Photograph by Rich Clement/Bloomberg

Supporters for passage of a new agriculture law rally near the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 12, 2012.

From Bloomberg Government’s CongressTracker

Though it’s only Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can see the end of the week from here.

During today’s session-opening floor remarks, Reid said that the chairwoman of the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow, had expressed optimism about finishing work on the farm bill, S. 954.

“I spoke to Chairman Stabenow last night; she indicated that she believes that there’s an opportunity to finish the bill even this week,” Reid said. “I certainly hope that’s the case.”

Original post is Reid: Farm Bill Can Be Finished This Week by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andoni Lubaki/AP Photo

Free Syrian Army fighters take a break from the front line in Aleppo, Syria.

As frustration mounts over the war in Syria, senators will prod President Barack Obama to do what he has resisted: arm the rebels.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee takes up a bill today that would authorize the president to provide military weapons to groups seeking the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad.

“To change the tipping point in Syria against the Assad regime, we must support the opposition by providing lethal arms and help build a free Syria,” Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the panel’s Democratic chairman, said in a statement last week. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the panel’s top Republican, is a cosponsor.

While the Obama administration hasn’t ruled out such a move, officials have expressed reluctance to flood Syria with more weaponry, partly because elements within the opposition have ties to al-Qaeda.

“Understandably, there’s a desire for easy answers,” Obama said on May 7. “We want to make sure that we are acting deliberately.”

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel gave a noncommittal answer at a news conference last week when asked about the option of providing arms.

“We continue to keep every option open, as the president has said,” Hagel said. “We are already doing a lot in Syria on the humanitarian side, on the non-lethal side. We are continuing to try to bring some consensus with all the different countries involved.”

A vote on the bill comes amid reports that Russia is providing the Assad regime with advanced anti-ship missiles and air-defense systems.

Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on May 17 that Russia’s continued arming of the Syrian regime is “at the very least an unfortunate decision that will embolden the regime and prolong the suffering.” Russian officials have said they are fulfilling their commitments under existing arms contracts.

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress last month that Russia was supplying Syria with a supersonic anti-ship cruise missile called the Yakhont that he said poses “a major threat to naval operations, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean.”

Russia also is supplying S-300 air-defense missile batteries to Syria, according to a Kremlin official who asked not to be named discussing the arms sales. The S-300S would bolster Syria’s air defense network, complicating any effort by other countries to create a no-fly zone within Syria to assist rebel groups.

Some Republicans, led by Arizona Senator John McCain, have been urging the administration for months to arm the rebels and create a no-fly zone.

The Menendez-Corker bill would authorize weapons to groups that go through “a vetting process which meet certain criteria on human rights, terrorism and non-proliferation,” the statement said.

The bill also would create an annual $250 million “transition fund” through 2015 to assist the opposition in creating a post-Assad government.

Original post is Senators Take Up Bill to Arm Syrian Rebels by Political Capital.

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, right, speaks after being introduced by President Barack Obama as the nominee for Secretary of Transportation at the White House, next to outgoing Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, left, on April 29, 2013 in Washington, DC.

Anthony Foxx, whose nomination as Transportation Secretary has slid under the radar as picks for the labor and commerce departments get more scrutiny, will get his moment in Washington at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee.

Foxx, 42, is scheduled for his hearing tomorrow, the day before the panel headed by Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, considers the nomination of Penny Pritzker to be commerce secretary.

Foxx is the part-time mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, and has little experience with transportation policy outside his state. Obama nominated him to replace Ray LaHood, a former Republican U.S. House member from Illinois, who is stepping down.

After criticism that too many of his second-term cabinet nominees were white men, President Barack Obama increased the diversity of his nominations for those posts. Foxx would be Obama’s second black cabinet officer, after Attorney General Eric Holder.

Rockefeller has said he doesn’t expect Foxx to have trouble getting confirmed and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, has called Foxx’s confirmation a priority.

As mayor, Foxx led Charlotte as it hosted the Democratic National Convention last year when Obama was nominated for a second term. When his nomination was announced, Foxx drew support from lawmakers and transportation groups.

