The four have also joined former Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) in the firm’s legislative and public policy practice.
“We have strengthened our already strong and respected team to advocate effectively on behalf of our clients in every relevant forum, crafting and implementing legislative strategies to achieve practical results,” said Bob Jones, leader of Alston & Bird’s legislative and public policy practice.
But so far, even the National Rifle Association has yet to engage in a serious lobbying effort to pressure centrist Democrats to oppose Sotomayor.
Several Democrats from conservative states told POLITICO that they are not ruling out opposing Sotomayor if she stumbles on the gun issue during her confirmation hearings, which begin July 13. But for now, red-state Democrats say they are comfortable with her position on the issue and are very unlikely to oppose her nomination — even if it elicits strong NRA opposition.
Most of the developments now threatening to reverse efforts to reduce the influence of money in politics were set in motion during George W. Bush’s presidency. But Obama is nevertheless poised to watch the regulatory regime crumble around him as his administration follows a cautious approach that mostly ignores calls for more activist steps to salvage the troubled campaign finance system
The irony that the system could collapse on Obama’s watch, after he convinced the advocates for stricter regulations that he was one of their own, is not lost on those who support limits on the flow of money into the American political system.
House Republican leaders used the argument during the debate over the Democrats’ climate change bill, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) urged members before the Fourth of July recess to pound Democrats on jobs at home over the recess, and Boehner signaled this week that Republicans will use the jobs issue again as the House turns to health care reform.
“In the midst of this recession, Republicans’ No. 1 priority is the same as the American people’s: jobs,” Boehner said in a statement to POLITICO. “Yet, again and again, rather than working together to enact policies that will actually help middle-class families and small businesses, Democrats have pushed policies — on energy and health care, for example — that will cost even more American jobs.”
Pushing to complete a comprehensive health care bill by Friday and bring it up for committee votes next week, House Democrats abandoned earlier money-raising proposals, including a payroll tax. They planned to meet behind closed doors Thursday to fine-tune the details.
The action in the House stood in contrast to the Senate, where Democrats edged away from their goal of passing health care legislation by early August amid heightening partisan controversy over tax increases and a proposed new government role in providing insurance to consumers.
The last time the CIA and Nancy Pelosi were in the news together, the House Speaker was accusing the agency of lying about its briefings to Congress on the interrogation of al Qaeda detainees. This week, the Speaker’s fellow Democrats are set to block public disclosure of what Ms. Pelosi was really told and when.
Democrats recently marked up the 2010 intelligence bill, and Republican Pete Hoekstra offered an amendment in committee to require the CIA to make public an unclassified version of its records on Congressional briefings. It also would have required the CIA to disclose the information gleaned from those interrogations.
Democrats have spent years demanding a “truth commission” into interrogations, so you’d think such public disclosure would be welcome. Ah, that was when a different guy was in the White House and before Mrs. Pelosi had made her own veracity an issue. Suddenly, she’s all for secrecy.
Yet the Obama Justice Department has come out of the blocks trying to scuttle a promising experiment to stabilize the chronically unprofitable U.S. airline sector. The new administration seemingly won’t let companies fail, and won’t let them succeed either.
Contrary to most reports, her decision had been in the works for months, accelerating recently as it became clear that controversies and endless ethics investigations were threatening to overshadow her legislative agenda. “Attacks inside Alaska and largely invisible to the national media had paralyzed her administration,” someone close to the governor told me. “She was fully aware she would be branded a ‘quitter.’ She did not want to disappoint her constituents, but she was no longer able to do the job she had been elected to do. Essentially, the taxpayers were paying for Sarah to go to work every day and defend herself.”
This situation developed because Alaska’s transparency laws allow anyone to file Freedom of Information Act requests. While normally useful, in the hands of political opponents FOIA requests can become a means to bog down a target in a bureaucratic quagmire, thanks to the need to comb through records and respond by a strict timetable. Similarly, ethics investigations are easily triggered and can drag on for months even if the initial complaint is flimsy. Since Ms. Palin returned to Alaska after the 2008 campaign, some 150 FOIA requests have been filed and her office has been targeted for investigation by everyone from the FBI to the Alaska legislature. Most have centered on Ms. Palin’s use of government resources, and to date have turned up little save for a few state trips that she agreed to reimburse the state for because her children had accompanied her. In the process, though, she accumulated $500,000 in legal fees in just the last nine months, and knew the bill would grow ever larger in the future.
It got little attention, but a recent legal decision could be a game-changer in Florida politics.
The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, ended a legal fight over a state law that requires the public to know who is behind — and who is bankrolling — television and radio ads and direct-mail fliers that sharply attack or praise politicians.
Browning decided not to appeal a federal court’s ruling in May that declared the state’s regulation of these outside groups was unconstitutional.
Florida’s decision not to appeal the case signaled to some that the state has given up the fight to try to control money-driven politics.
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