By ERIC LIPTON and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican, toured a prince’s vineyard and castle in Liechtenstein and spent an afternoon at a ski resort in the Alps — all at the expense of a group of European companies.

Representative Danny K. Davis, an Illinois Democrat, got the dignitary treatment when a big donor flew him to Inner Mongolia to lobby for a new medical supplies factory in rural China.

And Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, on another privately sponsored trip, stayed at the historic King David Hotel in Jerusalem and attended a gala party near the Western Wall as part of a weeklong conference that lobbyists and executives paid as much as $18,500 to attend.

Despite changes intended to curb Congressional junkets, some lawmakers and even their families continue to take trips hosted by private groups and companies that revel in their access to Washington power brokers.

An examination by The New York Times of 1,150 trips shows that some of them bent or broke rules adopted in 2007 to limit corporate influence in Washington. Others exploited glaring loopholes in the guidelines, enacted with much fanfare after scandals involving the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

While lobbyists are not supposed to pay for a lawmaker’s travel, for example, Mr. Sensenbrenner’s $14,708 trip to Liechtenstein and Germany in 2009 was organized by a nonprofit group whose president is a lobbyist. It was underwritten by European companies that, in many cases, lobby in the United States.

Another rule limits travel paid for by companies employing lobbyists to just two nights. This forced Mr. Davis to make a quick turnaround when he flew to China this year. He changed clothes in a van on a highway before meeting with officials there.

Mr. Davis said he was exhausted by the end of his journey. He said he saw nothing wrong with a businessman and big financial contributor flying him to help close a private business deal.

“He’s a guy that I really admire,” Mr. Davis said of Willie Wilson, president of Omar Medical Supplies, which got its factory. Still, Mr. Davis acknowledged, “It’s not going to create jobs in Illinois.”

The rules are filled with odd contradictions. Lobbyists themselves are not allowed to pay for trips, but their corporate clients can. And lobbyists are permitted to give huge sums to nonprofit groups that can sponsor travel. They can also travel to destinations and meet the lawmakers once they get there, though they cannot go on the same plane.

Seizing on the loopholes, lobbyists and the companies that employ them are still underwriting trips by dozens of members of Congress, particularly those in the House, the Times review shows. The companies finance much of this travel indirectly, getting around the spirit of the rules by giving money to nonprofits, some of which seem to exist largely to sponsor trips. In fact, the rules may have had the unexpected effect of obscuring who is actually paying for a lawmaker’s junket.

“If a nonprofit group is essentially just being used as a pass-through entity for corporate players that otherwise could not sponsor an event, that is a fraud and that is not allowed,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat who leads the House ethics committee.

The rules have had some real impact. Privately financed travel for members of the House has dropped to fewer than 400 trips in the first 10 months of this year, compared with 1,100 in the same period in 2005. The drop in Senate travel has been even greater: Senators took just 24 trips in the first 10 months of this year, compared with 189 in the same period in 2005. Democrats and Republicans traveled proportionate to their numbers in Congress.

The universe of regular sponsors has been reduced to fewer than a dozen big foundations and associations, the Times analysis shows. Many of the trips are sponsored by organizations with ideological and policy agendas, rather than commercial interests. Most of those rely, at least in part, on corporate financing to underwrite trips for lawmakers.

Their internal policies vary widely in how they seek to insulate the trips from corporate influence. The Aspen Institute, for instance, tries to block corporate influence-peddling by barring lobbyists from its events and declining corporate contributions for the trips, a spokesman said.

But not all groups are as strict. Some nonprofits take money from major corporations with lobbyists, like Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor, Eli Lilly, the drug company, and Volkswagen, the automaker, to sponsor events for lawmakers during the trips.

When Mr. Sensenbrenner and Representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia, traveled to Liechtenstein in February to learn about its banking system, they attended business meetings. But they and their wives also visited the Malbun ski resort, stayed at a first-class hotel and toured the wine cellar at the prince of Liechtenstein’s historic vineyard, according to their itinerary.

The cost of the trip — $14,708 for Mr. Sensenbrenner and his wife alone — was picked up by a nonprofit group called the International Management and Development Institute. Just since 2005, International Management has paid for 34 trips to Europe for lawmakers and staff members, totaling more than $400,000, including five for Mr. Sensenbrenner to Germany, Liechtenstein, Norway and France.

The trips were largely financed by contributions from companies like Deutsche Bank and Lufthansa, which have American lobbyists and therefore would have been prohibited from directly paying for the weeklong trips. Top executives at these companies were often offered special meetings with the lawmakers. The president of the institute, Don Bonker, is a Washington lobbyist, whose firm, APCO Worldwide, has served as a registered agent for the German government.

Foreign agents are also prohibited from sponsoring travel.

Because International Management is an American nonprofit and does not retain a lobbyist, none of the rules applied. As a result, a group of big corporations were able to indirectly pay for a weeklong visit to Europe, and their executives got to meet with powerful lawmakers.

Mr. Bonker, the lobbyist, and Mr. Sensenbrenner, the congressman, said they stuck to the rules, and that the trips had been approved beforehand by the House ethics staff.

“Many organizations that are seeking to educate Congressional leaders on a range of topics receive money from a variety of sources to better enable them to do so, without any cost to taxpayers,” Wendy Riemann, a spokeswoman for Mr. Sensenbrenner, said in a written statement.

Like International Management, the Franklin Center for Global Policy Exchange seems to exist largely to sponsor Congressional travel. The group’s Web site lists an “honorary” board made up of members of Congress, but it does not disclose a separate board that includes lobbyists from the nuclear power and liquor industries, among others. Nor does it disclose that private executives and lobbyists pay to attend the events the group sponsors for members of Congress in the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Another company, Doheny Global, of Manhattan, used lawmakers as a lure to attract paying attendance at a meeting in Israel.

Last year Doheny, an energy and real estate investment firm, invited private equity and energy industry executives to pay $18,500 per person to hobnob with “an elite cadre” of public and private powerbrokers, including Ms. Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida congresswoman. Doheny paid to fly her and her husband in for the weeklong gathering in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and she appeared in a promotional video calling Irwin G. Katsof, the company’s founder, “a matchmaker for business” who “enjoys great credibility in Congress.”

Ms. Ros-Lehtinen declined to comment on the trips.

The invitation to the 2008 event, which also featured Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, came from a host committee that included registered lobbyists. Depending on how much of a role that committee had in setting up the event, the trip may have violated House rules, which prohibit lawmakers from taking multiday trips “planned, organized, requested or arranged by a lobbyist.”

It takes a little digging to find the role big companies with lobbyists played in sponsoring the Congressional Black Caucus’s four-day 2008 conference at a casino resort in Tunica, Miss.

Each of the 14 House members submitted a detailed agenda for approval to the ethics committee. It listed social events like a golf outing, but it also included serious topics like health care and global warming.

But there is something missing from the agenda sent to the ethics committee.

A different copy handed out to the caucus members is much the same — except for the line under each event that names a corporate sponsor. A workshop focused on health care included the words “Sponsored by Eli Lily,” the big drug company with a huge stake in health care legislation. Edison Electric Institute, an association of power plant owners, hosted the global warming seminar. Wal-Mart sponsored a clinic to teach lawmakers and other attendees how to skeet shoot; after the lessons came a competition sponsored by the International Longshoremen’s Association.

William A. Kirk, the Washington lawyer and lobbyist who helped arrange the weekend, said the sponsor companies did not directly pay for the events or member travel. They became sponsors by contributing to the general fund of the caucus’s Political Education and Leadership Institute, which is a nonprofit. Money from the general fund, however, paid for hotels and other accommodations. Members were responsible for their own flights, though some used campaign funds.

The House ethics committee is separately investigating another event attended by members of the caucus, a November 2008 conference at a resort on St. Maarten in the Caribbean, which included corporate sponsors like American Airlines and Citigroup.

Mr. Davis’s trip to China was not so luxurious. But it may be the clearest example of a company openly paying a lawmaker to travel on purely commercial business.

Willie Wilson, the owner of Omar Medical Supplies, wanted to build a factory to make latex gloves to sell in the United States, and he thought Mr. Davis could help him negotiate better terms with the Chinese. Omar is not located in Mr. Davis’s district, but Mr. Wilson is a longtime friend who, along with his wife, has contributed $37,000 to Mr. Davis’s political causes in the last decade. Omar had also hired Richard Boykin, Mr. Davis’s former chief of staff, as lobbyist in Washington. And in between two trips to China Mr. Davis took in 2008 and 2009, Mr. Boykin held a fund-raiser for him.

The fact that Mr. Boykin actually traveled with Mr. Davis on the 2008 trip may have violated the rules, since lobbyists are not permitted to accompany members on trips.

Local officials, photographers, and a woman in traditional Mongolian garb greeted the visitors with flowers and gifts, before Mr. Wilson affixed his signature to the joint venture with Mr. Davis looking on. Mr. Wilson said Mr. Davis’s presence helped seal the deal.

“It was good to have a United States congressman speaking highly of you,” he said.

Ron Nixon and Derek Willis contributed research.

OLYMPIA – A Seattle-based atheists group asked state officials Friday for permission to display a placard outdoors on the Capitol campus over the holidays.

Jerry Schiffelbein, the treasurer for Seattle Atheists and an activist in other “free-thought” groups that advocate separation between church and state, said the sign’s message is less provocative than those that the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation put up last year.

The proposed 18-by-30-inch sign says, “In this holiday season let us remember that kindness, charity and goodwill transcend belief, creed or religion.”

The request to put up the sign came the day that state officials lit up a 48-foot holiday tree inside the domed Capitol rotunda, a yearly tradition now entirely under state sponsorship. The evening event featured Gov. Chris Gregoire; Army Staff Sgt. Stephanie McDowell, who recently returned from Iraq; and a children’s chorale.

The atheists’ request – just like two requests to display a Jewish menorah Thursday through Dec. 19 – will be considered under the state policy adopted after last December’s ruckus over holiday displays inside the Capitol, Department of General Administration spokesman Steve Valandra said Friday. He expects a decision on the requests Monday.

“We thought we would get more requests. There is still time,” he said.

Last December, the GA declared a moratorium because it had about a dozen requests from groups wanting to put up displays, and a third-floor area for displays was getting crowded. The GA had approved a half-dozen of the requests, including a Nativity set, an atheist placard that mocked religion as superstition, Christian placards that mocked atheism, and a 9-foot menorah.

Requests halted by the moratorium included a “Festivus” pole from the mock holiday celebrated on the TV show “Seinfeld,” a “flying spaghetti monster,” and one from a Kansas church that assails homosexuality.

Before the controversy ended, someone stole the atheists’ placard. Thousands of complaints flooded the governor’s office and the GA after a national television commentator condemned the state for allowing the atheists’ display near the Nativity scene.

The GA has approved one display request so far this year. It was one of two submitted by Chabad Jewish Discovery Center in Olympia for a 9-foot menorah. The approved request is for Sylvester Park, a state-owned property in downtown Olympia; the other is for a menorah next to the Tivoli Fountain on the campus lawn.

WASHINGTON — After months of focusing on Afghanistan and health care, President Obama turned his attention on Thursday to the high level of joblessness, but offered no promise that he could do much to bring unemployment down quickly even as he comes under pressure from his own party to do more.

At a White House forum, scheduled for the day before the government releases unemployment and job loss figures for November, Mr. Obama sought new ideas from business executives, labor leaders, economists and others. Confronted with concern that his own ambitious agenda and the uncertain climate it has created among employers have slowed hiring, the president defended his policies.

Mr. Obama said he would entertain “every demonstrably good idea” for creating jobs, but he cautioned that “our resources are limited.”

The president said he would announce some new ideas of his own next week. One of those, he indicated when he participated in a discussion group on clean energy, would be a program of weatherization incentives for homeowners and small businesses modeled on the popular “cash for clunkers” program.

On Capitol Hill, Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, told senators at a sometimes testy hearing on his confirmation for a second term, “Jobs are the issue right now.”

“It really is the biggest challenge, the most difficult problem that we face right now,” Mr. Bernanke added, citing in particular the inability of many credit-worthy small businesses to get bank loans.

In the House, where lawmakers are particularly sensitive to the employment issue since they all face re-election next year, Democratic leaders on Thursday were finishing work on a jobs bill for debate this month. It would extend expiring federal unemployment benefits for people who have been out of jobs for long periods, and provide up $70 billion for roads and infrastructure projects and for aid to small business. House Democrats plan to pay for the plan by drawing from the $700 billion fund set up last year to bail out financial institutions.

The House also passed legislation on Thursday that would freeze the federal tax on large estates at its current level. Under current law, the tax would have disappeared entirely next year, only to reappear at much higher levels in 2011. The vote highlighted the raft of fiscal issues facing the administration and Congress and the tension between addressing budget deficits and taking potentially expensive actions to help the economy.

Mr. Obama’s jobs event captured the political and policy vise now squeezing the president and his party at the end of his first year. It came on the eve of a government report that is expected to show unemployment remaining in double digits, and two days after Mr. Obama emphasized as he ordered 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that he did not want the financial burdens of the war to overwhelm his domestic agenda.

Both the domestic and the military demands on the administration are raising costs unanticipated when Mr. Obama took office, even as pressures build to arrest annual budget deficits now exceeding $1 trillion. Those demands are also eroding the broad support that swept Mr. Obama into office, especially among independent voters, and igniting a guns-versus-butter budget debate in his own party not seen since the Vietnam era.

While liberals are calling for ambitious job-creating measures along the lines of the New Deal and Republicans want to scale back government spending programs, Mr. Obama talked at the White House on Thursday of limited programs that he suggested could provide substantial bang for the buck when it comes to job creation. Among them was the weatherization program.

Called “cash for caulkers,” it would enlist contractors and home-improvement companies like Home Depot — whose chief executive was on the panel — to advertise the benefits, much as car dealers did for the clunkers trade-ins this year.

Yet that relatively modest proposal underscores the limits of the government’s ability to affect a jobless recovery with the highest unemployment rate in 26 years — and Mr. Obama acknowledged as much. Just as he said in Tuesday’s Afghanistan speech that the nation could not afford an open-ended commitment there, especially when the economy is so weak and deficits so high, Mr. Obama emphasized at the jobs forum that the government had already done a lot with his $787 billion economic stimulus package and the $700 billion financial bailout that he inherited.

“I want to be clear: While I believe the government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector,” he told his audience, which included executives and some critics from American Airlines, Boeing, Nucor, Google, Walt Disney and FedEx.

