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.

Photograph by Marc Rochette/Bloomberg

A Canadian flag flies over the Berens River in Berens River, Manitoba.

Lawmakers are agreed: We should not invade Canada.

Debate over a Senate Democratic proposal to tap “unspent” Afghanistan war funds to cover the cost of halting budget sequestration veered today into the theoretical.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois was on the floor, pushing his party’s plan to take advantage of an accounting quirk that forces the Congressional Budget Office to exaggerate how much the government probably will spend on the war in Afghanistan.

By law, the agency is required to assume that discretionary spending, including war funds, will grow each year with inflation even though costs should decline as the war in Afghanistan winds down. Democrats want to take the difference between what the war is projected to cost and what it will actually cost and use that to pay for offsetting automatic budget cuts for the rest of the fiscal year.

“There will be a surplus of money in this fund, some $600 billion, that otherwise had been anticipated to be spent,” Durbin said.

Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania mocked the idea, saying the money was never going to be spent anyway so it can’t be counted as savings. He compared it with deciding not to invade Canada, and then counting as savings the money it would have spent marching on Ottawa.

“Imagine the money we could save if we don’t go to war with Canada,” Toomey said. “With all that savings, let’s go out and spend it.”

Durbin retorted that House Republicans had included Toomey’s “Canadian invasion fund” in one of their previous budgets. “So it was a good idea when (House Budget Chairman) Paul Ryan had to write a budget — it is a bad idea when we’re trying to avoid the pain of sequestration,” he said.

In case anyone missed Toomey’s sarcasm, he was careful to note he isn’t proposing to invade Canada, which came as some comfort to Vermont’s  Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“I live right near there,” Sanders said. “It would be a terrible thing.”

As first reported in Bloomberg Government’s Congress Tracker.

Original post is Canadian Invasion Not in the Budget by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg

Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, in Washington.

Senator Mark Warner places the odds for a bipartisan debt-reduction deal at better than 50-50, and has outlined plans to roll out fresh ideas in the coming weeks on where to find the revenue to finance it.

Warner, a first-term Democrat who has been a leading participant in several unsuccessful bipartisan efforts to forge agreement on slicing the federal debt through a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases, said at a Bloomberg Breakfast in Washington today that he is in a “period of optimism” about the chances of doing so now.

“This is eminently doable,” Warner said of a package that would cut $2 trillion from the long-term debt. Without offering specifics, Warner said he was looking at ways to raise the revenue that would be needed for such a proposal as an alternative to rewriting the tax code — which has been the  chief means of doing so in deficit negotiations thus far.

“I’m not ready to come fully clean yet,” said Warner, adding later that he was in the process of sharing his ideas with Republican lawmakers and think tanks to determine his  proposal’s prospects and when to unveil it.

“Are there other default mechanisms, if tax reform doesn’t get there, that could be broad-based, fair, progressive, and that might attract attention?” he said.

Warner, who co-founded a company that is now part of Overland Park, Kansas-based Sprint Nextel Corp. and served as Virginia’s governor from 2002 to 2006, said lawmakers may be more inclined to strike a deal because “looking stupid at some point has got to motivate people.”

Still, he added, doing so would require both sides to save face in the stalemate, perhaps by embracing some fresh mechanisms for raising revenue that neither side has rejected in past negotiations.

“The validity of some good, new ideas in this debate are important, but equally important is just the idea of having some new ideas, so that people can get off their well-established positions,” he said.

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat who has  also been involved in previous bipartisan debt talks, said earlier this week he thought the chances of a compromise were now less than 50 percent.

Warner criticized House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s fiscal blueprint, arguing that the Wisconsin Republican’s proposed cuts to education, infrastructure and research and development spending are misguided from a business perspective.

Republican presidential nominee and co-founder of the private-equity firm Bain Capital LLC Mitt Romney “would never invest in the Paul Ryan business plan for this country,” Warner said. “It is a bad business plan for America. There is no nation in the world that we’re competing against that has as bad a business plan as what he’s laid out.”

Original post is Warner: Budget Deal Better Than 50-50 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images

Sen. Charles Schumer, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin hold a news conference at the Capitol on the eve of the budget sequester on Feb. 28, 2013 in Washington.

If the first rule in “Fight Club” is not to talk about fight club, the first rule in the U.S. Senate is to never acknowledge its shortcomings.

Senators pretend to be cordial, part of the most deliberative body in the world, but they seldom truly debate. Members go to the floor, spill their talking points, and if confronted by an opposing viewpoint rarely confront the issue at hand. For those in the visitors’ gallery, or watching along on CSPAN-2, the Senate appears to be a smooth-sailing legislative body — members sometimes taking to the floor to address no one but the TV camera.

