and counter-protests marking the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. The Basiji militia intimidated and oppressed reformist protesters today in a brutal crackdown. In a speech to ralliers, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that Iran had successfully upped their uranium enrichment, while insisting that the country was not building a nuclear weapon:

A day after Washington announced new sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, Ahmadinejad vowed “the Iranian nation will never give in to bullying and illogical remarks.

He repeated Iran’s stance that it is not building a nuclear weapon and does not intend to do so, adding, “If we wanted to manufacture a bomb, we would announce it.”

The sanctions announced yesterday by the Treasury Department are small and targeted, impacting just four companies affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard Corps. This is basically a placeholder for multi-lateral sanction efforts at the United Nations. But never ones to miss an opportunity to bash Iran, John McCain and Joe Lieberman today unleashed a bill that would sanction human rights abusers in Iran (not those in America who abused human rights through torture or rendition, mind you).

“The scheme is straightforward: the bill requires the President to draw up and periodically update a list of names of individuals who have committed human rights abuses in Iran,” a Senate aide says. “These individuals are then subject to a set of targeted sanctions, including a visa ban and various financial restrictions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.”

The Senate bill comes amid reports of attacks on several Iranian opposition leaders Iran today during demonstrations to mark the 31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution.

In a statement today, McCain said “The rulers of iran have no desire to meet their international responsibilities, and every desire to use the tools of violence and repression at their disposal to crush the peaceful aspirations of Iran’s citizens.” Lieberman added on MSNBC today that “I would say that the opposition to this fanatical government, regime in Tehran is not going to go away… It’s just a matter of time until the people triumph over this government that does not really represent them.”

I think McCain and Lieberman just don’t want to be left behind in a sanctions roundelay. New sanctions are likely for a variety of reasons, and Iran’s intransigence in talks with the West may even make them multilateral. And it’s unclear whether the effect of these sanctions will help reformers or swing the public behind the ruling regime in a nationalist fervor, as it may have done today. Maybe McCain, Lieberman and the rest of us shouldn’t be so helpful to the Green Movement. Maybe we’re not helping at all.

…I should add that the Administration is using equal amounts carrots and sticks, offering paths forward as they try to target the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

(photo: rolando.pujol)

The White House went into major pushback mode on President Obama’s comments about bonuses and banking CEOs Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon yesterday. They offered the full context of the remarks and said that his line about “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth” was something he’s said many times before. Of course, that’s pretty much what I said yesterday, when I supplied the full comments and noted that this is part of Obama’s “on the one hand, on the other hand” M.O. of how he answers questions. It doesn’t exactly help fix the problem, expressed by Paul Krugman, that it’s politically tone-deaf to say nice things about the banksters at this stage, and that calling the financial industry “the free-market system” at this stage neglects the historic level of support still being given to it by the federal government.

But all you want to know about how Obama orients himself, and what criticism he responds to, can be found in this follow-up report from the same interview:

President Barack Obama said he and his administration have pursued a “fundamentally business- friendly” agenda and are “fierce advocates” for the free market, rejecting corporate criticism of his policies.

“The irony is, is that on the left we are perceived as being in the pockets of big business; and then on the business side, we are perceived as being anti-business,” Obama said in a Feb. 9 interview in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands tomorrow.

“You would be hard-pressed to identify a piece of legislation that we have proposed out there that, net, is not good for businesses,” he added. He predicted that legislation he will sign this year would cut corporate taxes by about $70 billion.

So, there’s the “on the one hand, on the other hand” law professor approach, saying that the left sees him as a tool for big business, and the right perceives him as anti-business. But what follows that? An unmistakable assertion that he’s pro-business and that everything he’s done has helped them immensely. Well, yes, that’s the point. He reacts to this pressure from the left and the right only in one direction – to clear up misconceptions from the RIGHT, not from the left. He’s clearly more sensitive to the anti-business charge and bends over backwards to reassure folks that he’s really, really good for corporate America.

That’s precisely what people criticized yesterday – this pervasive sense that Obama views corporate CEOs as part of the same class, colleagues to be defended. This is occurring even as their lobbyists are fighting every single proposal he’s made on financial regulation. Later in the interview, he acknowledges that while insisting that his policies will be good for business.

Obama attributed feelings that he’s unsympathetic to business in part to “a spillover effect” from public criticism he has leveled at large banks.

