After warnings from some corners — such as the Heritage Foundation claiming the Senate’s immigration reform bill will cost trillions of dollars over five decades — the Congressional Budget Office has scored the measure:

A $175 billion savings over 10 years– with $197 billion in deficit reduction and some offsetting expenses.

About 8 million undocumented immigrants would gain legal status under the bipartisan Senate bill, the CBO report.

And pay taxes.

Sponsors see a springboard in that projection:

CBO report a huge momentum boost; debunks the idea that #CIR is anything other than a boon to our economy

— Chuck Schumer (@ChuckSchumer) June 18, 2013

Today’s report from #CBO is proof positive immigration reform is good for our economy and will help reduce the deficit.

— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) June 18, 2013

The Social Security Administration has said that the bill would generate more than $275 billion in revenue for Social Security and Medicare, increase the gross domestic product by 1.63 percent and add more than 3 million jobs over the next decade.

“Comprehensive Immigration Reform” is a budget builder.

It’s a jobs bill.

Somebody tell Jim DeMint.

Original post is Immigration Bill: $175 Bln Savings by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Attorney General Eric Holder delivers remarks during the Justice Department Inspector General’s annual awards ceremony in the Great Hall at the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice building on May 29, 2013 in Washington, DC.

Brian Fallon, one of the top Democratic communicators on Capitol Hill and long-time spokesman for Senator Charles Schumer of New York, has been tapped by Attorney General Eric Holder to run the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs, according to a person familiar with the decision.

Fallon will inherit a communications office that has been under intense pressure in recent weeks following the disclosure of the Justice Department’s decision to subpoena phone records from the Associated Press in a national security leak investigation.

While Holder was recused from that investigation, he was involved in a separate probe involving a Fox News reporter and played a role in the decision to seek a search warrant for the private e-mails of the reporter, James Rosen.

The leak investigations have drawn fire from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as well as free speech advocates and media organizations who question the scope and intent of the Justice searches involving reporters.

Holder’s staff, as part of a review of the guidelines followed by his department in investigations involving journalists, has reached out to the bureau chiefs of television and print outlets to set up meetings this week. Those meetings, which will take place at the Justice Department and will include Holder and Deputy Attorney General Jim Cole, are designed to allow the media outlets an opportunity to raise concerns and exchange ideas to update the department’s investigations guidelines, according to a Justice Department official.

Two House Republican lawmakers are also probing whether Holder misled lawmakers during his May 15 testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee, when he said he had never “been involved in, or heard of” the “potential prosecution” of journalists.

Fallon, a graduate of Harvard University, has run the communications and response operation for Schumer, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Center.

Fallon, who has been with Schumer since 2007, is expected to stay in the Senate for much of the next month as the chamber works on legislation to reshape U.S. immigration laws.

Original post is Holder Taps Schumer’s Front Man by Political Capital.

Photograph by STR/AFP via Getty Images

A vehicle and the surround buildings burn after they were set on fire inside the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi late on September 11, 2012.

President Barack Obama, addressing a live television audience from the White House, said the commissioner in charge of the IRS has been removed following the agency’s targeted scrutiny of conservative groups.

“The misconduct uncovered is inexcuseable,” Obama said in a brief statement delivered from the East Room. “Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it. I will not tolerate this kind of behavior at any agency, especially the IRS.”

“We’re going to hold the responsible parties accountable,” he said, announcing that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had accepted the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner, Steven Miller.

The president said “new safeguards” will be put in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again, and he will cooperate with Congress in its oversight “to get this thing fixed.”

“I’ll do everything in my power to ensure that nothing like this happens again,” Obama said in remarks delivered in under three and a half minutes.

The White House has faced widespread criticism for not standing up more quickly to the questions emerging from the fatal attacks on a U.S. mission in Libya, the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of requests for tax exemptions from Tea Party-related groups and the Justice Department’s tracking of Associated Press reporters’ phone calls.

The White House rose to all three today:

– Obama faced the television cameras this evening after meeting with high-level Treasury officials at the White House today about what the IRS’s inspector general had called “ineffective management” in the screening of requests for tax-exempt status for groups organized under section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code — groups that are supposed to have only limited political activity. IRS employees in Cincinnati screened for the words Tea Party in their scrutiny. The broadcast and cable networks lined up to carry his words live.

– The Obama White House this afternoon released almost 100 pages of e-mail traffic among officials at the White House, CIA and State Department. The e-mails show the Central Intelligence Agency made major revisions to administration talking points after the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya in Benghazi —as they were developed and before they were delivered to Congress and supplied to United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice. See the talking points here.