This afternoon on the floor of the chamber,  Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois was caught in a back-and-forth with Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey.

Toomey was trying to make the point that President Barack Obama has been overstating the impacts that budget sequestration would have on the aviation industry, citing lower levels in funding requests for the FAA in his FY 2013 budget.

Durbin was in no mood to politely pivot from Toomey and instead demanded control of the chamber. His voice rising, he warned of the threats the transportation industry faces under sequestration and looked toward the gallery saying: “This is getting perilously close to a debate. Which I might tell those in attendance never happens on the floor of the Senate.”

Original post is Danger: Debate Breaks out in Senate by Political Capital.

Photograph by U.S. Customs and Border Protection via AP

A silver Jeep Cherokee that suspected smugglers were attempting to drive over the U.S.-Mexico border fence is stuck at the top of a makeshift ramp near Yuma, Arizona.

Eight senators, four Democrats and four Republicans, today will announce a comprehensive framework for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, including a “road-map” to citizenship for some of the 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.

This is where a real movement for reform started the last time, in 2007, in the Senate.

Now, as then, the most daunting obstacle, is the House — where many Republicans have drawn a line against what they view as amnesty for law-breakers.

Now, however, Republicans are confronting a more pressing challenge for the party: Regaining lost footing among a fast-growing constituency, the nation’s Latinos, who gave 71 percent of their support in November to President Barack Obama’s re-election. Senators such as John McCain of Arizona, who figured prominently in the 2007 movement for immigration reform but became more cautious about the issue as he sought the White House in 2008, say sentiment is shifting toward an acknowledgment that something must be done about millions of people who have settled, established families and become working members of the economy.

“What’s changed is that there is a new appreciation on both sides of the aisle — including maybe more importantly on the Republican side of the aisle — that we have to enact a comprehensive immigration reform bill,” McCain said on ABC News’ “This Week.”

“We can’t round up millions of people and deport them,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, one of the senators proposing the plan and a rising star in the Republican Party, wrote in an opinion piece for the Las Vegas Review-Journal that was published online yesterday. “What we have now is de facto amnesty.”
See Lisa Lerer’s full report on the bipartisan immigration plan at Bloomberg.com.

And read the full outline that will be released by Sens. Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Bob Menendez, Marco Rubio, Mike Bennet, and Jeff Flake today at 2:30 pm EST, here:

“Bipartisan Framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform”

“We recognize that our immigration system is broken. And while border security has improved significantly over the last two Administrations, we still don’t have a functioning immigration system. This has created a situation where up to 11 million undocumented immigrants are living in the shadows. Our legislation acknowledges these realities by finally committing the resources needed to secure the border, modernize and streamline our current legal immigration system, while creating a tough but fair legalization program for individuals who are currently here. We will ensure that this is a successful permanent reform to our immigration system that will not need to be revisited.
Four Basic Legislative Pillars:
o Create a tough but fair path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States that is contingent upon securing our borders and tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required;

o Reform our legal immigration system to better recognize the importance of characteristics that will help build the American economy and strengthen American families;

o Create an effective employment verification system that will prevent identity theft and end the hiring of future unauthorized workers; and,

o Establish an improved process for admitting future workers to serve our nation’s workforce needs, while simultaneously protecting all workers.

I. Creating a Path to Citizenship for Unauthorized Immigrants Already Here that is Contingent Upon Securing the Border and Combating Visa Overstays

 Our legislation will provide a tough, fair, and practical roadmap to address the status of unauthorized immigrants in the United States that is contingent upon our success in securing our borders and addressing visa overstays.

 To fulfill the basic governmental function of securing our borders, we will continue the increased efforts of the Border Patrol by providing them with the latest technology, infrastructure, and personnel needed to prevent, detect, and apprehend every unauthorized entrant.

 Additionally, our legislation will increase the number of unmanned aerial vehicles and surveillance equipment, improve radio interoperability and increase the number of agents at and between ports of entry. The purpose is to substantially lower the number of successful illegal border crossings while continuing to facilitate commerce.
 We will strengthen prohibitions against racial profiling and inappropriate use of force, enhance the training of border patrol agents, increase oversight, and create a mechanism to ensure a meaningful opportunity for border communities to share input, including critiques.

 Our legislation will require the completion of an entry-exit system that tracks whether all persons entering the United States on temporary visas via airports and seaports have left the country as required by law.