Mr. Obama told the chief executives that he wanted to know: “What’s holding back business investment and how we can increase confidence and spur hiring? And if there are things that we’re doing here in Washington that are inhibiting you, then we want to know about it.”

He got a blunt answer from Fred P. Lampropoulos, founder and chief of Merit Medical Systems Inc., a medical device manufacturer in the Salt Lake City area. Mr. Lampropoulos said some in his discussion group agreed that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”

The president acknowledged, “This is a legitimate concern,” one that he and his advisers had discussed before he took office.

But Mr. Obama said he had decided that “if we keep on putting off tough decisions about health care, about energy, about education, we’ll never get to the point where there’s a lot of appetite for that.”

The argument that Democrats’ ambitions are unnerving business is one that Republicans have been making lately, and it was prominent Thursday when House Republican leaders held a competing round table on jobs with conservative economists.

“The American people are asking, ‘Where are the jobs?’ but all they are getting from Washington Democrats is more spending, more debt and more policies that hurt small businesses,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader.

But W. James McNerney Jr., the head of the Boeing Company, said in an interview after the president’s forum, “If you ask me what creates the uncertainty I’m dealing with, it’s more the state of the economy.”

The administration’s domestic agenda is a problem only to the extent that it “is crowding out their attention” to the economy, Mr. McNerney said, adding, “I think the purpose of today was to convince us that there’s at least a half-pivot in the other direction.”

When Mike Huckabee, a former Southern Baptist minister then serving as governor of Arkansas, granted clemency to Maurice Clemmons nine years ago, he cited his age: Mr. Clemmons was 16 when he began the crime spree for which he was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison.

Now, Mr. Clemmons is being sought as the suspect in the killing of four uniformed police officers, execution-style, on Sunday as they sat in a coffee shop near Tacoma, Wash., writing reports.

Mr. Huckabee, now a Fox News talk-show host, has been leading the pack of possible Republican contenders for president in 2012. But the killings of the police officers are focusing renewed attention on his long-contentious record of pardoning convicts or commuting their sentences.

In a decade as governor beginning in 1996, Mr. Huckabee did so twice as many times as his three predecessors combined. He typically gave little explanation for individual pardons. But he spoke often of his belief in redemption, based on a strong religious belief that even criminals are capable of changing their lives and often deserve a second chance. He also raised concerns about the fairness of the Arkansas justice system.

The commutation of Mr. Clemmons’s sentence was routine enough that it failed to make a list of Mr. Huckabee’s 10 “most publicized” prison commutations compiled by an Arkansas newspaper in August 2004. And if it turns out to be a case in which a parole had gone bad, it will be difficult to pin responsibility solely on Mr. Huckabee, because many others made decisions that kept Mr. Clemmons out of prison.

Mr. Clemmons had been convicted for a series of burglaries and robberies that began in 1989, and would not have been eligible for parole until 2021. He applied for clemency in 2000, writing in a petition to Mr. Huckabee that he had simply fallen in with a bad crowd in a bad neighborhood as a teenager, and that he “had learned through the ‘school of hard knocks’ to appreciate and respect the rights of others.”

Mr. Huckabee commuted his sentence, making him eligible for immediate parole. Within six months, Mr. Clemmons violated the conditions of his parole, returning to prison in July 2001 for aggravated robbery. When he was paroled again by the state in 2004, the police in Little Rock served a warrant on him related to a 2001 robbery. But a lawyer for Mr. Clemmons argued that too much time had elapsed since the warrant was issued, and prosecutors dropped the charges.

Mr. Huckabee, who rode a brand of prairie populism to finish second in the Republican presidential primaries in 2008, granted more than 1,000 pardons or clemency requests as governor. As his reputation for granting clemency spread, more convicts applied. Aides said he read each file personally.

In most cases, he followed the recommendation of the parole board, but in several cases he overrode the objections of prosecutors, judges and victims’ families. And in several, he followed recommendations for clemency from Baptist preachers who had been longtime supporters.

Prosecutors told him he was ignoring his responsibility to explain to citizens why he was setting free convicted murderers and rapists. His response, some of them say, was to blame others and strike out against his critics — an off-note from a man they consider a gifted politician.

“Victims groups were pretty well ignored, along with boots-on-the-streets law enforcement and good citizens who sit on these juries,” said Larry Jegley, who objected to Mr. Clemmons’s clemency request as the prosecuting attorney for Pulaski County, where he was convicted.

Robert Herzfeld, then the prosecuting attorney of Saline County, wrote a letter to Governor Huckabee in January 2004, saying his policy on clemency was “fatally flawed” and suggesting that he should announce specific reasons for granting clemency. Mr. Huckabee’s chief aide on clemency wrote back: “The governor read your letter and laughed out loud. He wanted me to respond to you. I wish you success as you cut down on your caffeine consumption.”

“It was all a very personal issue for him,” said Mr. Herzfeld, who later sued successfully to overturn one of Mr. Huckabee’s clemency decisions, which would have set free a man convicted in a bludgeoning death. “It was always about how I was trying to get him or another prosecutor was trying to get him, not about how to do it right. He’s brilliant politically and very likable, but it seems like there’s a blind spot on this issue.”

With Mr. Clemmons, political consultants say Mr. Huckabee may have hit his Willie Horton moment

“As a front-runner, obviously with circumstances like this, it’s out there as a big issue,” said Ed Rollins, the manager of Mr. Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Mr. Huckabee survived a similar moment before, during the Iowa caucuses, when former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts criticized his judgment in the case of Wayne DuMond, a convicted rapist who raped and killed a woman 11 months after being paroled in Arkansas.

Mr. Huckabee said that he had opposed clemency, and that it had been his predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, who had made Mr. DuMond eligible for parole by reducing his sentence. “If anyone needs to get a Willie Horton out of it, it’s Jim Guy Tucker and the Democrat Party and it ain’t me,” he said to reporters at the time.

But Mr. Huckabee had come into office saying he intended to commute Mr. DuMond’s sentence. He later denied the request only as the state’s board granted Mr. DuMond parole. Members of the board later said they had been pressured by the governor.

Mr. Clemmons’s case packs more potency: the facts of Mr. Huckabee’s involvement in the clemency decision are less in dispute, and the crime has played over and over on national television.

“It’s the same issue yet again,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “The difference this time is that Governor Huckabee would start with greater visibility and higher in the polls, which always enhances and exacerbates any possible criticisms.”

Should he run, there are many prosecutors and victims’ advocates in Arkansas who say they are ready to argue to the national news media that this is just one of the cases where Mr. Huckabee used poor judgment and ignored an inmate’s history of criminal behavior in deciding for clemency. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Huckabee declined requests for an interview, but a statement from the “press team” on the Web site of his political action committee said that should Mr. Clemmons be found responsible for the shootings, “it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State.”

“He was recommended for and received commutation of his original sentence from 1990,” the statement said. “This commutation made him parole-eligible and he was then paroled by the parole board once they determined he met the conditions at that time.”

On Sunday, before the shooting, Mr. Huckabee sounded ambivalent on Fox News about running for president, saying he liked his role at the network and wanted to be sure that, unlike in 2008, he would receive support from the Republican establishment.

As the Senate tackles the health care bill that may be its most important domestic legislation in a generation, you might have expected thousands of citizens to descend on Capitol Hill to demonstrate, for or against. But the streets outside – and even the Senate floor – aren’t where the action is. The important parts of this debate have moved into the Senate’s back rooms. The great health care debate hasn’t been a triumph of mass politics on either side. Congress isn’t being stampeded by the public into passing a bill – and it’s not being stopped by the public from passing one either.

Instead, the debate has turned out to be a battle of old-fashioned special interests and parochialism. The most important players have been the insurance industry, the American Medical Association, labor unions and AARP, the senior-citizens lobby. As for parochialism, last week’s most blatant action may have been Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s insertion into the bill of a $100 million Medicaid bonus for Louisiana, whose senior senator, Mary Landrieu, has been one of the holdouts.

One reason for this resurgence of backroom politics is simple: Polls show the public to be fairly evenly divided on health care reform and understandably confused by its details. But there’s also a deeper reason. In modern American politics, with its professional lobbyists and millions of dollars in campaign advertising, public opinion isn’t always the most important thing.

For members of Congress who anticipate tough re-election campaigns, what’s most important is not what voters think of health care proposals today, but which interest groups will spend money in their states to shape voters’ perceptions next year. Groups on both sides, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the unions, have already announced millions of dollars in planned advertising spending to do just that.

When he ran for president last year, Barack Obama said he’d try to change that system, in part by keeping his gigantic grass-roots network of campaign supporters together as a new, populist force in the legislative battles to come. But that’s not what happened. Members of Congress and their aides say the Obama organization, rechristened Organizing for America, or OFA, after the campaign, has had negligible effect on the debate.

For most of the year, the group was hobbled by the fact that Obama didn’t have a clear proposal for it to support, beyond a general commitment to (almost) universal health insurance. It did make sure that reform supporters turned out for town-hall meetings over the summer, and it’s running some ads attacking Republican House members in districts that Obama won.

But doing much beyond that has proved difficult, primarily because the most important debate over health care is not between the two parties – Republicans decided early that their goal was simply to stop a bill – but among Democrats. And OFA, now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee, has carefully refrained from criticizing any Democratic incumbents. One of its biggest efforts this fall, instead, was organizing rallies and letter-writing campaigns to say “thank you” to House members who voted in favor of health care reform – lobbying with all the bite of a Hallmark greeting card.

OFA was also undercut by Obama’s own strategy for winning health care reform, which began by cutting deals with the most important interest groups – including, initially, the health insurance industry – not by mobilizing public pressure.

Obama’s choice of strategies may well turn out to have been good politics, especially on an issue as complex as health care. Well-funded, well-focused interest groups often wield power more effectively than the general public, even though the public has more at stake.

That’s not a new phenomenon in American politics, but it’s one Obama told his followers he wanted to change. If the president wins a health care bill, it will be a major victory. But he will have won the old-fashioned way, not by reinventing American politics. It will be evidence that Obama, an untraditional candidate, has turned out to be a very traditional president.

Doyle McManus is a Los Angeles Times columnist. He can be reached at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com.

Obama’s handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. The strategic review began in September. Again and again, the war council convened in the Situation Room. The president mulled an array of unappealing options. Next week, finally, he will tell the American public the outcome of all this strategizing.

“He’s establishing his decision-making process as being almost diametrically the opposite of the previous administration,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s chief of staff. Wilkerson, who teaches national security decision-making at George Washington University, says the Bush-Cheney style was “cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming, and extremely secretive.”

Stephen Wayne, who teaches about the presidency at Georgetown, said: “He’s not an instinctive decision-maker as Bush was. He doesn’t go with his gut, he thinks with his head, which I think is desirable.” Referring to the Afghanistan decision, Wayne said, “I don’t think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one.”

But to his critics, Obama’s prolonged Afghanistan review suggests weakness rather than wisdom. Former vice president Richard B. Cheney lobbed the “dithering” accusation last month. Then last week, former senator Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) said on his radio show that Obama has waited so long to decide on an Afghanistan strategy that the war is now lost. “The president does not have the will and determination to do what’s necessary to win it. His heart’s not in it, and never has been,” Thompson said.

Obama’s style has been attacked from his left flank as well. Liberals have zinged him as being too cautious, too much of a compromiser. Some of his supporters would like to see him show more fire in the belly and recapture the energy that propelled him to victory last year.

“I think the Obama we’ve seen as president is a very different Obama than we saw during the campaign. He doesn’t seem to be connected, he doesn’t seem to have the passion, he doesn’t seem to be conveying the grand and inspiring vision,” says the progressive historian Allan Lichtman of American University. “If you want to be a transformational president, you’ve got to take the risks.”

Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, says Obama has suffered from unrealistic expectations among those who put him in office. “They kind of were sold Utopia, and they bought it, and it didn’t happen,” he says. “People were comparing the candidate to Abraham Lincoln before he served a day of his presidency. Nobody can live up to that.”

Many jobs, many crises

As commander in chief, economist in chief, diplomat in chief and figurehead in chief, the president has a job description nearly as long as the tax code. He is in the Situation Room one night, holding a state dinner in a South Lawn tent the next — and pardoning a turkey in the Rose Garden the following morning. His portfolio of responsibilities covers much of the planet; no president has seen so many countries so fast. But critics are not satisfied. The reaction to his recent trip to Asia was, in effect, that he went all the way to China and came back with only a lousy T-shirt.

With multiple crises on his docket, the president has much to contemplate as he enters the holiday season. The economy has shown signs of growth and the stock market is up, but it’s a jobless recovery, unemployment is at the highest rate since he was in college, and there are fears of a double-dip recession. The dollar is down. The national debt is oceanic. Obama’s health-care plan is imperiled by the whims of a handful of lawmakers. His approval rating has dipped below 50 percent. Even once-Obama-friendly “Saturday Night Live” has taken to mocking him as a do-nothing president. This follows historical patterns: New presidents always experience a drop in popularity as the romance of the campaign trail gives way to the mundane bill-paying and grocery shopping of governance.

The public debate over Afghanistan has focused on whether Obama should authorize more troops. The actual decision is vastly more complicated. Whatever the president chooses to do, he must bring on board as many allies as possible, which means getting a buy-in from Congress, his Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the bean counters who budget military action, NATO, various dyspeptic European leaders, the generals in the theater, the troops on the ground, the sketchy Afghan leadership, the Pakistanis and so on. He must also sell his plan to the American people, convincing the right that he’s tough enough to fight and the left that he knows where the exit is.

Obama told Chip Reid of CBS News, “I think the American people understand that my job here is to get it right, and I’m less concerned about perceptions, about process, than I am at making sure that once a decision is made everybody understands it, everybody is on the same page, and we’re able to move forward with the support of the American people.”

‘A lot of different layers’

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked Monday if the president had anguished over the Afghanistan decision.

“I don’t know if he’s anguished through this process,” Gibbs said. “I just think the president understands that there are a lot of different layers to our involvement in Afghanistan, how it relates to the region, what its impact is on our forces, what its impact is on our fiscal situation.”

Obama discussed his professorial leadership style in a recent interview with U.S. News & World Report. He said he is not afraid of doubt and is comfortable with uncertainty: “Because these are tough questions, you are always dealing to some degree with probabilities. You’re never 100 percent certain that the course of action you’re choosing is going to work. What you can have confidence in is that the probability of it working is higher than the other options available to you. But that still leaves some uncertainty, which I think can be stressful, and that’s part of the reason why it’s so important to be willing to constantly reevaluate decisions based on new information.”

