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14 Political Races to Watch in 2014

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Photo Credit: Bob LairdIn the 2014 elections, Republicans need to net a six-seat pickup to retake control of the U.S. Senate. They have high hopes, but there is little room for error. In the House, Democrats need a net gain of 17 seats next year to gain majority control and return Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to the speaker’s chair. Here are seven key races to watch in each chamber:

SENATE

•ALASKA: In 2010, Tea Party candidate Joe Miller shocked the GOP by defeating incumbent Lisa Murkowski in a primary; she came back to win re-election as a write-in candidate. Now Miller is expected to be one of three candidates vying for the Republican nomination to challenge Mark Begich, the first-term Democratic incumbent. Other Republicans who could be strong candidates: Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell and Dan Sullivan, former head of the state’s natural resources department.

•LOUISIANA: Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu has been called vulnerable in each of her three prior Senate races, and her fourth run is no different. Louisiana regularly votes Republican in presidential years, and Landrieu’s support of the Affordable Care Act has not helped boost her popularity. Her opponent, Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, staunchly opposes the law although he introduced health care legislation while a state senator in Louisiana.

•ARKANSAS: Mark Pryor is a moderate Democrat hoping for a third term. His voting record on the Affordable Care Act in increasingly conservative Arkansas, coupled with a strong Republican challenge, may hamper that. Republicans have quickly coalesced around Tom Cotton, a young freshman congressman who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. This race will be a huge spend for partisans on both sides of the aisle.

•KENTUCKY: Americans are frustrated with Washington, and Mitch McConnell is one of its best-known faces. The five-term senator is facing a primary challenge from Tea Party candidate Matt Bevin and, if he survives, an Election Day challenge from Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. Major ad buys are already taking over the airwaves – eight months ahead of the primary.

Read more from this story HERE.

Democrat Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein Calls for ‘Major Review’ of NSA Spying and Says it’s a ‘Big Problem’ if Obama was Unaware

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Photo Credit: APThe U.S. Senate’s top foreign intelligence official said Monday in a scathing statement that she is ‘totally opposed’ to spying of the sort that has gotten the Obama administration into hot water this week.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who chairs the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, seemed miffed at the idea that she and her colleagues were out of the loop when the president’s men conducted surveillance on foreign leaders in Europe and Latin America.

And she said President Obama’s lack of knowledge about monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phones going back to 2002 posed ‘a big problem.’
So she’s tightening the leash.

‘The White House has informed me that collection on our allies will not continue, which I support,’ said Feinstein.

‘But as far as I’m concerned, Congress needs to know exactly what our intelligence community is doing. To that end, the committee will initiate a major review into all intelligence collection programs.’

Read more from this story HERE.

The Senate GOP’s Surrender

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Photo Credit: National Review House Republicans had a joke in the mid-1990s that the Democrats were their opponents, but the Senate was the enemy. Today’s House Republicans are beginning to develop the same sentiment — but this time, it’s not a joke.

When Representative Paul Ryan last week used the pages of the Wall Street Journal to suggest a way out of the shutdown/debt-ceiling morass, conservatives complained that Ryan’s column did not even mention Obamacare. Yet now Ryan himself, less than a week after some conservatives accused him of sandbagging their efforts, is complaining that Senate Republicans are sandbagging his own compromise proposal just as it seemed to be gaining traction.

Conservatives were right about Ryan, and Ryan is right about the Senate. The Senate’s apostasy, though, appears substantially worse.

At least Ryan’s proposal aimed to accomplish conservative goals: long-term savings, entitlement reform, new limits on the coddling of federal employees, and a simplified tax code with lower corporate rates. Its deliberate refusal to include even the slightest nick in Obamacare’s edifice provided evidence that Ryan is far from averse to disappointing conservatives — but at least he could claim to be keeping his eye on the long-term goal of greater fiscal responsibility.