He also cited instances when he has clashed with specific industries such as insurance companies over his health-care plan, energy companies over climate change, and banks over a financial-regulatory overhaul. Still, he argued, in each case the proposal benefited American businesses as a whole.

“You have got some pretty significant, well-funded industry interest groups who are adamantly opposed, and they have got a lot of sway,” Obama said.

And they are, indeed, swaying the Administration. There’s no need to read between the lines on that.

This just totally misreads the public moods. Nobody wants to hear apologias for the rich and powerful at this stage. The one in eight Americans on food stamps are really not interested in whether or not Obama is good for big business. They want job security, opportunity, and a path to getting ahead. And they’re not seeing it, while their President compares the CEOs most responsible for this wreck to baseball stars.

Today, President Obama met with top African-American leaders at the White House to discuss the economic crisis in minority communities and upcoming jobs legislation. Attendees included Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, Benjamin Jealous, President of the NAACP, and Marc Morial, President and CEO of the National Urban League. Later, they joined reporters on a conference call to discuss the meeting, and they delivered a clear message – obstruction in the Senate is to blame for the sluggish recovery, and Democrats holding a majority needed to act, through the budget reconciliation process if necessary, to overcome it.

While Sharpton believed that the President was not getting the respect he deserved for leading the country out of a deep recession that he inherited, he said that clearly more needed to be done. Asked if Congress was doing enough to bring the country back, Sharpton said, “The quick answer is no. The question is how we push to get as much as possible.”

And clearly, from the comments on the call, the path to pushing for what’s possible goes through the United States Senate, and particularly opening up the process issues. The NAACP’s Ben Jealous described Republicans who are “seeking a super-majority for everything coming out of the Senate” as their primary target, saying that they have habitually obstructed or watered down recovery efforts, many of which are not reaching the African-American community. Morial, of the Urban League, noted that the first stimulus package was cut by Republican Senators whose votes were needed to pass the bill, and as a result became less effective. While both of these leaders expected a “series of steps” to get unemployment down to a sustainably low rate, and no magic jobs bill out there, they expressed great concern at the obstructionism in the Senate.

Jealous said while he was frustrated with Republicans consumed with saying “No” for political reasons, he was just as frustrated with Democrats who have other options to get their agenda through. “They should be trying to do more in the reconciliation process,” Jealous said. He talked about the 200 bills that have been held up through the filibuster, and 63 Presidential nominations held up as well.

Morial, himself a former Mayor of New Orleans, called the use of the filibuster and the hold process, which he called “the blue-slip process,” an abuse of the system. “Whether you agree with the filibuster or not, it was desgined as an extraordinary measure. And now the blue-slip process is being used to hold up appointment of federal marshals, security posts. The public needs to have a greater understanding that it does not take 60 votes to pass anything. It takes 60 votes to end debate.”

Asked by FDL News how to explain Senate process to a public which has little understanding of it, Jealous said, “It’s going to require all of us giving basic civics lessons to our constituents. People are mystified. They don’t understand why a majority can’t get anything done. The subverting of democracy has to stop.”

Asked later today on Hardball whether there should be majority rule in this country, Jealous replied, “Absolutely.” Sharpton said this goes further than the filibusters on civil rights legislation by Dixiecrats in the 1950s and 1960s. “The problem then was on race and civil rights,” Sharpton said. “These people are blocking everything. What they’re blocking hurts everybody. They’re not just hurting blacks, this is not, they’re not just blocking civil rights legislation, they’re blocking jobs, health care, they’re blocking things that hurt their own constituents… because they just want to obstruct anything this President says.” He said that Republicans have gotten away with this because of a lack of significant pushback from civil rights, labor and progressive communities to highlight the obstructionism.

With civil rights leaders pushing process arguments, seemingly this is coming away from an academic exercise and toward something that may truly educate the public as to what is happening in Washington.

Yesterday, Harry Reid gave a speech on the Senate floor where he suggested that the President recess appoint all his nominees who were not being given an up or down vote in the Senate.

REID: I mean it’s disgraceful. The Republicans are holding these people up for reasons that have nothing to do with their background, morality [or] competency of these people. … I think, frankly, the President should recess [appoint] all of them. All of them. He has been given very little recognition for the importance of the job that he has trying to find the best people in America to fill this position. No one can say Democrats did this when we were in the minority — we didn’t do this. There were people that were held up, but this something that is beyond the pale.