– This afternoon, the White House allowed that it had spoken with Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York about reintroducing a shield law to protect the confidential sources of reporters, following the revelation that the Justice Department had tracked the phone records of AP reporters citing an investigation into a leak with national security implications. The president supports the First Amendment, press secretary Jay Carney said today — a shield law should prove it.

In that scandal-industrial complex, that’s one busy day.

Original post is Charge of the Obama Brigade: IRS, Benghazi, Reporters by Political Capital.

Photograph by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, right, stand during the National Anthem as they attend the National Peace Officers Memorial Service, an annual ceremony honoring law enforcement who were killed in the line of duty in the previous year, on May 15, 2013.

Has President Barack Obama not made his objections about the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status clear enough — as well as what he intends to do about it?

The White House is getting roundly criticized on both counts.

“I think the president made clear, based on news reports, his feelings about those reports and what he would expect if they turned out to be true,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said today. “It is entirely appropriate for a president… not to take action based on media reports, but to wait for the actual inspector general’s review to see what happened before moving forward.”

The IRS inspector general has reported: attributing the singling out of Tea Party-related groups for review of their tax status applications to administrative inefficiency. The Justice Department is investigating, to see if any laws were broken.

“The president is impatient with people who do not hold themselves to the standards that he believes employees of the federal government ought to hold themselves to,” Carney said. “He also believes it is important for him to wait for the facts before he acts, and that is what he has done here.”

Is the president as concerned about the Justice Department’s tracking of Associated Press reporters’ telephone records in an investigation of a leak of government information said to have national security implications as it is with the Internal Revenue Service’s conduct?

“What I can tell is that when there are criminal investigations undertaken by the Department of Justice, we do not have insight into or knowledge about them, and that is the way it should be,” Carney said, pointing to Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement that he expects that his deputy who authorized the phone-record tracking followed the guidelines for exhausting every other avenue in any inquiry before resorting to that. “The president is a strong believer in the First Amendment… He also has to be, as commander of chief and an American citizen” concerned about national security.

The White House has spoken with Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York about reintroducing a so-called shield law preventing the government from seizing information from news reporters. Obama “believes the media should have the protection that a shield law would allow,” Carney said.

As for the ongoing clash with Republicans in Congress over the fatal attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, Carney said: “This is political.”

“Republicans are fundraising off of it,” he said at the press briefing in the White House. “You have reports by your colleagues that the speaker of the House is obsessed with it.”

“It is absolutely political.”

Original post is Obama Thinks First, Acts Later: Carney by Political Capital.

Photograph by Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Lead by Mayor Michael Hancock, Anna and Fran Simon are the first couple to take part in a civil union ceremony at the Webb Building in Denver , on May 1, 2013.

The two Democratic members of a bipartisan Senate immigration group who sit on the Judiciary Committee are refusing to say whether they’d vote to add protections for same-sex couples to the measure.

“I’m not going to get into speculatives,”  Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, said today when asked whether he’d vote for an amendment proposed by the panel’s chairman, Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy.

Leahy wants to add a provision requiring that foreign nationals married to a same-sex U.S. citizen be treated equally to those married to a citizen of the opposite sex. Republicans in the eight-member Senate group, opposing the measure, say it would cause them to pull their support for the bill.

“Our four Republican colleagues feel very strongly, those in the Gang of Eight, that if this is in the bill, they would not be able to support it,” Schumer said. “Our four Democratic colleagues, including myself, believe that this is not just another issue, but an issue of discrimination. So how we resolve this remains to be seen.”

Schumer said he “would like very much to see” Leahy’s provision added to the bill, “but we have to have a bill that has support.”

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the other Democratic member of the Senate group who sits on the Judiciary panel, similarly would not say earlier this week if he would back the Leahy amendment if it comes to a vote in the committee, which Democrats control by a two-seat margin.

Schumer today said supporters of Leahy’s amendment who don’t want to sink the overall immigration bill face a “conundrum.”

“This one is something I worry about all the time,” he said.   “I’m a good sleeper, but I wake up in the morning thinking of these things.”

Original post is Schumer: Same-Sex Marriage ‘Conundrum’ for Immigration Bill by Political Capital.

Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York, left, and John McCain of Arizona, before their meeting on immigration with President Barack Obama, April 16, 2013. AP Photo.