This past spring, Obama was asked by “60 Minutes” to describe the toughest decision in his first few months of office. He quickly said that it was the decision to deploy 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. The increase had been requested by military commanders during the previous administration. Obama signed off on it.

He noted the grave responsibility of sending young men and women into harm’s way. But he also expressed discomfort with the process.

“I think it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “But it’s a weighty decision, because we actually had to make the decision prior to the completion of a strategic review that we were conducting.”

No one can accuse him of rushing the decision this time around.

“We (should) wrap him in bacon and deep fry him at a state fair while Lee Greenwood stabs him in the face.”

Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” on confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

And seriously now, who doesn’t agree?

You’d have to be defective in your humanity not to. Mohammed plotted the greatest act of mass murder in American history. Who among us wouldn’t like a piece of this guy?

Indeed, if critics of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try him and his terrorist confederates in a New York City courtroom would be honest with themselves, they’d admit that this is what drives their condemnation, not questions of security, fears of acquittal or other obfuscatory concerns they’ve raised.

No, the baseline here is the understandable belief that these thugs, these gangsters of Islam, have no right to a trial, that the American legal system, with all its protections for the accused, all its rights and procedures and niceties, is more than they deserve.

Americans have always been ambivalent about the ability of our justice system to give bad people what they’ve got coming. That’s why the action movie almost always ends with the bad guy shot, impaled or fed into a wood chipper: Seeing him led away in handcuffs simply doesn’t impart the same visceral sense of just deserts.

But you have to wonder: Are our emotional needs the most important consideration here?

It’s worth remembering that even the architects of the greatest barbarism in history had their day in court. After burning away 11 million lives, the leaders of the Nazi regime found themselves facing not summary execution, but a trial before a military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany.

As prosecutor Robert Jackson put it: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.”

And when the trials were over and the verdicts delivered – death or imprisonment for most, three were acquitted – the New York Times editorialized as follows: “These sentences can neither atone for all the evil these men have brought into the world nor undo any part of it. But they help to assuage the conscience of mankind and to restore to honor the concept of the dignity of man which cannot be violated with impunity.”

Compare that with the Bush administration’s original, Supreme Court-rebuked vision of justice – minimal rights for the accused, torture allowed, the government’s thumb on justice’s scale – and maybe you’ll agree: we need this trial more than Mohammed does. For all its risks – and they are real – it offers a prize worth risking for: the promise of feeling like Americans again.

That feeling is arguably the most significant casualty of Sept. 11. On that day, we elevated a mob of stateless criminals, a mafia in cleric’s clothing, to the exalted level of rogue nation. But they were never that, never a threat to our national existence, lacked the forces to take even one square inch of American soil. What they could threaten – and take – was our sense of ourselves as a brave, reasonable and civilized people, inhabiting a nation of laws. They beckoned us into the mud with them, and we leapt.

It’s not the first time. Periodically, we have shed the burden of bravery, reason, civilization, laws. Always, it happens in moments of national stress, moments of overwhelming confusion, anger or fear, moments that make us prey to demons of expedience and moral compromise. Moments when we wonder if we can still afford to act like America.

But we face a band of bloodthirsty hoodlums whose dearest wish is to make us just like them. So maybe the better question is this:

Can we afford not to?

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

WASHINGTON — The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true.

But that happy situation, aided by ultralow interest rates, may not last much longer.

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The potential for rapidly escalating interest payouts is just one of the wrenching challenges facing the United States after decades of living beyond its means.

The surge in borrowing over the last year or two is widely judged to have been a necessary response to the financial crisis and the deep recession, and there is still a raging debate over how aggressively to bring down deficits over the next few years. But there is little doubt that the United States’ long-term budget crisis is becoming too big to postpone.

Americans now have to climb out of two deep holes: as debt-loaded consumers, whose personal wealth sank along with housing and stock prices; and as taxpayers, whose government debt has almost doubled in the last two years alone, just as costs tied to benefits for retiring baby boomers are set to explode.

The competing demands could deepen political battles over the size and role of the government, the trade-offs between taxes and spending, the choices between helping older generations versus younger ones, and the bottom-line questions about who should ultimately shoulder the burden.

“The government is on teaser rates,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates lower deficits. “We’re taking out a huge mortgage right now, but we won’t feel the pain until later.”

So far, the demand for Treasury securities from investors and other governments around the world has remained strong enough to hold down the interest rates that the United States must offer to sell them. Indeed, the government paid less interest on its debt this year than in 2008, even though it added almost $2 trillion in debt.

The government’s average interest rate on new borrowing last year fell below 1 percent. For short-term i.o.u.’s like one-month Treasury bills, its average rate was only sixteen-hundredths of a percent.

“All of the auction results have been solid,” said Matthew Rutherford, the Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary in charge of finance operations. “Investor demand has been very broad, and it’s been increasing in the last couple of years.”

The problem, many analysts say, is that record government deficits have arrived just as the long-feared explosion begins in spending on benefits under Medicare and Social Security. The nation’s oldest baby boomers are approaching 65, setting off what experts have warned for years will be a fiscal nightmare for the government.

“What a good country or a good squirrel should be doing is stashing away nuts for the winter,” said William H. Gross, managing director of the Pimco Group, the giant bond-management firm. “The United States is not only not saving nuts, it’s eating the ones left over from the last winter.”

The current low rates on the country’s debt were caused by temporary factors that are already beginning to fade. One factor was the economic crisis itself, which caused panicked investors around the world to plow their money into the comparative safety of Treasury bills and notes. Even though the United States was the epicenter of the global crisis, investors viewed Treasury securities as the least dangerous place to park their money.

On top of that, the Fed used almost every tool in its arsenal to push interest rates down even further. It cut the overnight federal funds rate, the rate at which banks lend reserves to one another, to almost zero. And to reduce longer-term rates, it bought more than $1.5 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and government-guaranteed securities linked to mortgages.

Those conditions are already beginning to change. Global investors are shifting money into riskier investments like stocks and corporate bonds, and they have been pouring money into fast-growing countries like Brazil and China.

The Fed, meanwhile, is already halting its efforts at tamping down long-term interest rates. Fed officials ended their $300 billion program to buy up Treasury bonds last month, and they have announced plans to stop buying mortgage-backed securities by the end of next March.

Eventually, though probably not until at least mid-2010, the Fed will also start raising its benchmark interest rate back to more historically normal levels.

The United States will not be the only government competing to refinance huge debt. Japan, Germany, Britain and other industrialized countries have even higher government debt loads, measured as a share of their gross domestic product, and they too borrowed heavily to combat the financial crisis and economic downturn. As the global economy recovers and businesses raise capital to finance their growth, all that new government debt is likely to put more upward pressure on interest rates.

Even a small increase in interest rates has a big impact. An increase of one percentage point in the Treasury’s average cost of borrowing would cost American taxpayers an extra $80 billion this year — about equal to the combined budgets of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.

But that could seem like a relatively modest pinch. Alan Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price, estimated that the Treasury’s tab for debt service this year would have been $221 billion higher if it had faced the same interest rates as it did last year.

The White House estimates that the government will have to borrow about $3.5 trillion more over the next three years. On top of that, the Treasury has to refinance, or roll over, a huge amount of short-term debt that was issued during the financial crisis. Treasury officials estimate that about 36 percent of the government’s marketable debt — about $1.6 trillion — is coming due in the months ahead.

To lock in low interest rates in the years ahead, Treasury officials are trying to replace one-month and three-month bills with 10-year and 30-year Treasury securities. That strategy will save taxpayers money in the long run. But it pushes up costs drastically in the short run, because interest rates are higher for long-term debt.

Adding to the pressure, the Fed is set to begin reversing some of the policies it has been using to prop up the economy. Wall Street firms advising the Treasury recently estimated that the Fed’s purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities pushed down long-term interest rates by about one-half of a percentage point. Removing that support could in itself add $40 billion to the government’s annual tab for debt service.

This month, the Treasury Department’s private-sector advisory committee on debt management warned of the risks ahead.

“Inflation, higher interest rate and rollover risk should be the primary concerns,” declared the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, a group of market experts that provide guidance to the government, on Nov. 4.

“Clever debt management strategy,” the group said, “can’t completely substitute for prudent fiscal policy.”

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted on Saturday to begin full debate on major health care legislation, propelling President Obama’s top domestic initiative over a crucial, preliminary hurdle in a formidable display of muscle-flexing by the Democratic majority.

“Tonight we have the opportunity, the historic opportunity to reform health care once and for all,” said Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and a chief architect of the legislation. “History is knocking on the door. Let’s open it. Let’s begin the debate.”

The 60-to-39 vote, along party lines, clears the way for weeks of rowdy floor proceedings that will begin after Thanksgiving and last through much of December.

The Senate bill seeks to extend health benefits to roughly 31 million Americans who are now uninsured, at a cost of $848 billion over 10 years.

The House earlier this month approved its health care bill by 220 to 215, with just one Republican voting in favor. That measure is broadly similar to the Senate legislation, but there are some major differences that would have to be resolved before a bill could reach Mr. Obama, and that would almost surely push the process into next year.

As the Democrats succeeded Saturday in uniting their caucus by winning over the last two holdouts, big disagreements remained, making final approval of the bill far from certain.

Two reluctant Democratic senators, Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, warned that their support for a motion to open debate did not guarantee that they would ultimately vote for the bill. Their remarks echoed previous comments by several other senators, including Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, and Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut.

Those comments made clear that more horse-trading lies ahead and that major changes might be required if the bill is to be approved. And it suggested that the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, who relied only on members aligned with his party to bring the bill to the floor, may yet have to sway one or more Republicans to his side to get the bill adopted.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said his party’s opposition would persist. “The battle has just begun,” he said.

In a rare ceremonial gesture reserved for major votes, senators cast their yeas and nays from their desks in the chamber, each one rising to voice his or her position. Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, was not present and did not vote.

After the vote, Mr. Reid said he understood that Ms. Landrieu was already working with two other Democratic senators, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware and Charles E. Schumer of New York, to see if they could devise a public insurance plan with broad appeal.

The White House issued a statement praising the vote. “The President is gratified that the Senate has acted to begin consideration of health insurance reform legislation,” his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said, adding that President Obama “looks forward to a thorough and productive debate.”

Mrs. Lincoln, who faces a tough re-election campaign next year and has in recent weeks been the target of millions of dollars in television advertising by both sides in the health care fight, said pointedly that she would not vote for the measure if it retained a government-run health insurance plan, known as the public option, to compete with private insurers. “Although I don’t agree with everything in this bill, I believe it is more important that we begin debate on how to improve the health care system for all Americans,” said Mrs. Lincoln, who was the last uncommitted Democrat, and whose speech, at about 2:30 p.m. Saturday, lifted a cloud of suspense that had hovered around the Capitol.

She added: “But let me be perfectly clear. I am opposed to a new government-administered health care plan as a part of comprehensive health insurance reform, and I will not vote in favor of the proposal that has been introduced by leader Reid as it is written.” But Senator Lieberman, who voted to take up the health care bill, said he was still staunchly opposed to a government-run plan. It is “a terrible idea,” he said.

Ms. Landrieu, whose support came after she won a provision that could be worth more than $100 million in additional federal aid for her financially troubled state, said, “I have decided there are enough significant reforms and safeguards in this bill to move forward, but much more work needs to be done.”

A parade of Democrats and Republicans spent Saturday laying out their arguments for and against the bill in floor speeches.

Mr. Reid, in a rousing closing speech given at his customary volume, which is barely audible, likened the health care bill to some of the most profound issues confronted by the Senate across history.

“Imagine if instead of debating either of the historic G.I. Bills — legislation that has given so many brave Americans the chance to brave college — if this body had stood silent,” Mr. Reid said. “Imagine if instead of debating the bills that created Social Security or Medicare, the Senate’s voices had been stilled. Imagine if instead of debating whether to abolish slavery, instead of debating whether giving women and minorities a right to vote, those who disagreed were muted, discussion was killed.”

With the Democrats nominally controlling 60 votes — the precise number needed to overcome the Republican attempt to stop the bill — the vote on Saturday evening was the biggest test yet of the Democrats’ resolve and of Mr. Reid’s ability to unite his fragile caucus. Mr. Reid faces a tough re-election fight next year.

The bill would expand health benefits by broadly expanding Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for low-income people, and by providing subsidies to help moderate-income people buy either private insurance or coverage under a new government-run plan, the public option. And it would impose a requirement that nearly all Americans obtain insurance or pay monetary penalties for failing to do so.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of the legislation would be more than offset by new taxes and fees and reductions in government spending, so that the bill would reduce future federal budget deficits by $130 billion through 2019.

Mr. Reid accused Republicans who opposed the legislation of “living in a different world.” He and several other Democrats also used their speeches to assail perceived abuses by private insurers. “The health insurance industry has an insatiable appetite for more profit,” Mr. Reid said.

Senate Republicans countered with an impassioned denunciation of the measure as an ill-conceived budget-busting expansion of government and a threat to the health and economic security of all Americans, especially the elderly.

The Republicans sought to portray the vote on Saturday — on whether to end debate on a motion to bring up the health bill — as tantamount to a vote on the bill itself, and to shake the confidence of Democrats who had wavered in recent days.

In his closing argument, just ahead of the vote, Mr. McConnell implored at least a single Democrat to vote no. “If we don’t stop this bill tonight,” he said, “the only debate we’ll be having is about higher premiums, not savings for the American people, higher taxes instead of lower costs, and cuts to Medicare rather than improving seniors’ care.”

“The American people are looking at the Senate tonight; they’re hoping we say no to this bill,” Mr. McConnell added moments later, holding up a single index finger. “All it would take,” he said, “is just one member of the other side of the aisle, just one, to give us an opportunity not to end the debate but to change the debate in the direction the American people would like us to go.”

Mr. McConnell warned of the political consequences for senators who voted to move ahead. “Senators who support this bill have a lot of explaining to do,” he said. “Americans know that a vote to proceed on this bill, to get on this bill, is a vote for higher premiums, higher taxes and massive cuts to Medicare.”

Republicans also said that the vote was a proxy for a larger dispute over abortion, because they said the bill did not sufficiently restrict the use of federal money for insurance covering abortions. Senator Mike Johanns, Republican of Nebraska, described the vote as “the key vote on abortion in the health care debate.”