It’s unclear whether this would include Craig Becker, the nominee for the National Labor Relations Board who was denied an up-or-down vote yesterday when the Senate failed to invoke cloture.

If this were some rank and file Senator saying this, it would mean one thing. But Reid is the Majority Leader, and in charge of the Senate schedule. So this could suggest that Reid is basically done with trying to move Obama nominees, seeing them as a waste of the Senate’s time and better dealt with through recess appointments. If Reid essentially shuts down the nomination process, Obama really has little choice if he wants to fill these key positions.

It’s not clear whether Reid is playing this kind of hardball, and efforts to get clarification on this from his office have not yet been returned (the government is shut down, after all). But if that’s the gambit, it would be significant, and it would be interesting to see how Obama reacts.

Sen. Tom Udall, who has been pushing for reform of the Senate’s rules, has responded to recent obstructionism by Senate Republicans by reiterating his call to break that by allowing the Senate to determine its own rules at the beginning of the next Congress.

(photo: TheTruthAbout)

I did get nervous last week that the no-brainer student loan bill, which would end the privatization of that industry, save over $80 billion dollars over ten years through direct student lending from the government instead of government-backed, government-subsidized private lending, and plow that money into Pell Grants to send kids to college, was facing a lobbyist assault and could be killed. However, the mistake the traditional media made in discussing this bill is a failure to provide the proper context. The student loan bill, with its pure focus on the budget, can be dealt with through reconciliation. The House has provided reconciliation instructions on the bill. There appear to be the minimum 50 votes required in the Senate for it to pass. In fact, there’s really only one reason it hasn’t passed yet.

The health care bill. Neil King at the Wall Street Journal finally provides the context.

For all the administration’s jousting at banks, however, the primary obstacle holding up the direct-lending bill isn’t Sallie Mae or high-priced lobbyists.

Instead, Democratic lawmakers are waiting to see if they will try to move some of their health-care measures as an attachment to an education bill, through a process known as reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes to pass.

“There is broad Democratic support for making needed changes to the student loan program so that we can invest in education and our economy,” said Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, Democratic chairman of the Senate health committee. “The timing of action on it, however, continues to be linked to the legislative strategy around health reform.”

Just to explain this further, reconciliation is kind of a one-shot deal. There’s basically one reconciliation bill per budget. So if you may need that process for the health care bill, you cannot finish the student loan bill. They would have to go together. To the Democrats’ credit, they did not jump the gun on the student loan bill, even though it would be a real accomplishment they could tout, and with reconciliation seen as probably the only option to finish off the health care bill, they still have the ability to do that and end the privatization of student lending besides.

I appreciate Arne Duncan getting tough on Sallie Mae and the banks, but while lobbyists may be making some nervous about the bill, it’s really the consequent timing with the health care bill which is causing the delay. Now, the hope is that, if health care does go down in flames, that the student loan bill isn’t consumed in the process. We’ll have to wait and see on that.

The vote to block Craig Becker from a position on the National Labor Relations Board, which “lost” by a count of 52-33, angered some longtime Senate Democrats, who would be needed to eventually change the Senate rules.

“I’m in my thirty-sixth year. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), noting that no previous Republican Senate leader would have allowed his party to filibuster such a routine nomination.

Leahy said that the overuse of filibusters by the GOP was leading Democrats to consider ways to modify it.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), another long-serving member, said that abuse of the filibuster is unsustainable. “I think it will either fall of its own weight — it should fall of its own weight — or it will fall after some massive conflict on the floor, which has happened in the past where there have been rulings from the chair that have led to reform,” Levin told the Huffington Post, adding that the filibuster should be restricted to major issues.

Why is the Becker vote drawing such outrage? It’s difficult to find any other instance of a nominee for the National Labor Relations Board even coming up for a cloture vote at all. Becker’s confirmation hearing was the first for a non-chairman NLRB nominee since 1980. As Sherrod Brown notes in Ryan Grim’s piece, for decades, Republican Presidents have nominated pro-management types to the NLRB and Democrats have nominated pro-labor types. Understand that the NLRB arose out of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and here was Franklin Roosevelt’s signing statement on that act: “This act defines, as a part of our substantive law, the right of self-organization of employees in industry for the purpose of collective bargaining, and provides methods by which the government can safeguard that legal right.” Having board members not disposed to labor would actually violate the spirit of the board, yet that has been done consistently with Republican nominees.