 We recognize that Americans living along the Southwest border are key to recognizing and understanding when the border is truly secure. Our legislation will create a commission comprised of governors, attorneys general, and community leaders living along the Southwest border to monitor the progress of securing our border and to make a recommendation regarding when the bill’s security measures outlined in the legislation are completed.

 While these security measures are being put into place, we will simultaneously require those who came or remained in the United States without our permission to register with the government. This will include passing a background check and settling their debt to society by paying a fine and back taxes, in order to earn probationary legal status, which will allow them to live and work legally in the United States. Individuals with a serious criminal background or others who pose a threat to our national security will be ineligible for legal status and subject to deportation. Illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes face immediate deportation.

 We will demonstrate our commitment to securing our borders and combating visa overstays by requiring our proposed enforcement measures be complete before any immigrant on probationary status can earn a green card

  Current restrictions preventing non-immigrants from accessing federal public benefits will also apply to lawful probationary immigrants.

 Once the enforcement measures have been completed, individuals with probationary legal status will be required to go to the back of the line of prospective immigrants, pass an additional background check, pay taxes, learn English and civics, demonstrate a history of work in the United States, and current employment, among other requirements, in order to earn the opportunity to apply for lawful permanent residency. Those individuals who successfully complete these requirements can eventually earn a green card.

 Individuals who are present without lawful status – not including people within the two categories identified below – will only receive a green card after every individual who is already waiting in line for a green card, at the time this legislation is enacted, has received their green card. Our purpose is to ensure that no one who has violated America’s immigration laws will receive preferential treatment as they relate to those individuals who have complied with the law.

 Our legislation also recognizes that the circumstances and the conduct of people without lawful status are not the same, and cannot be addressed identically.

o For instance, individuals who entered the United States as minor children did not knowingly choose to violate any immigration laws. Consequently, under our proposal these individuals will not face the same requirements as other individuals in order to earn a path to citizenship.

o Similarly, individuals who have been working without legal status in the United States agricultural industry have been performing very important and difficult work to maintain America’s food supply while earning subsistence wages. Due to the utmost importance in our nation maintaining the safety of its food supply, agricultural workers who commit to the long term stability of our nation’s agricultural industries will be treated differently than the rest of the undocumented population because of the role they play in ensuring that Americans have safe and secure agricultural products to sell and consume. These individuals will earn a path to citizenship through a different process under our new agricultural worker program.

II. Improving our Legal Immigration Syste m and Attracting the World ’s B est and Brightest

The development of a rational legal immigration system is essential to ensuring America’s future economic prosperity. Our failure to act is perpetuating a broken system which sadly  discourages the world’s best and brightest citizens from coming to the United States and remaining in our country to contribute to our economy. This failure makes a legal path to entry in the United States insurmountably difficult for well-meaning immigrants. This unarguably discourages innovation and economic growth. It has also created substantial visa backlogs which force families to live apart, which incentivizes illegal immigration.

 Our new immigration system must be more focused on recognizing the important characteristics which will help build the American economy and strengthen American families. Additionally, we must reduce backlogs in the family and employment visa categories so that future immigrants view our future legal immigration system as the exclusive means for entry into the United States.

 The United States must do a better job of attracting and keeping the world’s best and brightest. As such, our immigration proposal will award a green card to immigrants who have received a PhD or Master’s degree in science, technology, engineering, or math from an American university. It makes no sense to educate the world’s future innovators and entrepreneurs only to ultimately force them to leave our country at the moment they are most able to contribute to our economy.

III. Strong Employment Verification
We recognize that undocumented immigrants come to the United States almost exclusively for jobs. As such, dramatically reducing future illegal immigration can only be achieved by developing a tough, fair, effective and mandatory employment verification system. An employment verification system must hold employers accountable for knowingly hiring undocumented workers and make it more difficult for unauthorized immigrants to falsify documents to obtain employment. Employers who knowingly hire unauthorized workers must face stiff fines and criminal penalties for egregious offenses.

 We believe the federal government must provide U.S. employers with a fast and reliable method to confirm whether new hires are legally authorized to work in the United States. This is essential to ensure the effective enforcement of immigration laws.

 Our proposal will create an effective employment verification system which prevents identity theft and ends the hiring of future unauthorized workers. We believe requiring prospective workers to demonstrate both legal status and identity, through non-forgeable electronic means prior to obtaining employment, is essential to an employee verification system; and,

 The employee verification system in our proposal will be crafted with procedural safeguards to protect American workers, prevent identity theft, and provide due process protections.