Saturday night’s vote was required because Senate rules and precedent have long granted a right of virtually unlimited debate, or filibuster, to the minority that can be curtailed only by a supermajority vote of 60 senators to move ahead. Currently, there are 58 Democrats in the Senate and two independents who routinely align with them. If the Democrats had lost the vote, they could have tried again, presumably after changing the bill to try to attract more votes.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont assailed the Republicans as obstructionists on Saturday morning. “I will vote today to end the filibuster so the Senate can begin the historic debate to improve and reform our nation’s health insurance system,” he said. “Let’s not duck the debate, let the debate begin. Let’s not hide from the votes.”

While Democrats generally agree on the broad goals of the legislation, to cover the uninsured and to slow the growth in health care spending, there are potentially serious disagreements over any number of provisions that could sink the bill.

Ms. Landrieu, in her speech, methodically cataloged provisions of the bill that she liked and those that she said needed improvement.

Under the bill, she said, owners of small businesses would no longer face “volatile costs” for health insurance. In addition, she said, the bill would “encourage employers to move away from high-cost benefit plans” and shift some compensation to wages.

But more needed to be done to improve the bill, she argued, particularly to help small businesses and the self-employed. And she issued a stern warning about the public option, one of the most contentious features of the sweeping health care legislation.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

When the Senate begins floor debate on a health-care reform package this week, the outcome is almost certain to rest on decisions made by a handful of moderate Democrats.

None of those Democrats is feeling the heat as intensely as Sen. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), who has become emblematic of the improbable distance that health-care reform has traveled, and how far it still must go before becoming law.

Her vote and that of two other Democrats expressing serious reservations about the legislation — Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Mary Landrieu (La.) — will determine whether it will garner the 60 needed to break an all-but-certain Republican filibuster.

There are 60 members of the Democratic caucus but one, independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), has threatened to join a GOP filibuster if the final bill contains a government insurance plan, or “public option.” With only a single Republican, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, even considering backing the final product on the floor, the trio of Democratic centrists could make or break the reform effort.

And of those three, only Lincoln must face voters next year.

Hundreds of thousands of Lincoln’s constituents are low-income and lack insurance, the very kind of voters expected to benefit under the Senate bill. Lincoln, a second-term senator, helped write some of the legislation’s key provisions as a member of the Finance Committee, and her sometimes uncomfortable role near the center of the debate could cost her in culturally conservative Arkansas. Despite the potential benefits for many in her state, polls show her support weakening, and constituents are expressing doubts about the proposed overhaul.

The low-profile centrist is being pressed by both sides. Democratic activists are incensed that she has turned against the public option, an idea she once supported. Republicans are casting her cautious approach to the health-care debate in starkly political terms, saying that she is unwilling to put local interests above those of a president who lost the state by a resounding 20 percentage points.

“I want to be a check and balance on Barack Obama’s extreme agenda,” state Sen. Gilbert Baker, a front-runner for the GOP nomination, told reporters last week.

An Arkansas Poll published Nov. 5 found that Lincoln’s job-approval rating had dropped to 43 percent, from 54 percent a year ago. At least seven Republicans are vying to challenge her bid for a third term; Baker raised $500,000 in his first month as a candidate. And if she does not embrace the party line on the health issue, Lincoln could also face a Democratic primary challenger, along with a Green Party opponent in the general election.

“In some ways, there’s not a good vote on this,” said Sen. Mark Pryor (D), Arkansas’s junior senator, who coasted to reelection last year. “You’re going to have detractors on either side, no matter what you do. So I think in the end you have to what you think is right. And I think that’s what we’re all going to have to do.”

The first test for Lincoln could come as early as Friday, when the Senate will vote on whether to bring the bill to the floor. Lincoln told party leaders she would study the final product before committing either way.

“What people want is for us to take our time and not rush into something that we haven’t thought completely through,” she said, shrugging off the pressure as she hurried back to her office after a Senate vote last week.

Although Pryor supports the reform effort, another prominent Arkansan, Rep. Mike Ross (D), voted against the House bill.

“Most people support the need for health-insurance reform; they just think we can do it for less,” Ross said. “They really, as I do, support more choices. They’re just skeptical of a bill that takes 2,000 pages to accomplish that.”

Ross was reluctant to offer Lincoln advice, but acknowledged her predicament. “She represents the whole state. I just represent one-fourth of the state. I’d just be guessing.” But he added: “I think people fear the unintended consequences in a bill this massive.”

Democratic leaders expect Lincoln to stick with them on key procedural votes, but are less confident about winning her support on critical amendments — particularly on the contentious public option.

Lincoln’s record on a government insurance plan has drawn detractors on both sides. In July, she wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans. Options should include private plans as well as a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals as those of a public plan.”

By Sept. 1, she had changed her mind. “I would not support a solely government-funded public option,” Lincoln said at an event in Little Rock. “We can’t afford that.”

In recent weeks, she also has raised concerns about both potential compromise approaches — one that would allow states to “opt out” of a public plan that Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is expected to include in the Senate bill, and a proposal by Snowe, the only Republican still at the negotiating table, to create a public option as a fallback if private insurers do not offer reasonable rates.

In the process, Lincoln has riled liberal groups including MoveOn.org, which is targeting her with radio ads, direct mail and rallies outside two of her Arkansas offices. Perhaps more ominously, MoveOn — working with the liberal group Democracy for America — has amassed $3.5 million in pledges to fund primary challenges against any Democratic senator who sides with Republicans to block an up-or-down vote on a bill with a public option.

“We think it’s really important for her to see there are negative political consequences to being on the wrong side of this issue,” said Ilyse Hogue, MoveOn’s campaign director. “There’s no arguing she’s in a conservative state, but she’s going to face a tough election no matter what, and she can’t do it without the base. These are the activists, the people who knock on doors, and she is really running the risk of alienating them.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is also documenting each of Lincoln’s comments on health care to build a case against her. The Republican National Committee released a Web video this week that compares her public-option remarks to Sen. John F. Kerry’s “I actually voted for it before I voted against it” line about Iraq war funding.

For GOP leaders, the best strategy for defeating the Senate bill is to sow doubts among vulnerable Democrats, convincing them that Reid is leading them off a political cliff.

“There’s a great effort under way here to convince their members to ignore public opinion” on health-care reform, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters last week. “I hope it will not be lost on our Democratic friends where the public is, how the public feels about this measure. They’re speaking increasingly loudly that they do not think it ought to pass.”

Recent polls suggest that reform is a difficult sell in Lincoln’s home state. The Arkansas Poll, conducted in mid-October by the University of Arkansas’s Survey Research Center, found that 39 percent of voters support a public option and 48 percent oppose the idea. And respondents split about evenly on the question of whether reform would improve or hurt their quality of care.

“It’s hard to draw firm conclusions,” said Arkansas Poll Director Janine Parry. “People are dissatisfied, but they haven’t signed on with an alternative.” Lincoln, said Parry, appears to be “right with her constituents — convinced that we need to do something, and not convinced it’s this.”

Senior Senate aides said Lincoln helped to shape measures aimed at reducing the cost of such procedures as MRIs and at better coordinating care among doctors, hospitals and nursing homes. And she was the primary sponsor, along with Snowe, of a provision aimed at giving small businesses more health-care choices for employees.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, of the nearly 473,000 Arkansas residents who lacked coverage as of 2008, virtually all would be eligible for federal assistance under the Senate bill — either through Medicaid or through tax credits that would subsidize the purchase of private plans.

“There’s a lot in the bill that will be good for Arkansas,” Pryor said. “But there are a lot of people in our state who are against this bill. Some have very legitimate concerns and ask very good questions. But also some is based on bad information. We have to try to talk to those people.”

If Lincoln supports the Senate bill, she will have to sell it to constituents before they see many of the legislation’s benefits. But she says she is well aware of the challenge. “I have no doubt that I’ll be held accountable on this,” she said. “We’re going to be held accountable on a lot of things.”

By Yuval Levin | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 7, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Nov 16, 2009

All year, leading Democrats from the president on down have argued that the Republican Party is in the midst of a catastrophic civil war. You know the story. Successive election defeats have narrowed the GOP’s ideological range, and now an open struggle is afoot for control of its voice and agenda. Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, it seems, are out to destroy Republican moderates and commit the party to a radical course sure to relegate it to irrelevance. Only a move to the left can save the Republicans.

And, in fact, the new president and Congress had a real opportunity to divide the Republican Party. A moderate stimulus bill that offered a short-term boost and included a meaningful tax-cut component, for instance, might have won a very significant number of Republican votes in Congress last winter and launched a damaging internal GOP battle over the proper role of the opposition. Some restraint on taxes and spending in general, and on health care and energy policy in particular, would also have divided congressional Republicans and left the direction of the party in doubt.

But Washington Democrats chose a different route. While they have been peddling the story of Republican self-immolation, they have actually been creating the conditions for a Republican resurgence. President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid have launched the country on a course of massive spending, a dramatic expansion of government, and a slew of new taxes in the midst of a recession. Finding themselves in control of Congress and the White House and so possessed of an unusual opportunity to pursue their ideological agenda, they have sought to make the most of it. But they have misjudged just how far to the left of the country as a whole the Democratic base now resides—and so, rather than strengthen their own brand, they have inadvertently done wonders to build and unify the Republican Party.

In Congress, Republicans now march nearly as one, to a degree not seen in 15 years. Rather than split on the stimulus, conservative and moderate Republicans easily agreed that it went much too far to the left. The bill received zero Republican votes in the House and just three in the Senate. On many crucial votes since, and in the ongoing health-care and cap-and-trade debates, Republicans have stood together almost unanimously.

Around the country, the party seems to be regaining its balance. Last Tuesday’s election results were an extraordinary boost for Republicans. They showed that it is not necessary to run away from the party’s conservative brand to win elections. On the contrary, Republicans running as Republicans seem to succeed in the age of Obama, and to attract independent voters in droves.

In Virginia—which went for Obama last year, and elected Democratic -senators in the last two cycles and Democratic governors throughout this decade—-Republican Bob McDonnell ran as a practical conservative with an extensive policy agenda and was elected governor by an enormous 18-point margin. He produced concrete proposals on transportation and education but was also forthright about his conservative views on taxes and his opposition to abortion and gun control. In deeply blue New Jersey, which Obama won last year by double digits, Republican Chris Christie let the incumbent Democrat embrace Obama, refused to run away from his own party, and won the governorship decisively. He, too, is pro-life; he opposed gay marriage and even associated himself with several GOP governors who had refused to accept stimulus funds. Both Republicans won independent voters by roughly a 2-to-1 margin.

In the special election for New York’s 23rd Congressional District, Democrat Bill Owens defeated Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman a few days after the liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava (who had run to the left of the Democrat on key issues) dropped out of the race. The peculiar circumstances of that contest, with prominent conservatives supporting Hoffman over Scozzafava, have been taken by Democrats eager for good news as proof of a Republican breakdown. The day after the election, White House political adviser David Axelrod even went so far as to say that the victory “should be reassuring to Democrats.”

But, in fact, the message of that race was largely the same as those of New Jersey and Virginia: in this political climate, Republicans can win by nominating an identifiably Republican right-of-center candidate in tune with local voters. It seems clear that had they done so from the outset in upstate New York they would have won there, even though Obama won the district comfortably last year. For decades, almost no New York Republicans have been elected without the endorsement of the state’s long-established Conservative Party—that dynamic in this case hardly indicates new divisions on the right—and Republican leaders this year clearly erred by choosing (without a primary) a candidate well to the left of the district. Even so, Owens defeated Hoffman by a mere 4,218 votes, while Scozzafava, who withdrew at the last minute but still appeared on the ballot, received 6,986 votes. And every poll of the district in recent weeks suggested that the same uneasy mood prevailed there as in New Jersey and Virginia.

That mood is the crucial fact of this moment in our politics. It does not signify a mass migration into Republican ranks, only deep anxiety regarding what the Democrats are up to, and a renewed openness to hear what Republicans have to say. It means that Bush fatigue is in the past, early signs of Obama fatigue are emerging, and Republicans have an opportunity to win independents again if they can speak to their concerns.

Last week’s elections won’t fundamentally transform our politics, but they will likely help the GOP continue to build its strength. They will persuade some serious Republicans around the country to run for Congress next year, now that it’s clear that serious Republicans can win. That is just what happened in the first midterm elections of the last Democratic president’s term: most of the winning candidates in the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress decided to run only after seeing Christine Todd Whitman and George Allen win the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia in 1993.

The results will also make some moderate Democrats very nervous about the health-care and cap-and-trade bills being pursued by their leaders. Both bills are political risks—support for the health-care bill hovers around 40 percent in recent polls and a small majority opposes it, and the higher utility costs that would follow cap-and-trade legislation would surely be deeply unpopular in much of the country. Both would have to be passed on essentially party-line votes, leaving Democrats answerable to voters for their consequences. In both cases, too, last week’s elections will reinforce Republican unity.

The fact is, we remain a two-party nation. Republicans are not in the midst of a destructive civil war, any more than the Democrats were when they kicked out Joe Lieberman in 2006. When it comes to the major debates of the moment—health care, energy, the budget, even most social issues—the Democratic Party is far more divided than the GOP. Republican Party identification remains low (about 25 percent, compared with the Democrats’ 35 percent), but in a country where 40 percent of voters identify as conservative and only 20 percent as liberal (according to a Gallup poll released last month), the more conservative party isn’t going anywhere.

Rather than a civil war, we appear to be witnessing the beginnings of a significant Republican revival. The Grand Old Party is finding its footing again in Congress and the states, and behind the scenes there is a growing intellectual effort to develop the next conservative agenda—focused in particular on easing the burdens faced by middle-class parents and contending with the bleak long-term federal budget outlook. Much work remains on that front, but early indications suggest that this work—substantive policy development, seeking to apply conservative principles to the enormous problems of the moment—not only will help Republicans speak more effectively to middle-class voters, but will also help the party’s conservatives and moderates hone their common voice. Issue by issue, it turns out they don’t disagree all that much.

None of this means that President Obama has lost all his appeal, or that the Democrats don’t have an opportunity to advance their agenda in the coming year. It does mean, however, that liberals in Washington would do well to let go of the Republican breakdown narrative, take a real look at the mood of the country and the state of their own party’s prospects, and pull back to the center—or suffer the consequences.

Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.

BOISE – After Washington this year became the fifth state to endorse a big change in how the nation elects presidents – letting whoever wins the popular vote take the office – Idaho is poised to debate the same question.