Nothing like that can be said about the Senate plan whose details began to emerge on Saturday. It would essentially forfeit all leverage associated with both the debt ceiling and the annual appropriations process by providing a largely “clean” spending resolution through March while raising the debt ceiling enough to last through January. The only “concession” it would extract from the Left would be a two-year delay — not even a repeal but merely a delay — in the medical-device tax. The full repeal of this tax already enjoys majority support in both houses of Congress, and Barack Obama has indicated it is not central to his health-insurance Leviathan.

Read more from this story HERE.

Senate-Crafted Syria Resolution Riddled with Loopholes for Obama (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Senators on Wednesday tried to write a tight resolution authorizing President Obama to strike Syria under very specific circumstances, but analysts and lawmakers said the language still has plenty of holes the White House could use to expand military action well beyond what Congress appears to intend.

“Wiggle room? Plenty of that,” said Louis Fisher, scholar in residence at the Constitution Project and former long-time expert for the Congressional Research Service on separation of powers issues.

Writing the actual language to empower and constrain Mr. Obama is proving to be a difficult task, with the key authors being pulled in various directions.

Some of the drafters’ colleagues want to give the president broad latitude for ongoing strikes that not only target Syrian President Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons, but also aids the rebels seeking to overthrow him. Other lawmakers, though, want the most limited of action — a strike designed only to make sure the Assad regime can’t deploy its chemical weapons again.

The resolution drafted by Sens. Robert Menendez and Bob Corker, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, grants Mr. Obama power “to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in a limited and tailored manner against legitimate military targets in Syria” — but only in relation to that nation’s weapons of mass destruction.

Read more from this story HERE.

Senate Passes Student Loan Plan

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Photo Credit: APA plan to restore lower interest rates on most college loans won Senate approval Wednesday, despite objections from a bloc of Democrats who warned it could ultimately increase the cost of a degree for many students.

The legislation, which is supported by President Obama and is expected to swiftly pass the House, would reinstate a market-based approach for calculating rates, tying them to the 10-year Treasury note. The new rate for undergraduate Stafford loans would be about 3.8% this year, slightly above the rate that expired July 1.

The final vote was 81-18. Sixteen Democrats, joined by Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), voted no.

A market-based system had been in place until 2006, when the rate was fixed at 6.8%. It was later gradually reduced to 3.4%.

Democrats successfully mounted an election-year campaign in 2012 to extend that lower rate for an additional year. As rates were set to return to 6.8% this year, congressional Democrats pushed for another temporary extension. But they found their position weakened by a White House budget plan that supported a return to a market-based plan.

Read more from this story HERE.

Murkowski and Other RINO’s Lose Filibuster Fight – Badly

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Photo Credit: APBy Wall Street Journal. Senate Majority Leader Rich Trumka, er, Harry Reid held a gun to the head of Republicans on the filibuster, Republicans blinked, and President Obama and the AFL-CIO will now get their nominees confirmed for the cabinet and especially a legal quorum for the National Labor Relations Board.

Cut through all the procedural blather and that’s the essence of the Senate’s “deal” Tuesday over the 60-vote filibuster rule. While Democrats didn’t formally pull the trigger of the “nuclear option” to allow a mere majority vote to confirm nominees, they have now established a de facto majority-vote rule. Any time Democrats want to do so, they can threaten to pull the majority trigger.

Republicans might as well acknowledge this new reality, even if it means admitting defeat in this round. GOP Senators should state clearly for the record that the next time there is a GOP President and a Democratic Senate minority wants to block an appointment with a filibuster, fuhgedaboutit. Majority rule will prevail.

Otherwise Republicans will be conceding that the filibuster remains the rule—except when Democrats say it isn’t. Democrats would be able to use the filibuster to block confirmation of GOP nominees the way they did John Bolton for U.N. Ambassador during the Bush Presidency, but Republicans couldn’t return the favor. Bottom line: This week Democrats killed the filibuster against executive-branch appointees when the same party holds the White House and Senate.

