Photograph by Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Singer Carole King performs onstage at the 28th Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on April 18, 2013 in Los Angeles, California.

President Barack Obama has got a friend in Carole King, a staple singer of the Democratic fundraising performance circuit who will appear at the White House next week to receive the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

It’s not too late to recognize the singer and songwriter who has made the Earth move for so many fans so far away. She’s been to Canaan and may feel home again among the tapestries in the house where Obama has handed the same award to Stevie Wonder (2009), author of the president’s election and re-election theme song, “Signed, Sealed Delivered. ”

This is the first time the Gershwin award has gone to a natural woman, indeed a nightingale.

There will be no crying in the rain, as the show will be staged indoors, in the East Room, not up on the roof.

It should be one fine day, though it’s going to take some time to get through the program, with James Taylor (Democratic convention troubador), Billy Joel, Gloria Estefan and Trisha Yearwood playing at Wednesday’s installment of “In Performance at the White House.”

The whole Loco-Motion will be aired on PBS on Tuesday, May 28, at 8 pm EDT.

Meanwhile, King is polishing her credentials as a Democrat who takes good care of her babies, in this case Terry McAuliffe, the super-fundraiser and candidate for governor of Virginia:

Please join @terrymcauliffe for a Day of Action. Watch: youtube.com/watch?feature=… … #vagov

— Carole King (@Carole_King) May 17, 2013

Original post is Carole King: White House Earth-Mover by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images

A cardboard cut-out of President Barack Obama in a tent defending “Obamacare” at a street fair in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The long-running competition for one-upsmanship over Obamacare in three pithy words has reached a fever pitch, pitting the White House and allies against repeal-minded Republicans with all sorts of bystanders weighing in — remembering that last summer one of those entries read: Guarantees President Romney.

The White House stands on terra firma with this one:

It’s. The. Law. #ObamaCareInThreeWords, twitter.com/whitehouse/sta…

— The White House (@whitehouse) May 16, 2013

Yet the partisan competition is undeterred, and seldom have so many people with day jobs devoted so much time to debating something so momentous in such abbreviated fashion.

Counted 100 new tweets on this track in the last five minutes.

#ObamaCareInThreeWords–> $1,000,000,000,000 In Taxes

— Eric Cantor (@GOPLeader) May 16, 2013

IRS in control. #ObamacareInThreeWords

— Michele Bachmann (@MicheleBachmann) May 16, 2013

#obamacareinthreewords: God Bless America!

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) May 16, 2013

RT @gopleader: #ObamaCareInThreeWords –> Another Broken Promise

— Darrell Issa (@DarrellIssa) May 16, 2013

No gender discrimination.#ObamaCareInThreeWords #womenpaysameasmen

— Stephanie Cutter (@stefcutter) May 16, 2013

IRS. Is. Boss #obamacareinthreewords

— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) May 16, 2013

Good for America. #obamacareinthreewords

— D Wasserman Schultz (@DWStweets) May 16, 2013

#ObamaCareInThreeWords –Job Killing Regulations

— RNC (@GOP) May 16, 2013

The speaker’s office has been stuffing the ballot box:

RT @gopleader: #ObamaCareInThreeWords –> Run by #IRS.

— Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) May 16, 2013

#ObamaCareinThreeWords: Scares small businesses –> j.mp/10qCYTK

— Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) May 16, 2013

#ObamaCareinThreeWords –> Repeal for jobs

— Speaker John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) May 16, 2013

Original post is Obamacare in Three Words: OMG by Political Capital.

Photograph by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

Danny Werfel, federal controller, Office of Management and Budget, testifies before a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing in Hart Building on the impacts of the sequestration on his agency.

Updated at 3:25 pm EDT

President Barack Obama has picked Danny Werfel, controller of the Office of Management and Budget, as acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.

Werfel, 42, will replace Steven Miller, who was forced to resign yesterday amid revelations that the agency had targeted Tea Party-related groups for scrutiny of their tax exempt status. Werfel will start May 22 and serve through the end of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, the White House announced today.

“Throughout his career working in both Democratic and Republican administrations, Danny has proven an effective leader who serves with professionalism, integrity and skill,” Obama said in a statement. “The American people deserve to have the utmost confidence and trust in their government, and as we work to get to the bottom of what happened and restore confidence in the IRS, Danny has the experience and management ability necessary to lead the agency at this important time.”

An acting commissioner doesn’t require Senate confirmation, though Werfel has been through that process before. He was confirmed by the Senate in October 2009 as controller at OMB.