Nothing changes until enough states sign on to represent a majority of electoral votes; only about a quarter of them are on board so far. “We’re just waiting to see if there are additional states that decide to join in,” said Glenn Kuper, spokesman for Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, who backs the move and signed the Legislature-passed bill into law in April.

It may be a tougher sell in Idaho, the very last state to see the measure introduced. But state Rep. Donna Boe, D-Pocatello, who plans to introduce the bill in January, is enthusiastic about it. “Under this national popular vote, everyone’s vote will go to the total,” Boe said. “So all of us will have our vote count – that was the appeal to me.”

Currently, Idaho’s four electoral votes are something of a foregone conclusion: They’ve gone to the GOP candidate for president in every election since 1964.

But when the California-based National Popular Vote group, which is pushing for the measure in all 50 states, polled 800 registered Idaho voters in May, it found that 77 percent favored a switch to electing the president by popular vote – 84 percent of Democrats, and 75 percent of Republicans.

“We don’t see this to be a partisan issue,” said Pat Rosenstiel, a consultant who’s worked for GOP campaigns and now serves as the National Popular Vote lobbyist for five states, including Idaho.

Backers of the change argue that it’ll force presidential candidates to address issues important to voters everywhere, not just in key battleground states. Opponents say the current Electoral College system forces candidates to pay attention to small rural states, such as Idaho, rather than just a handful of large metropolitan cities.

“It’s certainly an issue of federalism, in terms of state role in the presidential vote,” said Boise State University political scientist emeritus Jim Weatherby.

Said Kuper, Gregoire’s spokesman, “Her perspective is that it’s a national election, and that the candidate who receives the most popular votes nationally ought to be elected president.” He added, “As a state that has a moderately large population, I think we would still receive the same kind of attention that we have in the past, just based on the number of popular votes we would have to deliver to either candidate.”

Four times in U.S. history, including the Bush-Gore race in 2000, the Electoral College selected a president who had lost the national popular vote.

WASHINGTON – Confronted with the stark reality of a 13-year-old boy sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, the Supreme Court justices signaled Monday that they were inclined to limit, or perhaps abolish, the use of life terms for teenagers whose crimes do not involve murder.

The court often has invoked the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” to restrict the death penalty. On Monday, the justices also sounded ready to rule that some states, in particular Florida, had gone too far by sentencing children to life in prison without a chance for a parole.

“To say to any child of 13 that you are only fit to die in prison is cruel,” attorney Bryan Stevenson told the court. “It cannot be reconciled with what we know about the nature of children. It cannot be reconciled with our standards of decency.”

Stevenson is representing Joe Sullivan, who at age 13 was convicted of raping a 72-year-old woman and given a life prison term. Stevenson said rapists in Florida are sentenced, on average, to 10 years in prison. Yet, Sullivan, who already has served 20 years, will die in prison unless the Supreme Court intervenes.

A second case heard Monday involved Terrance Graham, who at 17 was given a life term for his part in an armed robbery of a restaurant and a later home invasion robbery.

Sullivan and Graham are among 109 inmates nationwide who were sentenced to life in prison without parole for nonhomicide crimes.

During oral arguments, most of the justices sounded as though they were inclined to overturn at least some of these sentences as too extreme. However, they differed on how to do it. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. offered a middle-ground approach that could overturn prison terms in some cases if the state judges failed to weigh the youthful age of the offender. Roberts said this “case-by-case approach” was wiser than setting a single rule.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said he agreed.

But most of the liberal justices hinted they would go further and rule it was always cruel and unusual punishment to impose a life term for an offender who is under age 18 and who did not commit a murder.

“Every state recognizes the difference between an adult and a minor. And you have to make a line. We have it at 18,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. “The teenager can’t drink, can’t drive, can’t marry. There are many (legal) limitations on children just because they are children.”

Only Justice Antonin Scalia defended Florida’s policy, saying the court should look to history.

“When the ‘cruel and unusual’ clause was adopted (in 1791), 12 years was viewed as the year when a person reaches maturity,” Scalia said. “And then all felonies (were subject to) the death penalty.”

WASHINGTON – Furious liberals on Monday threatened to derail the massive health care overhaul bill to protest a last-minute deal over insurance coverage of abortions that had secured passage of the legislation in the House.

At least 40 House members pledged not to vote for a final health care bill if the abortion provision survives – endangering the exceptionally fragile Democratic coalition that has kept the bill afloat.

At issue are the insurance policies offered in a new “exchange,” or insurance marketplace, that the legislation would create to help consumers purchase health plans, many using newly created federal subsidies.

The House measure says the federal subsidies cannot be used to buy health policies that cover elective abortion. But abortion rights supporters say this would affect a broad set of consumers, because insurers would likely abandon abortion coverage in all policies offered in the exchange.

The provision “represents an unprecedented and unacceptable restriction on women’s ability to access the full range of reproductive health services to which they are lawfully entitled,” the House members wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It was a tougher line than they had adopted less than 48 hours earlier, when they had, almost to a member, voted to pass the health legislation. The bill cleared the chamber late Saturday night by a mere five votes.

The tumult over abortion now travels to the Senate, where it promises to cause headaches for Democrats still wrestling with fundamental issues of cost, coverage and revenues in its version of the health legislation.

Legislation before the Senate contains looser restrictions on abortion coverage than was approved by the House. But, already, at least one Senate Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, appears willing to work with abortion rights opponents on language similar to that from the House.

President Barack Obama suggested Monday the House measure might be altered as the legislation moves through Congress, though he did not say he would push for changes himself.

Obama told ABC News the bill should uphold the principle that federal money may not be used to subsidize abortions.

“And I want to make sure that the provision that emerges meets that test – that we are not in some way sneaking in funding for abortions, but, on the other hand, that we’re not restricting women’s insurance choices,” he said. “Because one of the pledges I made in that same speech was to say that if you’re happy and satisfied with the insurance that you have, that it’s not going to change.”

The House amendment would allow people buying insurance in the exchange to purchase separate “riders” that would cover abortions. Abortion-rights advocates say few would do so, because few women anticipate an unplanned pregnancy and few insurers are likely to offer such a separate service.

“No one counts on getting an abortion,” said Rachel Laser, a lawyer with Third Way, a Washington think tank that advocates centrist policies.

In 2001, 13 percent of abortions were billed directly to insurance companies, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health. That figure, however, may understate insurance payments for abortion, because it does not include cases where women paid for the procedure out of pocket and later asked for reimbursement from their insurers.

Dr. Willie Parker, a board member at Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, said the amendment could have the greatest impact on women whose underlying health conditions require hospitalization in order for a safe abortion to be performed.

Parker cited an example of a woman with a pregnancy that involves abnormal attachment of the placenta. While a standard abortion may cost just $350, the cost in that situation would range between $3,000 and $4,000.

At a glance:

Only 9 people in the country are serving life sentences for crimes committed when they were 13. The number rises to 73 when 14-year-olds are added in. No other country allows life sentences for young offenders.

WASHINGTON – Joe Sullivan was sent away for life for raping an elderly woman and judged incorrigible though he was only 13 at the time of the attack.

Terrance Graham, implicated in armed robberies when he was 16 and 17, was given a life sentence by a judge who told the teenager he threw his life away.

They didn’t kill anyone, but they effectively were sentenced to die in prison.

Life sentences with no chance of parole are rare and harsh for juveniles tried as adults and convicted of crimes less serious than killing. Just over 100 prison inmates in the United States are serving those terms, according to data compiled by opponents of the sentences.

Now the Supreme Court is being asked to say that locking up juveniles and throwing away the key is cruel and unusual – and thus, unconstitutional. Other than in death penalty cases, the justices never before have found that a penalty crossed the cruel-and-unusual line. They will hear arguments today.

Graham, now 22, and Sullivan, now 33, are in Florida prisons, which hold more than 70 percent of juvenile defendants locked up for life for nonhomicide crimes. Although their lawyers deny their clients are guilty, the court will consider only whether the sentences are permitted by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court’s latest look at how to punish young criminals flows directly from its four-year-old decision to rule out the death penalty for anyone younger than 18.

In that 2005 case decided by a 5-4 vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion talked about “the lesser culpability of the juvenile offender.”

“From a moral standpoint it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed,” Kennedy said.

Yet Kennedy also acknowledged the possibility that for the worst crimes and the worst offenders, “the punishment of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is itself a severe sanction, in particular for a young person.”

Both sides point to the same basic facts – the rare imposition of Draconian prison terms on people so young – to make their point.

The state of Florida, backed by 19 other states, argues it should retain flexibility in sentencing so that “particularly heinous acts that stop short of causing death” can be punished vigorously.

Life without parole “is appropriately rare and reserved only for the worst of the worst offenders,” crime victims groups said in court papers.

Most victims of juvenile violence also are young, the victims groups said, citing Justice Department statistics. “Softening sentences for juvenile offenders puts actual children in harm’s way – innocent ones, not those who have committed violent crimes,” the victims groups said.

Opponents of such sentences said, however, that most states have in practice rejected life terms for juveniles when no one was killed. The 109 juveniles serving terms of life without parole are in Florida and seven other states – California, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina – according to a Florida State University study. More than 2,000 other juveniles are serving life without parole for killing someone.

Beyond the infrequency of such punishment, lawyers for Graham and Sullivan argue that it is a bad idea to render a final judgment about people so young.

“They are unfinished products, works in progress,” said Bryan Stevenson, who will argue Sullivan’s case at the high court.

Actor Charles Dutton, former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson and others who committed crimes as teenagers have weighed in against life-without-parole sentences. Corrections officials, psychologists, educators and even some victims also have taken Graham and Sullivan’s side.

Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, served 18 years in the Senate, but as a teenager, he pleaded guilty to setting fire to an abandoned building on federal property and later spent a night in jail for slugging a police officer.

Simpson said he sees no good argument for refusing even to review their sentences after the passage of time.

“When they get to be 30 or 40 and they been in the clink for 20 years or 30 or 40 and they have learned how to read and how to do things, why not?”

If a prisoner shows he is not fit to be released, “throw him back in,” he said. “That’s better than saying ‘Sorry, we can’t look at that file because you were sent here for life.’ ”

WASHINGTON – The House of Representatives on Saturday passed, by a 220-215 vote, historic health care overhaul legislation that would require nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance and create a government-run health insurance plan to help them do so.

If passed by the Senate, the bill would bring about the most sweeping changes in the American health care system since Medicare was created 44 years ago.

Supporters of the measure burst into cheers and applause on the House floor as it became clear the measure had won, but the vote was excruciatingly close, passing by just two votes more than the bare minimum needed. One Republican, Joseph Cao of Louisiana, voted for the bill; 39 Democrats, including Idaho’s Walt Minnick, voted against.

President Barack Obama made a personal plea for passage before the all-day debate began.

“Now is the time to finish the job,” Obama said in brief remarks in the White House Rose Garden after meeting with House Democrats.

The job is far from finished. The Senate hopes to act by the end of the year, and if successful, the two Houses would then craft a compromise that would need approval of each chamber.

The House vote came with a warning: Getting enough votes later this year or early in 2010 will not be easy. Thirty-nine Democrats, most from conservative districts or freshmen who narrowly won their 2008 elections, voted against the House bill, joining 176 Republicans. In the Senate, eight to 12 moderates have expressed reservations about that chamber’s proposal.

In addition to creating the public option government-run insurance program, the House-passed bill would bar insurers from denying people coverage because of pre-existing conditions and set up health care “exchanges,” or marketplaces, where consumers could easily shop for coverage.

The changes are expected to mean that by 2019, 96 percent of eligible Americans would have health insurance, up from the current 83 percent.

During his half-hour appearance on Capitol Hill, Obama took no questions from lawmakers, but his presence was a vivid reminder that the president has put health care overhaul at the top of his domestic agenda – a change that has eluded presidents for nearly a century.

“He came here to say, ‘This is what we said we would do in the campaign. Let’s do it,’ ” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.

On the House floor, Democratic leaders appealed to members’ sense of history, reminding them this was one of the most significant votes, short of war, that they were likely to take.

“There are few moments when we have the opportunity to do so much good with one vote. This is one of those moments,” said Hoyer.

Republicans countered with arguments that the health care plan did little to improve coverage or affordability.

“Astoundingly, Democrats are bringing to the floor a bill today that will not reduce the costs of health insurance; it will grow the size of government,” said GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence, R-Ind.

The bill may have gotten a boost from a deal to bar coverage by government-subsidized insurance policies of elective abortions.

As originally written, the measure would have required insurers to separate public and private money, so that only private funds could be used for elective abortions. Abortion opponents were concerned that such a policy would effectively expand the government’s role in improving access to abortion, and as many as 40 Democrats threatened to withhold support from the health care bill unless changes were made.

After tense negotiations Friday night – with White House officials and representatives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as well as key Democratic members of Congress – House Democratic leaders agreed to allow a vote Saturday on sweeping changes to the abortion provision.

The measure was approved, 240-194, as 64 Democrats joined 176 Republicans to back the change.

The change would permit abortion coverage for people receiving federal aid for their insurance only in the case of rape or incest or when the mother’s life is endangered, consistent with a 1970s-era federal law governing public funding of abortion. Under the new provision, only people buying private insurance with their own funds would have an elective abortion covered.

Many abortion rights advocates were angry, and the brief debate often pitted Democrat against Democrat. “This amendment is government interference in the decision between a woman and her physician,” said Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif. “Unnecessary and reprehensible,” added Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y.

“Today we’re on the brink of passing health care reform that honors and respects life in every state,” countered Rep. Brad Ellsworth, D-Ind.

Republicans tried throughout the day to create more doubt and delay, shouting objections to routine parliamentary requests by objecting when Democratic women tried to discuss their concerns on the House floor.

GOP members then pushed their own plan, which would make it easier for small businesses to band together to purchase competitively priced coverage, allow consumers to buy policies across state lines, and effect strong medical malpractice reforms.

It was easily defeated on a largely party line vote, 258-176.

In the Senate, where moderates’ concerns have stalled progress, Democratic leaders are hoping for a debate and vote before the end of the year.

“My vote is not an endorsement of all the provisions of the bill, because I find much of the bill to be deeply flawed,” said Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., a Blue Dog who backed the measure. “My reason for voting ‘yes’ is to advance the cause … by forcing the Senate to act.”