Updated at 5:30 pm EDT

The White House isn’t completely satisfied with the immigration rewrite that a bipartisan group of senators has produced, two senators say, yet President Barack Obama has endorsed their work.

The White House confirmed as much after the meeting.

“While he certainly may not agree with every single part of it, he is certainly supportive of the bill we’ve put together,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in the driveway of the West Wing after a meeting with the president this afternoon. “No one is going to get everything they want in a bill, but if we meet in the middle, we can do a lot of good…. The president’s support of our proposal, even though he wouldn’t fully support it, is just where we need to be.”

“The president is very supportive,” said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican. “The president realizes that everybody didn’t get what they wanted completely… It is a process of compromise… The president also agrees that this is the beginning of a process — not the end… But I am very confident that at the end of the day we will have a bill to the president’s desk.”

“ This bill is clearly a compromise, and no one will get everything they wanted, including me,” Obama said in a statement issued later by the White House.  “But it is largely consistent with the principles that I have repeatedly laid out for comprehensive reform.  This bill would continue to strengthen security at our borders and hold employers more accountable if they knowingly hire undocumented workers.  It would provide a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million individuals who are already in this country illegally.  And it would modernize our legal immigration system so that we’re able to reunite families and attract the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers who will help create good paying jobs and grow our economy.  These are all commonsense steps that the majority of Americans support. ”

The one thing they agree on, both the president and Schumer said, is that the bill move as quickly as possible — the senators are filing their bill tonight (see the details here), and planning swift action in the Judiciary Committee and floor action by May.

One of the differences involves a trigger that the senators have in their bill: Before any of the 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. can apply for work permits, let alone the path to citizenship that requires another 10 years, the Department of Homeland Security must certify that there is 90 percent effectiveness in protection of the border in “high-risk” areas — sectors where more than 30,000 people are apprehended trying to cross each year.

‘“The president didn’t believe in a trigger — we did,” Schumer said.  “We know he doesn’t agree with the trigger. His proposal didn’t have one.”

That’s part of the plan’s selling point in the Senate, and in the House as well, where opponents have in the past and once again are deriding the path to citizenship as a form of “amnesty” for the undocumented.

“You’re not going to pass a bill” unless Congress and the public is assured “there is not going to be another wave of illegal immigration,” Schumer said.

With the requirement in the Senate bill that the undocumented pay back taxes, pay fines and get in line behind legal applicants for green cards before they can seek citizenship, he said, “that’s not amnesty in anyone’s book.”

Original post is Senators: Obama Nods on Immigration ‘Compromise’ by Political Capital.

That’s essentially what the U.S. has going now for an estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants already in the country, 8 million of them working, the way Rubio sees it.

And the plan he and other senators are proposing will install an arduous path to working permits and eventually citizenship for some that first demands a lot of the government: The implementation of an “E-verify” system that checks the legal status of all employees, and entry-exit visa system that tracks people in both directions — nearly half of those here illegally now over-stayed their visas rather than sneaking into the country — and “real border security.”

Their proposal demands that the Department of Homeland Security come up with a plan for all that within six months, and provides more than $3 billion for the effort, and if 100 percent of the nation’s borders aren’t 90-percent effective in preventing illegal crossings after five years a new commission takes over the work.

Only when that is in place, Rubio said several times today in a sweep of the Sunday talk shows, can the undocumented start applying for work permits. And, then, he said, they will have to undergo criminal background checks, pay back taxes and a fee to get a work permit. The path to actual citizenship is another decade down the road.

“If you are undocumented… you can’t even apply until after all this happens.,” Rubio said on CNN’s “State of the Union” today, in his response to those who will call his plan amnesty. “We’re not awarding anything. all we’re doing is eventually giving people access… to our modernized immigration system.”

Rubio voiced optimism about passage of this plan. “I’m optimistic about it,” he said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” “This bill answers all of the questions that people raise. That’s why it’s taken so long, that’s why we spent so much time on it. “This bill does three things that are fundamentally important for our country. It modernizes our legal immigration system – something we need to do no matter what. It puts in place the toughest enforcement measures in the history of the United States, potentially in the world. And it once and for all deals with the issue of those that are here illegally, but does so in a way that is fair and compassionate but does not encourage people to come illegally in the future, and isn’t unfair to the people that have done it the right way.”