At OMB, the White House says, he has been “responsible for coordinating OMB’s efforts to initiate government-wide improvements in all areas of financial management, including financial reporting, improper payments, real property management, financial accounting standards, grants management, and financial systems. More recently, Mr. Werfel has taken on an expanded role within OMB, leading the coordination of OMB’s efforts in the areas of Federal procurement, information technology, and personnel policy and performance management. ”

He has served as deputy controller, chief of the Financial Integrity and Analysis Branch, budget examiner in the Education Branch, and Policy Analyst in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  He also served as a trial attorney in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

He holds a Masters Degree in Public Policy from Duke University, a law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Bachelors Degree in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell.

Original post is Obama Naming Werfel for IRS by Political Capital.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images

President Barack Obama, left, and former President George W. Bush arrive at the opening ceremony of the George W. Bush Presidential Center on April 25, 2013 in Dallas, Texas.

That second term can be a real problem.

On May 19, 2005, the Pew Research Center reported that then-President George W. Bush’s popularity was slipping:

“Americans are critical of President Bush’s job performance in many policy areas, but negative opinions of his handling of the economy and Iraq are doing the most damage to his overall approval rating, which now stands at 43 percent. Just 35 percent approve of the president’s handling of the economy, down from 43 percent in February and 45 percent in January.”

“`With the level of violence rising in Iraq, Bush’s ratings also have slipped on that issue ­ from 45 percent in January, to 40 percent in February, and 37 percent currently. Over the same period, positive opinions of his handling of foreign policy have fallen 10 points, to 38 percent. There has been greater stability in Bush’s marks on energy policy and Social Security, but he gets positive ratings of only about 30 percent on both issues (energy policy 31 percent, Social Security 29 percent).”

President Barack Obama has no Iraq war to worry about, and he is winding down U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

But he does have the IRS to worry about now.

And that cuts closer to home for more Americans than any foreign conflict in recent years.

Having accepted the forced resignation of the acting IRS commissioner this week after it was revealed that workers had singled out Tea Party-related groups for scrutiny, the president will confront continuing questions as the first of the congressional hearings start tomorrow.

The president’s job approval, which reached 58 percent after reelection, in December, stood at 53 percent as recently as mid-April in the Gallup Poll’s count. Today, it is down to 48 percent in a three-day survey, May 13-15.

By the Pew Research Center’s count, the president’s job approval stood at 51 percent in April, after slipping to 47 percent in March.

Both counts are somewhat better than the 43 percent that Bush was looking at in this stage of his second term.

Nate Silver has taken it a step further, looking at the average standing of past seven presidents, back to Harry Truman.

“The seven presidents were quite popular, on average, in their first term,” Silver reports at the FiveThirtyEight blog. “Their approval ratings averaged 59 percent throughout their first term, and 57 percent in the final year of their first term, when they faced an election.”

“By contrast, the same presidents averaged a 48 percent approval rating during their second term. Moreover, their approval ratings declined throughout their second term – to an average of only 42 percent by the final year of their second term.”

At the same time, he attempts to dispel the myth of the cursed second term.

Original post is Obama’s Second Term vs. Bush’s Second Term: Job Approval #s 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 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 Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

President Barack Obama walks across the South Lawn while departing the White House on May 13, 2013.

For all the talk about averting any default on U.S. debt, this is personal for the president.

President Barack Obama holds between $1 million and $5 million in Treasury notes, according to his personal financial disclosure released by the White House today.

He also has more than $250,000 in a JP Morgan Chase asset management checking account.

The kids have money socked away in Bright Directions College Savings Plans.

Obama was still collecting more than $100,000 in royalties last year from Crown Publishing for both his “Dreams From My Father” and “Of Thee I Sing:  A Letter to My Daughters.”

Yet the president hadn’t taken advantage of declining home mortgage interest rates, it appears — he was still carrying a home mortgage from 2005 with a 5.625 percent interest rate.

Original post is Obama’s U.S. Debt: $1 Million-Plus in Treasury Notes, Disclosure Shows by Political Capital.

Photograph by Amanda McCoy/Biloxi Sun Herald/MCT via Getty Images

Residents seeking medical care wait in line outside of Bethel Free Health Clinic in Biloxi, Mississippi, on March 19, 2013, in order to be one of the dozen or so that will be seen by the volunteer staff. The clinic opened following Hurricane Katrina and continues to provide services for those that are uninsured or underinsured.