10 ways the House bill would change health care

1 Creates a government-run “public option” to offer coverage.

2 Sets up insurance “exchanges” where consumers can easily compare plans.

3 Requires nearly everyone to obtain health insurance by 2013.

4 Requires health plans to allow children to remain on parents’ policies until their 27th birthday.

5 Provides federal financial help for lower- and middle-income consumers to obtain coverage.

6 Bars insurers from denying or limiting coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

7 Bars insurers from imposing lifetime limits on coverage.

8 Expands Medicaid coverage.

9 Imposes 5.4 percent surcharge on adjusted gross incomes of more than $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for joint filers.

10 Imposes penalties on people and businesses who fail to comply.

McClatchy-Tribune

Does the U.S. Constitution stand for anything in an era of government excess? Can that founding document, which is supposed to restrain the power and reach of a centralized federal government, slow down the juggernaut of czars, health insurance overhaul and anything else this administration and Congress wish to do that is not in the Constitution?

The Framers created a limited government, thus ensuring individuals would have the opportunity to become all that their talents and persistence would allow. The Left has put aside the original Constitution in favor of a “living document” that they believe allows them to do whatever they want and demand more tax dollars with which to do it.

Can they be stopped? Some constitutional scholars think the Tenth Amendment offers the best opportunity. The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

In 1939, the Supreme Court began to dilute constitutional language so that it became open to broader interpretation. Rob Natelson, professor of Constitutional Law and Legal History at the University of Montana, has written that even before Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme, it was changing the way the Constitution was interpreted, especially “how the commerce and taxing powers were turned upside-down, the necessary and proper clauses and incidental powers, the false claim that the Supreme Court is conservative, how bad precedent leads to more bad court rulings, state elections as critical for constitutional activists, and more.”

While during the past seven decades the court has tolerated the federal welfare state, Natelson says it has never, except in wartime, “authorized an expansion of the federal scope quite as large as what is being proposed now. And in recent years, both the Court and individual justices – even ‘liberal’ justices – have said repeatedly that there are boundaries beyond which Congress may not go.” … “Chief Justice John Marshall once wrote that if Congress were to use its legitimate powers as a ‘pretext’ for assuming an unauthorized power, ‘it would become the painful duty’ of the Court ‘to say that such an act was not the law of the land.’ ”

It would be nice to know now what those boundaries are and whether Congress is exceeding its powers as it prepares to alter one-sixth of our economy and change how we access health insurance and health care.

Natelson makes a fascinating argument in his essay, “Is ObamaCare Constitutional?” (www.tenthamend mentcenter.com/2009/08/18/is-obama care-constitutional), using the court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973. In Roe, he writes, the court struck down state abortion laws that “intruded into the doctor-patient relationship. But the intrusion invalidated in Roe was insignificant compared to the massive intervention contemplated by schemes such as HB3200. ‘Global budgeting’ and ‘single-payer’ plans go even further, and seem clearly to violate the Supreme Court’s Substantive Due Process rules.”

Constitutional attorney John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, tells me, “Although the states surrendered many of their powers to the new federal government, they retained a residuary and inviolable sovereignty that is reflected throughout the Constitution’s text. The Framers rejected the concept of a central government that would act upon and through the states, and instead designed a system in which the state and federal governments would exercise concurrent authority over the people. The court’s jurisprudence makes clear that the federal government may not compel the states to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.”

Lawyers are busy writing language only they can understand that seeks to circumvent the intentions of the Founders. But it will be difficult to circumvent the last four words of the Tenth Amendment, which state unambiguously where ultimate power lies: “… or to the people.”

Americans who believe their government should not be a giant ATM, dispensing money and benefits to people who have not earned them, and who want their country returned to its founding principles, must now exercise that power before it is taken from them. The Tenth Amendment is one place to begin. The streets are another. It worked for the Left.

Cal Thomas is a columnist for Tribune Media Services.

WASHINGTON – Small businesses would have an easier time banding together to offer insurance to employees. Consumers could cross state lines to buy coverage. There’d be no big government expansion.

Those are among the ideas that Republicans in the House of Representatives plan to push later this week, as lawmakers expect to begin debating how to overhaul the nation’s health care system.

One longtime favorite Republican proposal apparently will be absent: The Republican plan will contain no tax incentives for consumers who buy insurance individually, said House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

“Cost,” he said, was the reason for the omission.

Chances are that little or none of the Republican plan will become law, since the House has 177 Republicans and 256 Democrats and Democrats control 60 of the Senate’s 100 seats.

The Republican strategy has two missions: Illustrate what the party stands for, and try to demonize and defeat Democratic initiatives.

House Democrats have proposed a 1,990-page bill that includes a government-run insurance plan, or “public option,” that would compete with private insurers. Savings in Medicare and a tax on the wealthy largely would pay for the legislation, which has been estimated to cost a net $894 billion over 10 years. The tax surcharge would apply to adjusted gross incomes of more than $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for joint filers.

Debate on that plan could begin late this week, with final votes late this week or early next week. The Republican plan would be offered as an alternative.

In the House, Republican leaders began mounting an offensive last week built around four key principles, as Boehner outlined Monday:

•Giving states more flexibility to “create their own innovative reforms.”

•Making it easier for employers, individuals and small businesses to set up risk pools.

Under one scenario, a small business that operates in different states could draw customers – and thus pool risks – from all states where it conducts business. Currently, such pools are subject to the rules and regulations of each state, which critics see as burdensome.

CHICAGO – Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.

The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Your neighbor may be using some of these programs, but it’s not the kind of thing people want to talk about,” Rank said.

The analysis was released Monday in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The authors say it’s a medical issue pediatricians need to be aware of because children on food stamps are at risk for malnutrition and other ills linked with poverty.

“This is a real danger sign that we as a society need to do a lot more to protect children,” Rank said.

Food stamps are a Department of Agriculture program for low-income individuals and families, covering most foods although not prepared hot foods or alcohol. For a family of four to be eligible, their annual take-home pay can’t exceed about $22,000.

According to a USDA report released last month, 28.4 million Americans received food stamps in an average month in 2008, and about half were younger than age 18. The average monthly benefit per household totaled $222.

Rank and Cornell University sociologist Thomas Hirschl studied data from a nationally representative survey of 4,800 American households interviewed annually from 1968 through 1997 by the University of Michigan. About 18,000 adults and children were involved.

Overall, about 49 percent of all children were on food stamps at some point by the age of 20, the analysis found. That includes 90 percent of black children and 37 percent of whites. The analysis didn’t include other ethnic groups.

The time span included typical economic ups and downs, including the early 1980s recession. That means similar portions of children now and in the future will live in families receiving food stamps, although ongoing economic turmoil may increase the numbers, Rank said.

An editorial in the medical journal agreed.

“The current recession is likely to generate for children in the United States the greatest level of material deprivation that we will see in our professional lifetimes,” Stanford pediatrician Dr. Paul Wise wrote.

Wise said the Archives study estimate is believable.

“I find it terribly sad, but not surprising,” Wise said.

James Weill, president of Food Research and Action Center, a Washington-based advocacy group, said the analysis underscores that “there are just very large numbers of people who rely on this program for a month, six months, a year.”

“What I hope comes out of this study is an understanding that food stamp beneficiaries aren’t them – they’re us,” Weill said.

The analysis is in line with other recent research suggesting that more than 40 percent of U.S. children will live in poverty or near-poverty by age 17; and that half will live at some point in a single-parent family. Also, other researchers have estimated that slightly more than half of adults will use food stamps at some point by age 65.

Voters seemed wary Tuesday of ballot measures that would cost them money or mandate too much more change.

Kootenai County voters shot down a pair of ballot measures would have increased the sales tax for 10 years to pay for a jail expansion and provide property tax relief.

In Washington, voters turned thumbs down to Initiative 1033, new spending limits on state, county and city governments that elected officials had said were so radical they’d wind up hamstringing services. Voters were narrowly passing Referendum 71, a measure to ratify expanded rights to domestic partnerships, but the final decision might not be known for days.

Spokane city voters were narrowly rejecting a new $33 million bond issue for city fire equipment and stations, but fire officials were trying to remain “cautiously optimistic” that they would gain enough votes in counts in the coming weeks.

There’s no such wait for a proposed change to Spokane’s City Charter: Voters soundly rejected a package of amendments that would have set new rules for wages, workplaces, neighborhood development and environmental protection.

Here’s a rundown of some of the top ballot measures:

Initiative 1033

This was the latest in a long line of attempts by Tim Eyman to put restrictions on government. It tried to attack the ability of the state, counties and cities to spend money, allowing their expenses to go up each year only by a formula that accounts for inflation and population growth. Any money collected above that level would be set aside, and returned the following year as rebates to property taxes.

It drew support from small business coalitions, many Republicans and the populist conservative Tea Party movement. It was blasted by government officials of both political parties in state and local jurisdictions as a dangerous formula in the midst of a recession.

Eyman seemed to acknowledge defeat before the first ballot results were in, e-mailing a copy of his statement to supporters that the campaign was “proud of all our heroic supporters” whatever happened, and listing previous victories at the ballot box. The measure failed decisively in Spokane, Whitman, Garfield and Asotin counties as well as those surrounding the Puget Sound.

Referendum 71

Social conservatives sought to block expanded legal protections for domestic partnerships that the Legislature approved last spring for same-sex couples and seniors who want to live together without getting married. Those rights were labeled “everything but marriage” in the legislation, but opponents said it essentially allows marriage for same-sex couples.

Approving the referendum meant allowing the law to go into effect, while rejecting the referendum rejected the changes.

Supporters of R-71 raised more than $2 million, which fueled a television ad blitz in the month before the election. Opponents of the measure, who had put it on the ballot, raised about $275,000, and concentrated on yard signs and mailings.

The measure was narrowly passing at press time, but sharply dividing the state. Most counties around the Puget Sound were approving the measure, while the remainder of the state’s counties were heavily rejecting it.

Spokane Proposition 4

Named the Community Bill of Rights by supporters, this proposal offered voters the chance to add nine amendments to the Spokane City Charter. It was drafted in a series of meetings sponsored by Envision Spokane with neighborhood groups, labor unions and environmental organizations, and fine tuned through town hall style meetings.

But the breadth of the amendments, which either had to be approved or rejected as a group, prompted criticism from city officials and business organizations. They said it could saddle the city with costs of guaranteeing health care or make businesses uncompetitive. Most of all, they said, it would spawn lawsuits because many of the concepts were untested.

It failed, nearly 3-to-1 in votes counted Tuesday.

“We think the voters of Spokane realized this is a bad idea,” Brian Murray, a campaign manager for one of the opposition groups, said Tuesday night. Spokane Mayor Mary Verner and business leaders have said they’d be willing to sit down with Envision Spokane to discuss other ways to accomplish some of their goals, he added.

But Brad Read of Envision Spokane said the outcome wasn’t surprising considering opponents heavily outspent them and used dire predictions like “Spokane would cease to exist” if the measure passed. Whether the group would accept an offer to discuss other ways to make changes is unclear, Read added, and there is some skepticism that opponents are willing to negotiate seriously.

Spokane Proposition 1

City voters were also asked to approve a $33 million bond issue for new fire engines, equipment and stations. The 10-year bond issue would cost a homeowner $27 for every $100,000 of assessed value of property; it’s designed to replace a bond issue passed in 1999, but raises the cost by about $10 per $100,000. It needed a 60 percent supermajority, and in Tuesday’s tally had collected only 58.6 percent.

Assistant Chief Brian Schaeffer said supporters hoped to close the gap in upcoming ballot counts. If that doesn’t work, the Fire Department will try again, but not before meeting with voters and asking them if the department should take a different direction.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency and empowered his health secretary to suspend federal requirements and speed treatment for thousands of infected people.

The declaration that Obama signed late Friday authorized Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to bypass federal rules so health officials can respond more quickly to the outbreak, which has killed more than 1,000 people in the United States.

The goal is to remove bureaucratic roadblocks and make it easier for sick people to seek treatment and medical providers to provide it immediately. That could mean fewer hurdles involving Medicare, Medicaid or health privacy regulations.

“As a nation, we have prepared at all levels of government, and as individuals and communities, taking unprecedented steps to counter the emerging pandemic,” Obama wrote in the declaration, which the White House announced Saturday.

He said the pandemic keeps evolving, the rates of illness are rising rapidly in many areas and there’s a potential “to overburden health care resources.”

Because of vaccine production delays, the government has backed off initial, optimistic estimates that as many as 120 million doses would be available by mid-October. As of Wednesday, only 11 million doses had been shipped to health departments, doctor’s offices and other providers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said.

The government now hopes to have about 50 million doses of swine flu vaccine out by mid-November and 150 million in December.

The flu virus has to be grown in chicken eggs, and the yield hasn’t been as high as was initially hoped, officials explained.

Swine flu is more widespread now than it’s ever been. Health authorities say almost 100 children have died from the flu, known as H1N1, and 46 states now have widespread flu activity.

Worldwide, more than 5,000 people have reportedly died from swine flu since it emerged this year and developed into a global epidemic, the World Health Organization said Friday. Since most countries have stopped counting individual swine flu cases, the figure is considered an underestimate.

WASHINGTON — Representative Earl Blumenauer should be experiencing the most fulfilling days of his more than 35 years in public service.

The liberal Democrat from Portland, Ore. — known for his bowties, his Trek bicycle and a pragmatic brand of progressivism — embraced Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy early in 2008 and campaigned hard alongside him, steadily gaining confidence that the young senator from Illinois was the ideal liberal remedy to eight years of conservative dominance.

Now political reality has set in, testing Mr. Blumenauer’s faith that Mr. Obama’s election and big Democratic majorities in Congress would yield quick advances in the progressive agenda.

Instead of forging ahead, Mr. Blumenauer, 61, finds himself fighting to retain one of the touchstones for liberals this year, a public insurance option in the health care overhaul, and is watching his hopes of curbing global warming grow cold in the Senate. Mr. Blumenauer, a seven-term congressman, is bracing for a tough vote on sending more troops to Afghanistan while he frets about the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay remaining open.

“It has been a hard landing for a lot of the people that I represent,” Mr. Blumenauer, referring to his largely liberal constituency, said as he assessed the first months of the Obama administration.

As health care legislation moves to the floor with other major issues close behind, the question for Mr. Blumenauer and those who share his ideology will be whether they relent on some of their core beliefs to support less satisfying compromises, despite being in what, on the surface, is a commanding political position.

“It is still something that I am struggling with,” he said.