IV. Admit ting New Worker s and Protecting Workers’ Rights

 The overwhelming majority of the 327,000 illegal entrants apprehended by CBP in FY2011 were seeking employment in the United States. We recognize that to prevent future waves of illegal immigration a humane and effective system needs to be created for these immigrant workers to enter the country and find employment without seeking the aid of human traffickers or drug cartels.

 Our proposal will provide businesses with the ability to hire lower-skilled workers in a timely manner when Americans are unavailable or unwilling to fill those jobs.

 Our legislation would:

o Allow employers to hire immigrants if it can be demonstrated that they were unsuccessful in recruiting an American to fill an open position and the hiring of an immigrant will not displace American workers;

o Create a workable program to meet the needs of America’s agricultural industry, including dairy to find agricultural workers when American workers are not available to fill open positions;

o Allow more lower-skilled immigrants to come here when our economy is creating jobs, and fewer when our economy is not creating jobs;

o Protect workers by ensuring strong labor protections; and,

o Permit workers who have succeeded in the workplace and contributed to their communities over many years to earn green cards.

Original post is Immigration ‘Road-map:’ Bipartisan Senators Proposing a Path Today by Political Capital.

Photograph by Getty Images

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, seen speaking at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, is working with Senate Democrats on an immigration package. Photo by Getty Images.

Senate Democrats plan to put forward an immigration proposal next week, with President Barack Obama telling Hispanic lawmakers that he intends to push legislation as quickly as possible.

Obama will begin a public campaign to build support for an immigration package that will include a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. A bipartisan group of six senators also plans to release a detailed framework laying out their principals for a bill as soon as the end of next week, Senate aides say.

The president “made it very clear that this is his number one legislative priority,” Democratic Rep. Xavier Becerra of California, said after meeting yesterday with Obama at the White House. “In every sense of the word he is in the starting gate.”

The immigration proposal will be the centerpiece of the president’s planned stop on Jan. 29 in Las Vegas, Nevada, a state that Obama won in the last two elections and where Hispanics make up 27 percent of the population.

Passage of a comprehensive immigration bill would fulfill a promise Obama made in both of his presidential campaigns. He won 71 percent of Hispanic voters in his re-election victory. Last June, he took executive action to halt deportations of young people brought illegally to the U.S. as children and make them eligible for work permits.

Since Obama won a second term, the administration has intensified its work on a legislative plan with immigrant-rights advocates, law-enforcement officials and religious leaders who support a change.

A bipartisan group of senators is working on a parallel track to write a bill, and they may release an agreement as soon as next week. White House officials and Democratic leaders are negotiating over who will release their plan first, according to congressional aides.

The Senate proposal will cover four major areas, border enforcement, managing the future flow of immigrants to the U.S., workplace verification standards and a pathway for citizenship for undocumented immigrants, Senate aides said. While Republicans have pushed to take a piecemeal approach, taking up the different components in separate bills, the legislation will be comprehensive, the aides say.

The group includes Republicans Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona and Marco Rubio of Florida, along with Democrats Chuck Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, aides say. Rubio, weighing whether to offer his own legislation, joined the group after November’s elections. Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, Democratic Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado and Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee have also been involved in the discussions, according to Senate aides.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, plans to hold hearings on the issue next month. The goal is for legislation to reach the Senate floor by May or June.

While many Republicans in Congress have criticized creating a system to grant citizenship to undocumented immigrants as amnesty for people who entered the U.S. illegally, the party has softened its stance as Hispanic political clout has grown.

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour says the nation needs to revamp its immigration laws, including citizenship for undocumented people and is urging his party to reach out to minorities or face more electoral losses.

“We’ve got to face up to some demographic issues” if Republicans hope to win the White House in 2016, he says in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” airing this weekend.

National exit polls showed that 10 percent of the electorate was Latino in November, compared with 9 percent four years ago and 8 percent in 2004. Hispanics constitute 16.7 percent of the total U.S. population, the largest ethnic or racial minority, according to the Census Bureau.

The former Mississippi governor says allowing many of the illegal immigrants in the U.S. to stay makes economic as well as political sense.

“If we will follow what’s good economic policy, we will recognize that we are in a global battle for capital and for labor,” Barbour said. “We need the labor, not just H-1B visas for PhDs and engineering from India, but also we need agricultural labor.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney says Obama will be promoting the same set of proposals that were part of his election campaign.

In his Jan. 21 inaugural address, Obama said the immigration issue is tied to economic growth.

“Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity, until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country,” the president said.