The Senate is working its way through Obama’s nominees to second-term posts. Last week, a Senate panel approved the nomination of Thomas Perez to be labor secretary. Last month, the Senate confirmed Sally Jewell, an outdoor-equipment company executive, to become interior secretary.

Original post is Low-Key Mr. Foxx Goes to Washington by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., speaks about the Xbox 360 system during his keynote address at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

By Susan Decker

Microsoft could see the end of its almost three-year trade fight with Google’s Motorola Mobility unit over technology used in the popular Xbox video-gaming system.

A U.S. International Trade Commission judge in March cleared Microsoft of a claim it infringed a Motorola patent for a way to establish communication between the Xbox and accessories. The full commission is scheduled to announce Friday whether it will let those findings stand, thus ending the case, or conduct a further review with a final decision issued by July.

Should a violation be found, the commission has the power to stop the China-made Xbox from entering U.S. borders. It’s the nation’s most popular game console, beating out Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Wii in a market projected to expand to $70 billion in 2017 by DFC Intelligence, a market researcher.

Microsoft has argued that, even if it did violate the Motorola patent, banning the Xbox would be an extreme remedy that would reduce consumer choice and hurt game developers.

Microsoft’s entertainment unit, which includes the Xbox, generated $9.6 billion in sales last year, or 13 percent of the company’s revenue, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

There is a single patent left in the case. Two patents that were part of the original complaint were on widely used technology for video decoding, and led to accusations by Microsoft and regulators that Motorola Mobility was misusing patents to thwart competition.

Motorola Mobility dropped those two after Google reached an agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over the use of standard-essential patents. Two other patents were dropped because they are expiring this year.

No matter how this case ends, it won’t close out all the patent fights between the two companies, who have accused each other of infringement in cases in Germany and Washington state.

A federal judge in Seattle last month said the Motorola Mobility patents on video-decoding and wireless technology standards were worth about $1.8 million, far less than the 2.25 percent of the retail price that Motorola Mobility had initially demanded.

The patent in the ITC case, like some of the others asserted against Microsoft and Apple don’t relate to any industrywide standard and so aren’t part of that broader debate on standard-essential patents.

Original post is A Microsoft-Google Patent Case May Actually End? by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images

Workers lay the pipes for a gas pipeline outside the town of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, on April 13, 2012. It is estimated that more than 500 trillion cubic feet of shale gas is contained in this stretch of rock that runs through parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia.

So many positive attributes have been ascribed to natural gas it’s a wonder that it hasn’t been touted as a cure for wrinkles and belly fat.

The U.S. gas bonanza will revive domestic manufacturing, lower carbon emissions, weaken OPEC, reduce the U.S. trade deficit, and turn landowners that sit atop the shale-rock formations where the fuel is found into overnight millionaires.

Senator Ron Wyden, the chairman of the Senate’s energy committee, will try to separate fact from fiction in two sessions on natural gas this week.

Executives from General Electric Co. and other companies told the Senate panel last week the U.S. needed to build more pipelines to keep up with the production, which grew by 27 percent from 2007-2011.

On Tuesday, the committee looks at how much gas there is in the U.S. and whether we can afford to ship some overseas. The Energy Department is reviewing 19 applications for export terminals. Dow Chemical Co. and other companies that use gas as a feedstock for their products have said more overseas sales could raise prices here, negating an advantage they have over global competitors.

Peter Huntsman, chief executive officer of the Huntsman Corp., a chemical company that has joined Dow in opposing broad exports, is expected to testify. Executives from Cheniere Energy, Inc., Sempra Energy, and the American Chemistry Council are also scheduled to appear.

As with any Old West elixir, some naysayers see negative side effects to the cure-all.

Fracking, the process that shoots a mixture of water, sand and chemicals deep underground to break apart the rock and free trapped gas, is a source of water and air pollution, according to groups including the Sierra Club. And while gas is less harmful to the environment than coal, it’s still a fossil fuel and generates carbon emissions all its own.