Mr. Blumenauer is just one example of what might be called the Frustrated Left, a substantial caucus of Congressional Democrats who dreamed that Mr. Obama would usher in a new era of liberal problem-solving only to see Congress and the new administration collide with the old problems of partisanship, internal disagreement and the challenge of mustering 60 votes to get just about anything done in the Senate.

While Congressional leaders try to appease moderate and conservative Democrats who can provide the crucial votes for passage, more liberal Democrats from safer districts sometimes simmer, feeling that they are being taken for granted while it is assumed they will get on board when the time comes.

On health care, Democrats are growing more optimistic that they can find a compromise approach to creating a government-run insurer to compete with the private sector — an issue that as much as any other has split the party’s liberals and moderates — even as progressive voices outside of Congress insist that there be no compromise.

“The fact is that Earl Blumenauer could stop a bill going through that does not have a public option in it,” said Jane Hamsher, founder of the progressive blog firedoglake.com. “Is it his loyalty to the party, partisan politics over principle? We are going to get to see that.”

Mr. Blumenauer strongly favors a public option and in late July was one of more than 60 Democrats who signed a letter to the leadership saying that, essentially, they would not back a final bill without an acceptable public plan. But on health care — as on other domestic issues, global warming and foreign policy — he must weigh whether it makes more sense to take what he can get as opposed to standing firm and perhaps seeing the overall effort collapse.

“It would be very hard for me to do,” Mr. Blumenauer said of voting for a final health care overhaul without a public plan. “But if it gets to the point where the choice is doing some things that will make a significant difference without a public option or letting the whole thing die, that too would be hard.”

Mr. Blumenauer got on board early with Mr. Obama after concluding that he offered the chance for a more decisive change in course than Hillary Rodham Clinton could provide. He first met Mr. Obama at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston and endorsed him in late January 2008.

“There was something going on here, this guy has got some real capacity being able to, I think, connect, communicate,” remembered Mr. Blumenauer.

Mr. Obama won Oregon and Mr. Blumenauer’s district going away, setting sky-high expectations among his followers in the Pacific Northwest.

Mr. Blumenauer, a member of the tax-writing and climate change committees with a devotion to trying to improve the livability of American cities, said he did not think Mr. Obama had shifted his ideological stance since his election and did not blame the president for the problems slowing the liberal agenda. He said he saw a combination of factors — the troubled economy, the sheer scope of the nation’s problems and an unexpected level of Republican opposition — as the culprits.

“The combination of the economic shock and frankly the political upset and outrage has changed the landscape,” Mr. Blumenauer said. “The Barack Obama that I campaigned with is pretty much the same guy. But it is an environment that is unprecedented and would press anyone’s skills.”

Back home, Mr. Blumenauer said his constituents had shown patience with the pace of things, partly, he suggested, because they were so disenchanted with the Bush administration.

Activists and pollsters in Oregon said that they agreed but that the patience of Mr. Blumenauer’s liberal base was not unlimited.

“I think people realize you can’t do everything precisely all at once,” said Steve Novick, a Democratic advocate in Portland who lost a Senate bid in 2008.

Senator Ron Wyden, whose move to the Senate opened up the House seat for Mr. Blumenauer in 1996, said Oregon residents grasped the complexity of the problems facing the country. “Look at what is coming at us: Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran,” he said. “There is a sense that there is going to be a lot of heavy lifting, but people want to stay at it until it happens.”

Even with his frustrations, Mr. Blumenauer said that having a Democratic administration had paid tangible benefits. The secretaries of the housing and transportation departments have visited Portland, and he recently hosted Lisa P. Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, in his office. “They want to be a partner on the cleanup rather than ignoring it,” he said, referring to environmental cleanup projects in his state.

And though some of his preferred legislative approaches might be stalled or fall victim to compromise, Mr. Blumenauer said he believed that Mr. Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress would ultimately be successful in advancing a liberal agenda on the major issues.

“We are going to be working on climate, on health care, on the economy for every minute of the next two Congresses and beyond,” he said. “Will the public be patient enough? Will the political process hold together?

“This is not going to be easy,” he said, “but I think we are seeing a process that makes me actually optimistic, even though it is not exactly like I would have liked.”

WASHINGTON — After months of relentless courting and suspense, Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, cast her vote with Democrats on Tuesday as the Senate Finance Committee approved legislation to remake the health care system and provide coverage to millions of the uninsured.

With Ms. Snowe’s support, the committee backed the $829 billion measure on a vote of 14 to 9, with all the other Republicans opposed.

“Is this bill all that I would want?” Ms. Snowe said. “Far from it. Is it all that it can be? No. But when history calls, history calls. And I happen to think that the consequences of inaction dictate the urgency of Congress to take every opportunity to demonstrate its capacity to solve the monumental issues of our time.”

Ms. Snowe’s remarks silenced the packed committee room, riveted colleagues and thrilled the White House. President Obama had sought her vote, hoping that she would break with Republican leaders and provide at least a veneer of bipartisanship to the bill, which he has declared his top domestic priority.

Mr. Obama, speaking in the Rose Garden, described the committee’s action as “a critical milestone” and declared, “We are now closer than ever before to passing health reform.” But he added: “Now is not the time to pat ourselves on the back. Now is not the time to offer ourselves congratulations. Now is the time to dig in and work even harder to get this done.”

With its vote Tuesday, the Finance Committee became the fifth — and final — Congressional panel to approve a sweeping health care bill. The action will now move to the floors of the House and the Senate, where the health care measures still face significant hurdles.

Aside from Ms. Snowe, no Republicans in Congress have publicly endorsed the bills in their current form. And Republican leaders are strongly opposed, saying the bills cost too much, raise taxes, cut Medicare and dangerously expand federal power.

Pressure from lobbyists is sure to grow in the coming weeks. And many more lawmakers will get involved in what promise to be impassioned and highly politicized debates in the Senate and the House.

After the Finance Committee vote, the chief architect of the bill, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the committee, declared: “It’s clear that health care reform will pass this year. Our action today provides terrific momentum.”

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, said the bill put the nation on “a slippery slope toward more and more government control of health care.”

Ms. Snowe helped write the Finance Committee bill, in months of bipartisan negotiations, but had not committed to vote for it. She said Tuesday that she shared many of her Republican colleagues’ reservations about the legislation, and pointedly warned Democrats that they could lose her support later in the legislative process.

“My vote today is my vote today,” she said. “It doesn’t forecast what my vote will be tomorrow.” And she observed, “There are many, many miles to go in this legislative journey.”

Ms. Snowe gave no clue how she would vote in the first few hours of committee deliberations Tuesday and she did not alert the White House to her plans.

While colleagues spoke, she kept her head buried in papers, fidgeted and spoke occasionally with aides. When Mr. Baucus stepped over to speak to her, a small army of photographers snapped pictures, with cameras clicking like a chorus of chirping crickets.

The Congressional Budget Office said the bill would cost $829 billion over 10 years. The costs include $345 billion for the expansion of Medicaid and $461 billion for subsidies to help lower-income people buy insurance.

The budget office said the costs would be completely offset by new fees and taxes and by cutbacks in Medicare, so federal budget deficits in the next 10 years would be $81 billion lower than now projected.

But Douglas W. Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said his agency had not estimated the impact of the bill on overall national health spending, public and private, and could not say whether it would “bend the cost curve,” as Mr. Obama and lawmakers want.

Likewise, Mr. Elmendorf said he did not know for sure how the bill would affect premiums.

Several senators said they would fight for changes on the Senate floor.

Liberal Democrats, like Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, said they would push for a public insurance plan. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, both Democrats, said they would seek changes to make insurance more affordable to middle-income families. And Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said he wanted to require employers to provide insurance to their employees.

The bill does not include such an employer mandate. But employers with more than 50 workers would have to reimburse the government for some or all of the cost of federal subsidies provided to employees who buy insurance on their own.

Ms. Snowe said she liked the Finance Committee bill because it would prohibit insurance companies from discriminating against people on account of health status or sex and would create a network of insurance exchanges where individuals, families and small businesses could shop for coverage, with subsidies from the federal government.

At the same time, Ms. Snowe said she shared Republican “concerns about vast governmental bureaucracies and governmental intrusions.” That, she said, is why she had opposed amendments to create a government insurance plan and would continue to do so.

Ms. Snowe said she was open to a compromise under which a public plan could be “triggered” in states where people could not otherwise find affordable insurance. She said her “paramount concern” was that insurance might be too expensive for some people, even with government subsidies.

The Congressional Budget Office said the Finance Committee bill would provide coverage to 29 million people, but still leave 25 million uninsured in 2019. Of those left uncovered, about a third would be illegal immigrants.

David Stout contributed reporting.

Christmas is probably unconstitutional.

I’m no lawyer, but the logic seems unassailable to me. Consider: Santa Claus aside, Christmas is an explicitly Christian holiday and the only holiday of any religion to be observed by the federal government. Which would seem to violate the First Amendment edict that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Yet to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, no one has ever sued Christmas before the Supreme Court.

Not that I’m trying to give any ideas. No, I’m only trying to tease out an opinion I can live with in a case the court heard last week, about a cross in the Mojave Desert.

The original cross (it has been replaced a number of times over the years) was erected in 1934 as a tribute to the dead of World War I and sits in a remote corner of what is now the Mojave National Preserve. Its legal troubles began 10 years ago with a former employee of the National Park Service who sued because he thought the cross an improper display on federal land in that it celebrated one faith over others.

It’s a contention Justice Antonin Scalia sharply disputed last week. “It’s erected as a war memorial,” he said. “I assume it is erected in honor of all the war dead.”

To which Peter Eliasberg, a lawyer representing the American Civil Liberties Union, shot back: “I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew.”

Scalia was unconvinced: “I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that the cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.”

But Eliasberg’s conclusion was, of course, perfectly valid, and Scalia’s obstinate insistence that the cross is a generic symbol manages to simultaneously demean Christianity and deftly illustrate the sort of bullying the Constitution discourages. How easily and readily the majority embraces the myopic view that its symbols and norms represent us all.

That said, I keep wondering what good can come of this.

The plaintiff is said to be a devout Catholic, so we can take it on – ahem – faith that he is motivated solely by principle. For the record, the principle is one I support.

You need only look at Iran to know the separation of church and state is a good thing. You do not post the Ten Commandments in court for the same reason you do not mandate prayer in schools or require Bible study to get a job: There is a coercive effect that is wholly unfair to those of other faiths or no faith at all.

But I have trouble seeing the coercive effect of a cross in the middle of nowhere.

I submit that this is a battle poorly chosen. Yes, the argument arguably has legal merit, but you have to ask yourself: What’s the point? Is someone really injured by a cross in the desert? Or is this not about validating principle at all costs – even public peace and common sense?

Indeed, by the same reasoning, one might sue cities that allow crosses to be planted at roadsides where traffic fatalities have occurred. Except that if it comforts some grieving family and your only “injury” is to glimpse it while driving by at 65 mph, why would you bother? Principle absent human compassion is just intellectual masturbation.

So forgive me if I am unimpressed by the argument that a cross in the middle of nowhere is unconstitutional. Understand: I think the argument may well be correct.

But that’s not the same as being right.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His e-mail address is lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Published Sep 24, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Oct 5, 2009

Next week the Supreme Court will begin its 2009 term, secure in the knowledge that it remains completely misunderstood by the American public. A Gallup poll conducted in September showed the court’s current approval rating—61 percent—to be higher than it’s been in a decade. (Last year that number was 50 percent.) This fall, 50 percent of Americans believe the court is not too liberal or too conservative; that’s up from 43 percent last year. The number of Americans who believe the court is too conservative has dropped from 30 to 19 percent.

All this public admiration for the court’s moderation came the same week the court was hearing a campaign-finance-reform case that may dismantle a longstanding system of campaign-finance restrictions. The issue in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission is not limited to the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law. The reason court watchers got so worked up about this case is that it squarely tests Chief Justice John Roberts’s stated commitments to preserving precedent, deferring to the elected branches, and issuing narrow rulings instead of sweeping ones. Oral arguments revealed that the court’s five conservatives feel nothing but contempt for campaign-finance regulations that demonize corporations, restrict core political speech, and—to quote the chief justice—”put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats.”

But that’s where the public confusion kicks in. In last term’s cases on voting rights, reverse discrimination, and a school strip search, the court opted for narrow, case-specific rulings rather than the sweeping ones foreshadowed by dramatic oral arguments. All this hardly means the 2008 term was a triumph for liberals at the high court. On balance, the term continued a clear trend in which big business always prevails, environmentalists are always buried, female and elderly workers go unprotected, death-row inmates get the needle, and criminal defendants are shown the door. So how to explain these new poll numbers showing that 49 percent of Republicans believe the Roberts Court is too liberal and 59 percent of Democrats believe the court is “about right”?

In part, the numbers reflect a focus on the wrong data; we continue to believe in the court we see on TV. Thus, the highly charged confirmation hearings of Justice Sonia Sotomayor this summer contributed to the idea that the court was swinging leftward, even though it’s clear that her substitution for Justice David Souter will do nothing to alter the balance of the court (indeed, she is generally expected to move the court to the right in some areas of criminal law). Similarly, the refusal of the court to go all the way in the big-banner civil-rights cases last year leads to the broad perception that the court is quite liberal.

To be sure, progressives who claim that the court’s eventual ruling in September’s campaign-finance fracas will conclusively reveal the heart of darkness that lurks inside the Roberts Court are also overstating their case. It’s true that the Roberts Court is a fundamentally conservative creature and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. But as we learned yet again last term, it’s also a court that is deeply aware of, even responsive to, public opinion. This is a court willing to reverse the Warren revolution with a tablespoon instead of a wrecking ball, and that may be too nuanced an approach to be captured in public-opinion polls.

The term that opens next week promises to provide another fistful of cases that will slowly deepen our understanding of the Roberts Court. Among them: yet another challenge to a cross on government property (raising questions about who has standing to be offended by religious symbols); a dispute over the constitutionality of a federal statute criminalizing depictions of animal cruelty; questions about whether juveniles may be sentenced to life without parole; another hot eminent-domain case; and maybe even a quarrel over whether the name “Washington Redskins” is offensive. If the tea leaves are correct, we may also see another confirmation hearing next summer.

As a generation raised on a constant diet of reality television and the inevitable “big reveal,” we will continue to look to the high drama of oral argument and the staged fireworks of judicial-confirmation hearings for our views about the Supreme Court. What really happens at the high court in the coming years will continue to occur by the tablespoon—even if we are too busy with imagined wrecking balls to see it.