Original post is Immigration: Obama, Senate Leaders Pushing Reforms at ‘Starting Gate’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images

A Washington, D.C. ‘TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION’ license plate on Vice President Joseph Biden’s limousine.

Taxation without representation.

It’s a storied complaint in American history.

In Washington, D.C., it’s a license plate.

For all the failures of Washingtonians to gain recognition from the Congress that operates in their own home town, a long-denied bid for statehood for the District of Columbia or even some measure of independence more stately than the landlord relationship they have with the congressional committees that approve their civic budgets has yielded little more than the license plates complaining about all the taxes people pay in the district with the nation’s highest wages and the lack of representation they have in the House and Senate.

They did convince President Barack Obama to slap the “Taxation Without Representation” D.C. plates on his armored limousines for his inauguration.

“Attaching these plates to the presidential vehicles demonstrates the president’s commitment to the principle of full representation for the people of the District of Columbia and his willingness to fight for voting rights, home rule, and budget autonomy for the district,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said on Jan. 17,

And now, once again, senators are introducing a statehood bill. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of  Illinois has joined Sens. Tom Carper of Delaware, Barbara Boxer of California and Patty Murray of Washington in introducing the perennial D.C. statehood bill.

Call it New Columbia.

The 51st state would have full voting rights in Congress, and a federal district called Washington, D.C., encompassing the White House,  Capitol, Supreme Court and National Mall would still remain under the control of Congress, as the Constitution mandates, under the bill. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton , the non-voting delegate from D.C., introduced companion legislation in the House earlier this month.

“”Washington, D.C. is not just a collection of government offices, monuments and museums; it is home to more than 600,000 people who work, study, raise families, and start businesses,” Carper says. “These citizens serve in our military, fight in our wars, die for our country, and pay federal taxes. But when it comes to having a voice in Congress, suddenly these men and women do not count.”

“With the 57th presidential inauguration just days behind us, it might surprise some students of American history to know that it wasn’t until the 1964 election that residents of the District of Columbia were finally able to cast a ballot for President and Vice President of the United States,” says Durbin. “”Unfortunately, the disenfranchisement of these citizens is not yet a relic of history.”

“We live in the only democracy in the world that denies voting representation to residents of its capital city,” adds Murray. “Residents of the District of Columbia have been denied their right to fully participate in our democracy for far too long, and this legislation would finally give them a voice.”

Original post is Washington Statehood: ‘New Columbia’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid addressed negotiations to avert the "fiscal cliff" and mentioned possible changes to filibuster rules in the Senate.

The Senate won’t consider a small-scale bill to avoid an expansion of the alternative minimum tax or a cut in Medicare reimbursements to physicians if no broader budget deal is reached, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says.

Reid, a Nevada Democrat, today said the Senate won’t address any tax or spending provisions that expire at year’s end unless Republicans agree to let tax rates rise for the top 2 percent of earners, as Democrats are demanding.

“As long as they do something on rates, I am happy to talk to them about anything,” Reid said in an interview. Pressed on whether he would refuse to move a smaller scale bill if Republicans refuse to budge on rates, Reid said, “That’s right.”

President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner are at an impasse in talks over how to avert more than $600 billion  in spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to start taking effect in January. Obama and congressional Democrats have said they won’t discuss spending cuts unless Republicans agree to higher tax rates for top earners.

The alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax system created to ensure that wealthy individuals couldn’t avoid all taxes, is scheduled to affect about 28 additional million households for tax year 2012, up from about 4 million otherwise.

Without legislation to prevent that, the Internal Revenue Service has said it would delay tax filing scheduled to start in January until at least late March for more than 60 million filers. Action isn’t required, though the consequences of inaction would be quick and severe.

If Congress doesn’t act by Jan. 1, Medicare payments to physicians will drop by 26.5 percent. Lawmakers usually act to prevent the cut or restore it retroactively in what has become known as the “doc fix.”

Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat, told reporters that Democratic leaders met today with doctors who were concerned about the cut in reimbursement rates.

“Is he waiting for that to happen?” Durbin said of Boehner.

Representative Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said today in an interview that he was continuing to explore alternatives, noting that Congress is running out of time to address the AMT and physician reimbursement rates.

“Many of us were looking at the possibility of a larger package, and it doesn’t look like that’s coming together,” said Camp, a Michigan Republican who is part of Boehner’s negotiating team. “I think those others, it’s uncertain how they’re going to be addressed.”

Original post is Harry Reid: No Small-Scale AMT Fix by Political Capital.