The issue of what broad gas development means to the environment is the subject of final session on Thursday. The Sierra Club’s Deb Nardone, who directs the groups Beyond Natural Gas campaign, will appear side-by-side representatives from gas producers like Anadarko Petroleum Corp., and Noble Energy, Inc.

Original post is Wyden Seeks the Whole Truth on Natural Gas by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images

People march through the streets of Oxnard, California, for immigration reform and to honor the legacy of Cesar E. Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers of America, on March 24, 2013.

At the rose-adorned grave-site of Cesar Chavez, co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association, widow Helen Chavez had one wish for the visiting President Barack Obama.

“I would like to make sure and request that you get immigration reform passed,” she said at that encounter last fall, according to Arturo Rodriguez, a longtime associate of the late farmworkers’ leader and now president of the United Farm Workers, recounting Obama’s reply: “He said, `You know what, Mrs. Chavez, I promise you I will get that done.”’

While the Obama White House hasn’t taken the public lead on an immigration bill shaped by a bipartisan group of senators working its way through the Judiciary Committee — wary that any bill with Obama’s name on it will become a target for Republican opposition — the president has blessed the bill as within the bounds of the sort of comprehensive legislation he wants: Offering a path to citizenship for some 11 million undocumented workers already in the U.S., while securing the nation’s borders and instituting a sensible program of guest-worker visas for lower- and higher-skilled workers alike — including farmworkers.

During negotiations over the farmworker provisions of the bill led by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and Republican Marco Rubio of Florida, the UFW’s Giev Kashkooli says, the Obama administration’s Departments of Homeland Security, Agriculture and Labor were instrumental in guiding which one of the many proposals on the bargaining table would work and which ones wouldn’t. The agencies provided good “technical assistance,” he said, “on what was possible and what was not possible.”

At the center of the farmworkers’ concerns in what could be the most significant immigration legislation in a generation is the provision enabling those who have toiled in American fields without legal residency to seek a path to citizenship, Rodriguez says. At least 800,000 and as many as 1.1 million families  stand to benefit from that, he says.

“We’re very optimistic and very hopeful,” Rodriguez said today, at a breakfast sponsored by Bloomberg Government in Washington. “We developed what I believe is a very important step… to ensure that they gain legal status,” he said. “They’ve earned the right to be able to do that in this country.”

Today, as the Democratic-run Senate Judiciary Committee continues work on amendments to the bipartisan bill, the Republican-run House Judiciary Committee is taking testimony on far more limited legislation involving the guest farmworker program. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the bill’s sponsor, has spoken out against a path to citizenship for the undocumented, and is more interested in specific legislation enhancing border security and amending the guest-worker visa programs.

Yet the House’s bill is worse than limited, Rodriguez maintains. As Bloomberg’s Alan Bjerga reports on Rodriguez’s remarks, it represents a throw-back to the 1940s and 1950s, he says — evoking the Bracero program in place from 1942-64. Prompted by a need for manual labor during World War II, the agreement between the U.S. and Mexico permitted Mexican citizens to take temporary farm work in the U.S. Initially, 10 percent of their pay was deducted for savings accounts that many of the workers never saw. A Labor Department employee in 1964 called it “legalized slavery.”

“We can’t afford to go back in history,” Rodriguez said.

Negotiations in the House among another bipartisan group of lawmakers for broader legislation along the lines of the Senate bill are reported at a near-impasse. Yet, “there’s too much momentum at this point,” Rodriguez suggests. “I don’t think Congress can afford to ignore this anymore.”

On Oct. 3, one month before his reelection, Obama traveled to Nuestra Senora Reina de la Paz – Our Lady of Peace — in Keene, California, resting place of Cesar Chavez and home of the union he led until his death in 1993. The president declared 105 acres a national monument to be managed by the National Park Service. He visited Chavez’s grave with his widow and declared the farmworkers’ movement a “story of determined, fearless, hopeful people who have been willing to devote their lives to making the country a little more just and a little more fair.”

In November, Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, which helped him defeat Republican Mitt Romney.

The narrative of the immigration debate under way in Washington suggests that Republicans ultimately will align with Democrats on a long-sought revision of U.S. law because it is in their political self-interest to avert another drubbing.