On ABC News’ “This Week,” Rubio said: “After some period of time, over 10 years that’s elapsed, the only thing you will get — assuming that the border is secure, that E-Verify is in place, that an entry-exit system is in place for tracking visas — then the only thing you get is the chance to apply for a green card, like everybody else does. ”

At the same time, Rubio readily acknowledged that eight senators aren’t rewriting the nation’s immigration laws. “It is a starting point of reform,” he said. “There are 92 other senators who have ideas of their own. And I think that, from them, we are going to get ways to improve this. … Now, there are amendments designed to undermine this. There are amendments that will be designed to make this thing undoable. And obviously, I’ll oppose those.”

Finally, the political question, from CNN’s Candy Crowley: “You seem to be the go-to guy for this Gang of Eight. Do you think this would help or hurt Marco Rubio if he, perhaps, ran for president in 2016?”

“You know, I haven’t even thought about it in that way,” Rubio insisted. “I really haven’t. I have a job. My belief has always been that if I do my job and I do my job well, I’ll have options and opportunities in the future to do things — whether it’s run for reelection, run for something else or give someone else a chance at public service. And that’s how I view this issue.”

Original post is Rubio: The Selling of Immigration by Political Capital.

Photograph by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Sen. Marco Rubio with reporters on Capitol Hill on March 22, 2013 in Washington, DC.

Behind closed doors.

That’s where much of what gets done — when things actually get done — gets done in Washington.

So it appears that the funny bone of the Senate judiciary chairman was tickled by Sen. Marco Rubio’s letter about the immigration bill.

Florida’s Republican Rubio warned Democratic Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont late last week in an open letter that “a rush to legislate, without fully considering all views and input from all senators, could be fatal to the effort of earning the public’s confidence.”

Chairman to secretary: Take a letter to Rubio.

“Yours is the second open letter in March that I have received from a Republican Senator, each suggesting, in one way or another, that we slow the process for consideration of comprehensive immigration reform,” Leahy wrote to Rubio today in another open letter.

Rubio’s bipartisan “gang” of eight senators has been negotiating the terms of a bill they hope to unveil next week. The latest element of it, an agreement between labor and business leaders over visas for low-skilled workers, was sealed in a private conference call Friday night with another member of the gang, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York. That promoted a statement from Rubio Sunday morning as the talk shows were getting underway:

Any talk of a final agreement is “premature,” he said, adding: “In order to succeed, this process cannot be rushed or done in secret.”

“I hope that the American people will soon be able to review the legislation you and your seven fellow gang members have reportedly been working on for months,” Leahy wrote to Rubio today. “I am hopeful you recognize, as I do, that if we do not act quickly and decisively we will lose the opportunity we now have to fix our immigration system. Those who have been committed to this effort for decades are counting on us and expect the Senate to act thoughtfully and without further delay. I have little doubt we are capable of doing both and that our committee process will be, as is my practice, a full and open public debate of the legislation.”

(Note the reference to decades, in the note to the senator of two years.)

When everyone gets back to town next week — when the gang’s proposal is to be unveiled — Leahy is inviting everyone in for a talk.

We’re sure that will be open.

(With thanks to Bloomberg’s Phil Mattingly for pointing out the chairman’s letter:)

Sen. Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy responds to Rubio letter on immigration: 1.usa.gov/YQKuGF

— Phil Mattingly (@Phil_Mattingly) April 2, 2013

Original post is Leahy to Rubio: Ready for ‘You and Your Fellow Gang Members’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by by John Moore/Getty Images

New American citizens take photos following a naturalization ceremony at the district office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on January 28, 2013 in Newark, New Jersey.

As word of a deal between business and labor leaders emerged this weekend, clearing what appeared to be the last impediment in talks among a bipartisan group of eight senators crafting a plan to overhaul immigration, one of the leaders today issued a sober reminder:

There are 92 senators from 43 other states who haven’t signed off yet, Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio, a leader of the “Gang of Eight,” noted in a statement from his office today.

Indeed, that Gang of Eight has more than the Gang of 100 Senators (including a Gang of 45 Republicans who can prevent anything from reaching a vote) to worry about.

There’s also that Gang of 435 known as the House of Representatives, and, most importantly in this case, the Gang of 232 House Republicans.

In fact, Rubio’s own statement today included one easy-to-overlook word that points to a much greater point of contention between Democrats and Republicans in any immigration rewrite than the agreement on guest workers that business and labor have reached: The possible goal for many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S.

Rubio’s gang has agreed to a potential path to citizenship, an arduous road that takes 13 years. The House’s Republicans are unlikely to entertain anything more than a path to legal residency, if that. If the Senate cannot accept a bill without citizenship, and the House cannot accept one with it, the business-labor deal on guest workers could by a pyrrhic victory.