By Howard Fineman | NEWSWEEK

Published Sep 26, 2009 From the magazine issue dated Oct 5, 2009

If ubiquity were the measure of a presidency, Barack Obama would already be grinning at us from Mount Rushmore. But of course it is not. Despite his many words and television appearances, our elegant and eloquent president remains more an emblem of change than an agent of it. He’s a man with an endless, worthy to-do list—health care, climate change, bank reform, global capital regulation, AfPak, the Middle East, you name it—but, as yet, no boxes checked “done.” This is a problem that style will not fix. Unless Obama learns to rely less on charm, rhetoric, and good intentions and more on picking his spots and winning in political combat, he’s not going to be reelected, let alone enshrined in South Dakota.

The president’s problem isn’t that he is too visible; it’s the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube. Obama can seem a mite too impressed with his own aura, as if his presence on the stage is the Answer. There is, at times, a self-referential (even self-reverential) tone in his big speeches. They are heavily salted with the words “I” and “my.” (He used the former 11 times in the first few paragraphs of his address to the U.N. last week.) Obama is a historic figure, but that is the beginning, not the end, of the story.

There is only so much political mileage that can still be had by his reminding the world that he is not George W. Bush. It was the winning theme of the 2008 campaign, but that race ended nearly a year ago. The ex-president is now more ex than ever, yet the current president, who vowed to look forward, is still reaching back to Bush as bogeyman.

He did it again in that U.N. speech. The delegates wanted to know what the president was going to do about Israel and the Palestinian territories. He answered by telling them what his predecessor had failed to do. This was effective for his first month or two. Now it is starting to sound more like an excuse than an explanation.

Members of Obama’s own party know who Obama is not; they still sometimes wonder who he really is. In Washington, the appearance of uncertainty is taken as weakness—especially on Capitol Hill, where a president is only as revered as he is feared. Being the cool, convivial late-night-guest in chief won’t cut it with Congress, an institution impervious to charm (especially the charm of a president with wavering poll numbers). Members of both parties are taking Obama’s measure with their defiant and sometimes hostile response to his desires on health care. Never much of a legislator (and not long a senator), Obama underestimated the complexity of enacting a major “reform” bill. Letting Congress try to write it on its own was an awful idea. As a balkanized land of microfiefdoms, each loyal to its own lobbyists and consultants, Congress is incapable of being led by its “leadership.” It’s not like Chicago, where you call a guy who calls a guy who calls Daley, who makes the call. The president himself must make his wishes clear—along with the consequences for those who fail to grant them.

The model is a man whose political effectiveness Obama repeatedly says he admires: Ronald Reagan. There was never doubt about what he wanted. The Gipper made his simple, dramatic tax cuts the centerpiece not only of his campaign but also of the entire first year of his presidency.

Obama seems to think he’ll get credit for the breathtaking scope of his ambition. But unless he sees results, it will have the opposite effect—diluting his clout, exhausting his allies, and emboldening his enemies.

That may be starting to happen. Health-care legislation is still weeks, if not months, from passage, and the bill as it stands could well be a windfall for the very insurance and drug companies it was supposed to rein in. Climate-change legislation (a.k.a. cap-and-trade) is almost certainly dead for this year, which means that American negotiators will go empty-handed to the Copenhagen summit in December —pushing the goal of limiting carbon emissions even farther into the distance. In the spring Obama privately told the big banks that he was going to change the way they do business. It was going to be his way or the highway. But the complex legislation he wants to submit to Congress has little chance of passage this year. Doing Letterman again won’t help. It may boost the host’s ratings, Mr. President, but probably not your own.

Howard Fineman is also the author of The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country .

Barack Obama has reached the moment of truth for answering the persistent question about his core beliefs and political priorities. The coming votes in the House and Senate on his signature health care reform effort will tell us more about the president than anything so far in his White House tenure.

The challenge is not one he invited. All during last year’s campaign, Obama skillfully skirted the question of whether he was a moderate, consensus-seeking pragmatist, as his words suggested, or a faithful adherent to the liberal agenda, as his voting record demonstrated.

In stylistic terms, he cultivated the pragmatic image. On issues, he was alternately one or the other – lining up with the liberals on Iraq and civil liberties, for example, but joining the hard-liners on Afghanistan and the budget.

In the campaign, he took the moderate side of the health care debate – disagreeing with Hillary Clinton on the necessity for an individual mandate to buy health insurance and suggesting he would be satisfied with incremental progress toward covering all the uninsured.

But now, a number of factors have combined to strip him of the camouflage he once enjoyed when it comes to health care policy.

His effort to craft a bipartisan package with significant Republican support has failed, as GOP leaders in Congress have chosen to take their chances on handing him a costly defeat rather than opting to claim a share of the credit for success. With Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine apparently the only Republican who might vote for the evolving legislation, Obama will have to find virtually all the votes he needs among his fellow Democrats.

Also, the debates inside the five House and Senate committees that have shared in drafting the bills have dramatized the deep ideological splits on the Democratic side of the aisle. The symbolic issue has been the public option – the proposal for a Medicare-like insurance plan competing with those offered by private companies.

Four of the five committees have included that proposal; the fifth, the Senate Finance Committee, has explicitly rejected it.

Beyond that much-hyped dispute are multiple disagreements on the cost and financing of the overall reform, with no consensus between the more conservative Democratic Blue Dogs and the more numerous liberals, especially in the House.

The first imperative for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is to find a formula that will produce 218 Democratic votes in the House and 59 of the needed 60 votes in the Senate.

Obama will have to be an active player in that process. But in addition, he will have to negotiate something that will be workable in the real world. As he contemplates a re-election race in 2012, he needs at least three years when his most important domestic initiative has not blown up in his face.

What are his chances of pulling it off? It will not be easy. In the House, Pelosi and a clear majority of the Democratic caucus members want a liberal bill, including the public option. They may have to offer some cosmetic concessions to the Blue Dogs, but they are unlikely to yield on the main points.

In the Senate, on the other hand, while the liberals may prevail on floor amendments to install the public option, they cannot by themselves deliver 60 votes for passage. At this point, the leverage swings to the handful of more conservative, small-state Democratic senators who, with the Republicans, may be able to force substantive changes.

As this plays out – finally, in a House-Senate conference committee – the political cost of the Republican decision to be simply a blocking force will become clear. Had the GOP furnished even a few votes in return for seeing some of their concerns addressed, chances are Obama and the Democratic congressional leaders would not have felt the necessity to keep all the liberals in line. This would have given the president more room to maneuver.

As it is, his main leverage point is the realization among nearly all Democrats that nothing would be as costly to them, in their individual 2010 races, as the failure of this Congress, with its heavy Democratic majorities, to pass a substantive health reform bill.

That may be enough in the end for Obama to succeed. But the task of getting there will really test him – and expose his core values.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

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Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

As UW students flock back to school this week, their representatives in Congress will have recently flocked back to their D.C. offices after an August recess marked by angry town halls and endless health-care ad wars.

President Barack Obama’s signature domestic agenda item has faced a tough road, and no doubt his own strategy and execution is partly to blame. By failing to explain what health-care reform means to those who already possess insurance, the President left a vague plan open to attack.

Such Republican scare tactics and outright lies (see “death panels”) have unfortunately had an impact. They’ve inflamed the passions of anti-Obama activists on the right and sewn doubt in the minds of many Americans about health insurance reform.

The key sticking point in this debate has been the inclusion of a government run “public option” that would compete with private health insurance. While support has declined for the Democratic plan in general, a CBS poll in September showed support for a public option strong at 68 percent. Another poll published in September found that 73 percent of doctors support the public option.

Republicans have used confusion over this proposal to paint the entire reform effort as a “government takeover.” They have constantly claimed that Americans will be forced from their private insurance into a “big government plan.”

I find this to be a strange argument because, as I understand it, you can’t be forced into something that is by definition an option.

The public option is intended to provide competition to private insurance by giving Americans more choices. If people choose to abandon their private insurance for a public option, it’ll be because they make the decision that they can get better care at a lower cost with that plan. It won’t be because the evil, socialist government forced them to do it.

We can all agree that the goals of health reform should be to lower overall costs and increase the quality of care. We can also agree on the general principle that more choice for consumers and competition in the marketplace leads to both lower costs and an increased quality of the product being sold. That’s what the public plan will do; provide another choice to consumers and force private insurers to compete.

For those who suggest that the public option would drive private insurers out of business, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 11 to 12 million people will sign up for it. Not to mention the fact that reform will require everyone to have insurance, similar to the way everyone is required to have auto insurance. With roughly 45 million Americans currently lacking any plan, private insurance companies will be signing up new customers faster than they can take them.

And for those who suggest that the public option would be too costly, the President has said that it must be self-sustaining and funded by those who pay to use it.

We should set up a health-care system that is uniquely American; one that combines the best aspects of our own system (high quality care, innovation) with the best of other systems (universal coverage, lower cost). That’s why Obama is not proposing a government takeover, he’s proposing a government option that will pay for itself and provide more health insurance choices, and thus competition.

If the public option does not survive into the final bill, we will have lost a great tool for controlling health-care costs.

Reach columnist Chris Jordan at opinion@dailyuw.com.

Tags: climate change Environmental Protection Agency global warming

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday unveiled a detailed proposal for using the government’s regulatory powers to curb greenhouse gas emissions – reassuring foreign allies on the U.S. commitment to fight climate change and warning Congress that the administration will act on its own if lawmakers fail to address the issue.

The proposed regulations would apply to large-scale industrial sources of heat-trapping gases, including power plants, factories and refineries, but not to smaller sources, such as new schools, as some critics of the EPA action had feared.

The rules would force new – or substantially modified – industrial emitters to employ “best available control technologies and energy efficiency measures” to minimize greenhouse-gas emissions, a tougher standard than the one applied to many emitters now.

The EPA action, along with the formal unveiling of proposed legislation in the Senate, stoked optimism among environmentalists and others who have voiced concern that the chances for agreement at a global warming conference in Copenhagen could be reduced if leaders of other countries concluded the U.S. was not prepared to take the kinds of steps it has urged other developed nations to take.

“We are not going to continue with business as usual while we wait for Congress to act,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson told a climate conference in Los Angeles. She said the proposal “allows us to do what the Clean Air Act does best – reduce emissions for better health, drive technology innovation for a better economy, and protect the environment for a better future – all without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the better part of our economy.”

EPA officials unveiled the proposal as international climate negotiators gathered in Bangkok to prepare for global warming treaty talks in Copenhagen in December.

The EPA rules would mimic how the agency forces power plants and factories to install “scrubbers” and other means of limiting many types of air pollutants.

But it’s unclear exactly how that would apply in the case of greenhouse gases, which scientists blame for climate change. Researchers are still studying and have yet to deploy a commercial-scale method to capture and store carbon emissions from coal plants, for example.

The EPA proposal, which must now move through a lengthy process of comments and reviews, is likely to encounter legal challenges.

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Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama on Wednesday laid out a series of compromises he’s willing to make to get a health care overhaul through a nervous Congress this year, including diluting his vision for a new public insurance program and embracing ideas floated by Republicans.

In an address to a joint session of Congress, Obama tried to seize control of the Democratic Party’s highest domestic priority after months of party disarray and raucous public debate across the country. The president said that he’d require all individuals to have health insurance and would provide tax credits to people and small businesses that couldn’t afford it.

“Well, the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action,” Obama said.

At one point, a South Carolina Republican congressman shouted, “You lie” when Obama characterized reports that he’d insure illegal immigrants as false.

On perhaps the most controversial single plank in his program, Obama endorsed creating a “public option” government program to compete against private insurers, but he didn’t insist that it be included.

Instead, he left room for alternatives that liberal Democrats in Congress are resisting. Those include creating nonprofit health care cooperatives; a “trigger” mechanism for a public option to kick in later if private insurers fail to meet benchmarks of coverage; or perhaps simply tightening regulations on private insurers.

He pledged that any “public option” wouldn’t weaken coverage for those in Medicare or insured through their employers. He promised them “more security and stability.”

In turn, Obama made it clear that he intends to work with congressional Democrats to push some health care plan through Congress this year – on a bare partisan majority if necessary.

“I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last,” Obama said in remarks that he hoped would breathe new life into Democrats’ push to expand coverage to many of the roughly 46 million in the U.S. who now lack health insurance.

“We are the only advanced democracy on Earth, the only nation, that allows such hardships for millions of people,” he said. “Now is the season for action.”

Such an expansion is a goal that’s eluded presidents since Harry Truman, and, most recently, Bill Clinton 15 years ago.

Obama said that his plan would cost about $900 billion over a decade. He said it could be paid for mostly by eliminating “waste and abuse” from the existing health care system, but he wasn’t specific. In addition, he’d charge insurance companies “a fee for their most expensive policies” to fund his plan. Beyond that, he failed to specify how his proposals would slow rising health costs.

Three House of Representatives committees have written legislation that would create a public option, raise taxes on the wealthy to help pay for the plan and mandate coverage for most people. The House is expected to combine three pending Democratic bills into one piece of legislation and attempt to pass it this month.

The Senate outlook is cloudier and likely to take longer. Even if both chambers pass versions of the legislation, they’re all but certain to differ, requiring a House-Senate conference to draft a compromise version that each house then must pass. How that will happen or what final terms it may contain aren’t clear.

Fleshing out a framework that he’s been advocating for months now, Obama called for creating a government health insurance exchange, or marketplace, to take effect by 2013. Through it many Americans could obtain lower-cost private coverage – or possibly coverage through some variation of a public plan if Congress creates one.

Until the exchange would take effect, Obama would borrow from a plan that his 2008 Republican rival, Arizona Sen. John McCain, proposed last year – to provide catastrophic coverage for those with pre-existing conditions.

In another olive branch to Republicans, Obama indicated that he’d support some “demonstration projects” to try setting experimental limits on medical malpractice lawsuits – long a Republican goal that Democrats typically oppose.

Obama also called for new regulations on private insurers to protect patients. He told Americans that any plan he signs will:

•Ban insurance companies from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

•Prevent insurers from dropping or watering down coverage during illness.

•End arbitrary annual or lifetime coverage caps.

•Limit out-of-pocket expenses.

•Require insurers to cover routine checkups, mammograms and colonoscopies.

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Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post. His e-mail address is davidbroder@washpost.com.

Spin Control is a weekly political column that also appears online with daily posts, videos and reader comments at www. spokesman.com/blogs/ spincontrol. See the McMorris Rodgers video and hear audio from her Colville interview on the blog.