Yet will passage of an immigration bill repair the Republican Party’s torn relations with Latino voters, following a campaign in which deportation of the undocumented drove the party’s primary contests?

“It’s hard to say what the dynamic would be — how it would change peoples’ thinking,” Rodriguez said. “We’re like everybody else out there,” he said, suggesting that the public at large will thank Congress for taking action on what everyone knows is “a broken immigration system” — and look askance at failure.

Original post is Immigration Bill: Promise with a Prayer by Political Capital.

Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A worker is viewed through protective sheeting on the Brooklyn Bridge on April 30, 2013 in New York City.

With the employment report today beating expectations – at 165,000 new jobs, above the widely expected 140,000 gain – the U.S. economy continues to chug along at a steady, though unexciting pace. The unemployment rate ticked down by 0.1 percent to 7.5 percent, and that’s good news too. So is the fact that job growth continued despite the dreaded sequester.

All this relatively good news doesn’t mean, however, that sequestration is having no impact. Earlier the Congressional Budget Office projected job losses of 750,000 on an annualized basis if the across-the-board cuts remained in force this year. So, the job numbers just reported surely would be somewhat higher – perhaps by 50,000 to 60,000 — without the sequestration.

There are other developments for the “half empty” crowd to worry about. Many workers are in less-than full time jobs, or in new jobs paying much less than they were used to. Productivity growth, the key to long-term living standards, has averaged well below 2 percent for the past eight years, compared with 3 percent recorded in much of the 1990s. Income growth continues to go almost all to the top of the income scale, according to the latest statistics. And economic growth itself is hardly earth-shaking: the early GDP report of 2.5 percent in the first quarter disappointed a market that was expecting 3 percent.

In short, the two political parties have plenty of economic ammunition to support their verdicts on the budget, President Barack Obama and the economy, further feeding the cynicism that has turned off so many voters outside the Beltway and contributed to political gridlock inside it.

As for the Fed, the new employment numbers probably won’t change the current sentiment to keep up the bond buying until the labor market improves a lot more. Inflation remains low, so the Fed critics have a hard case to make.

The Fed’s responsibilities remain daunting. It’s providing the only policy support for an economy that, given the sequester and other austerity measures advanced since the August 2011 budget deal, would be generating even less output and job growth than the weak improvements noted in the news lately.

Robert Litan is director of research at Bloomberg Government. Follow him on Twitter at @BobLitan.

Original post is Divided Views of U.S. Economy Remain with Jobs Report: BGov by Political Capital.

Photograph by J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

President Barack Obama makes a final get-out-the-vote push for Democratic candidates, Attorney General Dick Blumenthal, running for U.S. Senate, left, and Rep. Jim Himes, D-Ct., right, in Bridgeport, Conn.

As the 2014 campaign begins, one bright spot for House Democrats is their early success raising campaign funds.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee raised $22.6 million in the first three months of this year compared with $17.5 million for its partisan counterpart, the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Yet money is one of many factors that shape election results, and it surely isn’t the most important one. Other factors militate against the 201-member Democratic minority securing a 218-seat majority next year — reconfigured district maps that favor Republicans, an inefficient clumping of Democratic voters in large metropolitan areas and the ability of some Republican incumbents to win competitive districts.

While President Barack Obama is helping House Democrats raise money, midterm elections almost always are difficult for the White House’s party. An administration’s supporters are less enthusiastic about voting in a lower-turnout midterm election year.

Obama is “very serious about raising money for congressional Democrats. But I’m not sure this is a challenge that money alone can solve,” Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the DCCC’s finance chairman, said at a Bloomberg Government breakfast. “On the House side, the numbers are daunting in terms of Democrats taking control of the House, very daunting.”

Original post is DCCC Finance Chair: Winning House ‘Very Daunting’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Planet News Archive/SSPL via Getty Images

World heavyweight champion Jack Johnson with his wife, visiting Paris in 1910.