They did so, moreover, to serve AFL-CIO chief Trumka, who all but ordered Mr. Reid to threaten the nuclear option. Big Labor desperately wants a quorum of at least three National Labor Relations Board nominees to keep issuing pro-union orders that have become the NLRB’s standard operating procedure in the Obama years. Today there are only three board members and Chairman Mark Pearce is set to resign on August 27. Read more from this story HERE.

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Compromise, Senate GOP Style

By Daniel Horowitz. Who could have predicted the outcome of the latest filibuster imbroglio in the Senate? Republicans paid the full ransom. What else is new?

Once again, Mitch McConnell outsourced his leadership position to the McCain-Graham duo. He tapped them, along with Bob Corker and Roger Wicker – all from solid red states – to negotiate a compromise with Reid and Schumer over the filibuster and executive nominations. What could go wrong?

The outcome produced a compromise similar to the deals the Israelis cut with the Palestinians. In other words, it was all one-sided. Republicans agreed to allow Richard Cordray to direct the Consumer Financial Protection Board, even though he was originally appointed illegally. The following senators voted for cloture:

Ayotte (NH)
Blunt (MO)
Chambliss (GA)
Coats (IN)
Collins, S. (ME)
Corker (TN)
Flake (AZ)
Graham, L. (SC)
Hatch (UT)
Hoeven (ND)
Isakson (GA)
Johanns (NE)
Kirk (IL)
McCain (AZ)
Murkowski, L. (AK)
Portman (OH)
Wicker (MS)

Read more from this story HERE.

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Richard Cordray vote a leaves GOP at a loss

By MJ Lee, Kate Davidson and Kevin Cirilli. For almost two years, Senate Republicans have insisted they would block anyone from being confirmed as head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without major changes in how the agency conducts its business.

On Tuesday, Republicans relented and agreed to allow Richard Cordray to be confirmed as the bureau’s leader. The vote was 66-34.

And in the end, what do Republicans have to show for their two-year fight? Pretty close to nothing — which raises questions about why it took so long to strike a deal and highlighting how poisonous the debates over presidential nominations had become in the Senate leading up to this week.

“This shows the danger of overplaying your hand,” said Jaret Seiberg, an analyst with Guggenheim Partners who has followed the debate closely. “By not dealing when they had a hand to play, the Republicans get nothing out of this.”

Republicans defended their strategy, insisting their effort was not futile because they were able to raise important questions about whether the CFPB, a pillar of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, has too much power. Read more from this story HERE.

Hardcore, Constitutionalist Lawmaker: Time to Sue Obama Over Amnesty

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmorePressure is mounting on the House of Representatives to pass the Senate immigration bill, but Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, says the Senate plan is unconstitutional and is not nearly focused enough on border security.

House Republicans met Wednesday to get a sense of where the members stand on immigration and what the GOP strategy should be.

Rep. Stockman told WND Republicans don’t feel much pressure to pass the Senate bill. He said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has not submitted the bill to the House because he knows the GOP believes it’s unconstitutional.

“The bill is unconstitutional because Article 1, Section 7, says quite clearly that all taxes are to be started in the House, not in the Senate,” he said. “The thing is loaded with taxes, loaded with pork, so Harry Reid to my knowledge has never sent it over to the House.”

The congressman said if Reid does submit it, the House GOP will request a point of order on the alleged constitutional violation. He believes that would be followed by the House “blue-slipping” the bill.

Read more from this story HERE.

Palin: Kelly Ayotte Flip-Flopped on Amnesty Bill, Should Face Primary Challenge

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Three years ago, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin backed Kelly Ayotte in a very hotly contested Republican primary for the Senate. Palin said that Ayotte was “Granite Grizzly” and the endorsement was a key reason why the powerful tea party support in 2010 was split between Ayotte and a primary opponent she barely defeated.

Now Palin feels differently about Ayotte. In fact, in an radio interview she suggested that Ayotte, now in the Senate, should face a primary over her “flip-flop” on immigration, as Palin put it.