So that’s the background for why Senate Democrats are so fed up. The fact that Becker actually got 61% of the votes of those present yesterday may also be a factor. As Ben Eidelson notes, the Senate is by nature an undemocratic institution in that the representation is skewed toward small states, and sometimes a filibuster represents the votes of a majority of the US population. In fact, that happens most of the time – 64% – when Democrats are filibustering a Republican majority, and just 3% of the time when Republicans filibuster a Democratic majority. But this is not how we count votes in the US Senate, with each Senator getting the proportion of the vote of the population he or she represents. In a perfect world, a unicameral legislature would serve the nation well. But until that time, the 60-vote hurdle, now being trotted out for routine appointments, is too onerous for a democracy to function, particularly one with such unbalanced ideological rigidity from one party.

(photo: mathowie)

The Hill posted a draft of the jobs bill that will presumably get a vote in the Senate this week. There’s no cost estimate attached to it, but this isn’t all that much of a bill, so I’d imagine that it comes in lower than the $80 billion dollar price tag.

Reading through the draft, the big measure here is the job creation tax credit, which comes in two forms – payroll tax forgiveness for new employees, and a business credit for retaining individuals hired in 2010, essentially an incentive to hire now. In addition, there are extensions for unemployment benefits and the 65% COBRA subsidy from the stimulus, allowing laid-off workers to retain their current health insurance at a reduced rate. The third big element relates to spending on infrastructure projects, through both renewing the Highway Trust Fund and some new allocations to do with transportation.

And that’s mainly it. The usual Christmas tree ornaments of attachments to large bills are included, such as various tax extenders from last year, cuts to capital gains taxes for small business, disaster relief, extending the Medicare “doc fix” for seven more months, and low-income housing credits. Finally, adding to the mop-up of earlier bills, believe it or not, the jobs bill includes an extension of provisions for the Patriot Act. It’s on page 125:

(a) USA PATRIOT IMPROVEMENT AND REAUTHORIZATIONACTOF2005. Section 102(b)(1) of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 (Public Law 109–177; 50 U.S.C. 1805 note, 50 U.S.C. 1861 note, and 50 U.S.C. 1862 note) is amended by striking ‘‘February 28, 2010’’ and inserting ‘‘December 31, 2010’’.

It’s a 10-month extension, stuck into an unrelated bill.

There are a variety of revenue raisers in here as well, including taxing foreign-held assets and trusts in the US, and the exclusion of “black liquor” created by paper mills from alternative fuel tax credits. The latter was a revenue item in the health care bill, so if that passes here, lawmakers would have to find a different revenue item or lose about $20 billion.

Outside of being a convenient piece of legislation to use for passing unrelated items, I’m not exactly seeing the utility of a jobs bill that has very little in the way of job creation. There’s a tax cut, some necessary extension of safety-net spending, and infrastructure investment that might create a few more construction projects. That’s not even a sliver of the jobs agenda Democrats unveiled last week.

UPDATE: Working not off a draft but Reid’s statement on the floor today, Chris Bowers sees this bill as having substantially less public spending than what passed the House; about $55 billion dollars, to be exact.

The Senate voted against invoking cloture on Obama appointee Craig Becker, a nominee for the National Labor Relations Board. The final vote was 52-33, with all Republicans opposed, including Scott Brown, who claimed to be “undecided” last week. Among Democrats, both Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln voted against Becker, an associate general counsel for the SEIU and the AFL-CIO, for the five-person board, which currently only holds two members. Because the Becker nomination was paired with two other nominees, a vote against him is essentially a vote to keep the NLRB in a non-functional state. Some other Democrats were unable to make the vote, owing to the weather in Washington, DC. When a final roll call is available, I’ll link to it.

The AFL-CIO attacked Nelson for his hypocrisy in opposing cloture on Becker; they’d better get out the mimeograph machine and send that to Blanche Lincoln as well.

UPDATE: In his press conference today, the President said that if qualified nominees were obstructed by the Senate, he would have to resort to a recess appointment as soon as next week. He now has a chance with Craig Becker, if he chooses.