From Bloomberg Government’s Congress Tracker:

On a day when senators couldn’t agree on any proposals to deal with the burning issue of the moment, gun control, they were able reach consensus on divisive events of a century ago — now that they know which side of history it’s safe to be on.

Quietly (with no roll-call vote), the Senate adopted a resolution expressing the sense of Congress that the first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, deserves a posthumous pardon for “his racially motivated 1913 conviction.” The resolution, “S.Con.Res. 5,” was adopted last night by unanimous consent.

Even if you’ve never heard of Johnson, you’ve probably heard the turn of phrase that his prowess in the ring added to America’s lexicon. A nation that couldn’t accept a black heavyweight champion went on a search for a “great white hope.” As summarized in the Senate resolution, after Johnson knocked out the white ex-champ who came out of retirement for the express purpose of being the “great white hope,” there was “rioting, aggression against African-Americans and the racially motivated murder of African-Americans nationwide.”

Two more pieces of relevant information: the champ dated white women during a time when, according to the Senate’s research, 754 African-Americans were lynched between 1901 and 1910, “some for simply being ‘too familiar’” with white women. In 1912, Johnson traveled with his future wife, who was white, and federal marshals arrested him for transporting her across state lines for an “immoral purpose,” in violation of a 1910 law. When that prosecution failed, they charged him with transporting a different woman across state lines.

Johnson ended up spending a year in the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. He died in 1954.

Original post is An Easy Decision for the U.S. Senate: Boxer Jack Johnson by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, left, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein leave the White House after they and 13 other bank heads met with President Barack Obama on March 27, 2009 in Washington, DC.

President Barack Obama will meet with the heads of the world’s biggest banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Lloyd C. Blankfein and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon, seeking to strengthen ties that have been strained by new U.S. curbs on fees and trading.

The NTSB begins public meetings on the Boeing 787 lithium battery fire.

In the Senate, a cloture vote will determine whether lawmakers consider a bill to expand the background checks on gun purchases.

Bloomberg View Columnist Amity Shlaes joins a Cato Institute discussion on tax reform under President Calvin Coolidge.

Speaking of taxes, eliminating most deductions, lowering overall tax rates would be a “good idea,” voters say 47 percent to 35 percent, while 55 percent say the rich pay less than their fair share, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Almost two-thirds of American voters have someone else prepare their tax return.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and Acting OMB Director Jeffrey Zients head to Capitol Hill to sell the Obama administration’s budget to hearings of House and Senate committees, while the House Appropriations panel hears from Acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank on her agency’s spending plans.

The House Armed Services Committee hears from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey on the Pentagon’s budget request. The House Select Intelligence Committee holds a hearing on threats to the U.S. with witnesses including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director Robert Mueller. The Atlantic Council holds a discussion of the future of the Air Force, with topics including budget cuts, competitor nations and new technologies.

A House Energy and Commerce panel, chaired by Rep. John Shimkus, an Illinois Republican, holds a hearing on the Coal Ash Recycling and Oversight Act of 2013 as the Senate Environment Committee hears from EPA head nominee Gina McCarthy at her confirmation hearing. NOAA holds a conference call on its Drought Task Force.

The rebound in homebuilding after a six-year slump should generate as many as 500,000 jobs this year and 700,000 in 2014, including related services, estimates Russell Price, a senior economist at Ameriprise Financial. Price is the top forecaster of employment over the past two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The SEC’s Dodd-Frank Investor Advisory Committee meets today. A Senate Banking panel holds a hearing on the role of regulators and consultants in the scrapped multibillion dollar settlement over mishandled foreclosures. A House Financial Services panel on capital markets holds a hearing on derivatives provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act.

The Washington International Trade Association holds the third in a four-part series of discussions on Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, this one on U.S. priorities and objectives. Bloomberg Government’s Robert Litan and Navigant Economics Managing Director Hal Singer discuss how FCC policies affect investment in telecommunications at ITIF.

And this evening, filmmakers Ken Burns and David McMahon discuss their film “The Central Park Five” after a screening at the National Press Club.

Original post is Washington Daybook: Banks, Budgets and Guns by Political Capital.