“I think that every politician should be held accountable for breaking their campaign promises. Kelly Ayotte, bless her heart, she had on her website that her top immigration priority would be to secure the border. ‘No excuses’ is her quote. No excuses,” Palin said on Fox News radio to host John Gibson. “And she was absolutely against amnesty and yet Kelly Ayotte and Marco Rubio and all the others who had said that border security must come first before any talk about immigration reform they turned their back on the American public, so why should they not be held accountable?”

Gibson, the radio host, then pushed Palin, asking if Republicans should deny Rubio or Ayotte of “major office”…

“I think that they should be challenged,” Palin said

Read more from this story HERE.

Wisconsin Senate Descends into Chaos During Debate Over Abortion Bill (+video)

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Photo Credit: Raw Story

The debate over a bill requiring women to undergo an ultrasound procedure before being permitted to have an abortion resulted in an explosive shouting match on the floor of the Wisconsin Senate Wednesday.

State Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D) began by reading various letters from her constituents complaining about the adverse affects the proposed legislation may have on women and victims of rape.

Vinehout’s argument was rebutted by her Republican colleague state Sen. Mary Lazich, who pointed out that victims of rape and incest are exempted in the anti-abortion legislation. She dismissed Vinehout’s argument as “theatrics”…

“They make that decision, it’s over! It’s over in a few minutes,” she said. “And then later on they can live with the fact that they terminated their pregnancy and it was the best thing for them or they killed their child and they made a horrific decision and they regret it and they wish they never would have done it.”

Following Lazich’s comments, Senate President Mike Ellis ( R) called for a vote on the bill despite efforts by Senate Democrats to extend the debate. The move resulted in chaos on the Senate floor.

See what happened here:

Read more from this story HERE.

Chris Christie’s Lautenberg Dilemma Is 2013-as-2016 All Over Again

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Photo Credit: AP

By Elspeth Reeve. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie can name a successor for Frank Lautenberg, who died at the age of 89 on Monday, becoming the 299th Senator to pass away in office. But it’s yet another moment when what’s good for Christie in 2013 might not be good for him in 2016. Christie, after all, is a Republican running a state that voted for President Obama by almost 18 points. “Replacing a Democrat with a Democrat and then saying the voters should decide what happens next in November would no doubt be very well-received by Democrats and moderates,” The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan writes. But that would mean Republicans who are already annoyed with Christie and his Obama-hugging antics would disown him.

To understand the difficult position Christie’s in, look at these two tweets: “What lucky Democrat will Democrat Chris Christie appoint to Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s seat?” conservative thriller author Brad Thor asks. Salon’s Joan Walsh adds: “Hey Dem donors giving to Chris Christie: will you rethink if he picks a Republican to replace Lautenberg?” Read more from this story HERE.

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Major Democratic donors flock to Christie

By Salvador Rizzo. Gov. Chris Christie is cashing in donations from top Democratic fundraisers and other traditionally liberal donors across the country, even nabbing the support of a handful of rainmakers aligned with President Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Star-Ledger review of state and federal records shows.

The checks are flying into the Republican governor’s war chest from all sorts of unlikely places — the hedge fund run by liberal billionaire George Soros, for example, and the politically progressive halls of the University of California, Berkeley.

The nascent support from Democratic donors is an early sign of Christie’s fundraising prowess in a potential run for the White House in 2016, experts and Democratic donors said, and dovetails with recent polls showing him gaining popularity nationally among Democrats and independents. Read more from this story HERE.

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Christie faces tricky task in filling N.J. seat

By Dave Boyer. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s options for appointing a replacement for the late Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg include Tom Kean Jr., minority leader of the state senate and son of the former governor.

The Republican bench in New Jersey, a blue state, isn’t particularly deep and Mr. Kean would have the advantage of name recognition if he wanted to run for a full term. He won the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2006 but was defeated in the general election by Democrat Bob Menendez.

But there’s also a potential problem — there’s friction between Mr. Christie and Mr. Kean.

The governor “does not like Kean Jr.,” said a New Jersey political operative familiar with the governor’s thinking.

Among the governor’s other options are Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, and Joe Kyrillos, a Christie ally whom the GOP nominated for the Senate in 2012. Read more from this story HERE.