Rubio’s statement offers the least inflammatory word for Republicans: Residency.

“We have made substantial progress, and I believe we will be able to agree on a legislative proposal that modernizes our legal immigration system, improves border security and enforcement and allows those here illegally to earn the chance to one day apply for permanent residency contingent upon certain triggers being met,” Rubio said in his statement today. “However, that legislation will only be a starting point.”

“We will need a healthy public debate that includes committee hearings and the opportunity for other senators to improve our legislation with their own amendments,” he said. “Eight senators from seven states have worked on this bill to serve as a starting point for discussion about fixing our broken immigration system. But arriving at a final product will require it to be properly submitted for the American people’s consideration, through the other 92 senators from 43 states that weren’t part of this initial drafting process. ”

“In order to succeed,” he said, “this process cannot be rushed or done in secret.”

Secrecy like the agreement over guest workers, hashed out in weeks of closed-door talks among business and union leaders and lawmakers, the results widely reported in the media this weekend.

Bloomberg’s Kathleen Hunter and Heidi Przybyla have some of the best details emerging from those talks today,  including the creation of yet another federal office, a Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research to manage the  W Visa Program.

Bloomberg’s reporters wrote on the immigration talks this morning: 

U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue and Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, reached a verbal agreement during a conference call with Senator Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat involved in the talks, according to a person familiar with the discussion, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private call. Schumer called White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to alert him to the deal, the person said.

“This issue has always been the deal-breaker on immigration reform, but not this time,” Schumer said yesterday in an e-mailed statement.

The agreement “seems like a fair compromise,” said Marshall Fitz, head of immigration policy at the Democratic- aligned Center for American Progress. “The two sides have been looking at this through the prism of what they were losing. Appears they have reached a point where they both understand that they are getting a lot of what they wanted.”

“I think this agreement will seal the deal” for a Senate compromise, Fitz said. “Labor gets more data-driven accountability in the system; business gets a new worker program that is more flexible than the current patchwork of temporary visas.”u

The agreement would establish a federal bureau called the Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research and a visa program called the W Visa Program, according to the AFL-CIO. The bureau would use labor market and demographic information to identify labor shortages and to help set an annual visa cap. It would be funded through registered employer fees.

Employers seeking workers in lesser-skilled fields including hospitality, janitorial services, retail and construction could apply through the new visa program, which also would allow workers to petition for permanent status after working for one year.

The program would start with 20,000 visas in the first year, 35,000 in the second, 55,000 in the third and 75,000 in the fourth. In year five the number would grow or shrink based on a formula that takes into account the unemployment rate, the number of job openings and other factors.

The number of visas awarded annually could never exceed 200,000, and one-third of all visas would go only to businesses with under 25 employees, according to the AFL-CIO. Construction visas would be capped at 15,000 per year, addressing Trumka’s concern about a potentially adverse impact on that industry.

Yet, as Rubio reminded all today, this is all part of a “starting point.”

Original post is Immigration: Gang of 535 by Political Capital.

Photograph by John Moore/Getty Images

Undocumented Guatemalan immigrants are body searched before boarding a deportation flight to Guatemala City at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport in Mesa, Arizona.

President Barack Obama, calling the proposal for an immigration overhaul from a bipartisan group of senators “very much in line” with his own goals, says he sees “a genuine desire” in Congress to accomplish this soon.

“The good news is that – for the first time in many years – Republicans and Democrats seem ready to tackle this problem together,” Obama plans to say at an appearance in Las Vegas today. “Members of both parties both chambers, are actively working on a solution.”

The plan proposed by Sens. John McCain and Marco Rubio and two other Republicans, working with Sens. Chuck Schumer, Mike Bennet and two other Democrats, “are very much in line with the principles I’ve proposed and campaigned on for the last few years,” Obama plans to say, according to excerpts from the White House.

Congress must act on “a comprehensive approach” that deals with the 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S., the president will say. The senators have proposed a “road-map” for green cards and ultimately citizenship for many of the undocumented.

The Republicans in the group say they are spurred by the 2012 elections, in which Obama took 71 percent of the Hispanic vote.

“At this moment, it looks like there’s a genuine desire to get this done soon,” Obama plans to say in Nevada, one of the states where Hispanic voters helped re-eelect him. “And that’s very encouraging.”

Original post is Obama: ‘Genuine Desire’ on Immigration by Political Capital.