[Ed Note: As Michael Whitney notes, Becker is one of the most vetted presidential nominees in history.]

Earlier today, Sam Stein noted that Democrats joining this filibuster will complicate efforts to paint the obstructionism as solely a partisan act.

UPDATE II: The AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka’s statement on the Becker nomination kinda, sorta, almost outright says that the President should recess-appoint him. . .:

It is reprehensible that a minority in the U.S. Senate has blocked an up-or-down vote on Craig Becker, nominated seven months ago by President Obama to serve on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Once again, a Republican-led filibuster has put political interests over the needs of America ’s working families. For more than two years, the NLRB has had only two of its five members. Without a fully staffed NLRB, working families face a major disadvantage in winning justice in the workplace.

Becker is a highly-respected and experienced labor law practitioner and scholar. He has an impressive 27-year record of advocating for and representing workers, especially low-wage workers. He is eminently qualified to hear and decide cases fairly for both workers and employers as a member of the NLRB.

This is yet another instance of Washington politics-as-usual that so frustrates the American public. Americans deserve a government fully staffed by qualified, dedicated public servants with integrity – and leaders willing to put the interests of working families over politics and corporate influence.

We support President Obama’s expressed willingness to make recess appointments of critical posts in the federal government if that’s what it takes to get around minority delay and obstruction. There are currently more than 60 political nominees being held up by the Republican minority in the Senate – at this point in the Bush Administration, only four nominees were still in limbo.

President Obama popped in on the White House press briefing today for one of his first question-and-answer sessions since July. And the two big topics where this White House health care summit scheduled for February 25, as well as the subject of bipartisanship and both parties working together in Washington. To that end, the President said that, if his nominees for routine appointments keep getting held up in the Senate for no good reason, he would consider moving many of them through recess appointments “in the upcoming recess” which begins next week.

On health care, the President reiterated his pledge to get a bill done, similar to his Organizing for America compatriots today. He called the rate hike by Anthem Blue Cross in California a “preview of coming attractions,” and while he acknowledged there was little he could do about that, he maintained this is why a reform bill is so important. “I don’t have authority to issue an order lowering everyone’s rates, if I could, I would have done that already…. There’s no shortcut in dealing with this issue… Without some action, it is very unlikely that we see any improvement over the current trajectory.” He added that this was the first year in history where more people were getting health care from the government than the private sector, and that the erosion of the employer-based system had to be shored up by something that controls costs and covers more people.

Speaking about the issue with nominees, Obama said that, while he respected the Senate’s role to advise and consent, “qualified nominees have been held up despite having overwhelming support… That’s not advise and consent, that’s delay and obstruct.” He made note of the blanket hold, recently lifted, by Richard Shelby, and the 96-0 vote to confirm Martha Johnson to run the General Services Administration, which took 9 months. President Obama today asked Republican Congressional leaders to put a stop to all the holds on his nominees, and he said that if they persisted, “I will consider making several recess appointments during the upcoming recess.”

The President proceeded from the expectation that the Feb. 25 health care summit would actually take place, although he did not agree to any of the list of demands put forth by Republicans in their recent letter, particularly the idea of scrapping the bill entirely and starting over. He said that he’s starting from scratch only in the sense that he would be open to ideas that meet core goals of coverage expansion and cost containment. What he would not do, he said, is to agree to every single aspect of a Republican wish list for health care without getting them to vote for it. “Bipartisanship can’t be, I agree to all the things they believe in or want, and they agree to nothing that I believe in or want. That cannot be the price of bipartisanship … that’s not how it works in any other walk of life.”

It’s unclear how much more the President can concede on these points, anyway. The Senate health care bill is chock full of concessions to Republicans already. Presumably the idea of the meeting is to add on, or pretend to add on, one more layer of that, and then advance to a vote to get this done.

Obama said that the process of the last year had the effect of contaminating the substance of the bills. He thinks that a public airing of the relevant parts will actually increase public support in the process and the policy. In exchange, Republicans get a public showcase for their ideas.

He said that the White House has not refined the agenda for the health care summit, though he did say that he wanted to make sure the CBO would be available to answer questions. “Let’s establish some common facts,” the President said.

Other topics included energy, financial regulation, Iran’s nuclear program, and jobs.