Poor and elderly Mississippians on Medicaid could lose it by July, as Democrats and Republicans there play a game of chicken over expanding the insurance program under the federal health care law.

The legislature recessed in April without reauthorizing or funding the state’s Medicaid program.  The current authorization ends June 30. More than 600,000 Mississippians — one in four — is on Medicaid now. If the situation isn’t fixed, Mississippi could become the first state in more than 40 years to have no Medicaid program.

Democrats were responsible for killing the reauthorization and funding. They did it because the legislature’s Republican leadership wouldn’t allow a vote on expanding the program to more people, as allowed under the 2010 Affordable Care Act that President Barack Obama promoted, said Democratic House Leader Bobby Moak.

The authorization required a three-fifths vote, and the funding, which required a simple majority in the House, had a few Republicans who wouldn’t consider it and abstained.

Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn accused Democrats of holding the poor hostage in a battle for Medicaid expansion that Democrats can’t win: “They are playing with the lives of 600,000 Mississippians in order to put on a political show.”

“Go ahead and whip us,” said Moak. “Just give us a vote.”

No one knows what happens next.

Republican Gov. Phil Bryant has said he’ll keep the program going out of his own office, an option Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood says isn’t legal, according to Hood spokeswoman Jan Schaefer.  It would also require funding that the legislature didn’t approve.

Bryant spokesman Mick Bullock said the governor “regrets the situation Democrats have created by voting several times to withdraw funding and authorization for Mississippi’s nursing homes, hospitals and other facilities.”

He said the governor would hold a special session to resolve the matter — so that “Mississippi can continue providing services to children, pregnant women and aged, blind and disabled adults” — as soon as Democrats say they’ll vote to do that.

Moak said Republicans are as much or more to blame as Democrats, and that they voted against dozens of Democratic measures that would have continued the Medicaid program and also allowed an expansion vote.

He said Democrats will back down when they get to vote on the wider insurance program, too.

He predicted the standoff will end and no Medicaid beneficiaries will suffer. He said he’s seen similar impasses over the program before. “I’ve seen it happen several times and I haven’t seen granny kicked out of the nursing home yet.”

Original post is Mississippi’s Medicaid in Doubt by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, talks prior to an interview at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on May 7, 2013.

“We’ve had four years of slow and anemic job growth — and frankly, it’s unacceptable,” House Speaker John Boehner said today.

The Ohio Republican attempted to turn the latest unemployment rate against the White House — 7.5 percent reported for April representing the lowest rate in four years — as something short of what President Barack Obama promised with his economic stimulus.
“Slow growth cannot be the new normal,” he said today at his weekly news conference in the Capitol — as Obama traveled to Texas to tout the potential for economic growth.

“We can’t cut our way to prosperity — we need real economic growth,” Boehner said, suggesting that “real tax reform” will contribute to that. House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp is promising a tax bill this year — though Republicans and Democrats are divided over whether that should result on added tax revenue or come out “revenue neutral.”

Obama is traveling to Texas to promote technology-based education, training and jobs as he seeks support in Congress for economic initiatives he proposed earlier this year.

Stops today around Austin, including at Manor New Tech High School and at an Applied Materials Inc. factory, as well as
meetings with students, workers and entrepreneurs, are intended to give Obama a platform to promote proposals from his State of the Union speech in February. Those include raising the minimum hourly wage to $9 and promoting spending on education, manufacturing-innovation centers, worker training and research.

   Bloomberg’s Margaret Talev, reporting from Texas today, contributed.

Original post is Boehner: Slow Growth Can’t be ‘New Normal’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images

Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., right, Chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), walks with Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., Vice Chairman, to a discussion of the JTC on the topic of reforming the U.S. Internal Revenue Code.

Welcome to Taxreform.gov — a new bipartisan entry on the Internet sponsored by Rep. Dave Camp, Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

Camp says he is “committed” to getting a tax overhaul out of his committee this year. Baucus, who will retire at the end of 2014, is working on a bill but can’t say for sure that his committee will produce one this year. They’re reaching out to the public for ideas as they move forward.

Bloomberg’s Richard Rubin writes about the “Max and Dave” tour underway, which comes with more than a website — there’s a Twitter handle too: @simplertaxes.

The two are talking about a zero-based approach to writing a new federal tax code that has undergone 15,000 amendments since 1986.

“What we’re trying to do is set up a framework where we don’t take the current tax code and see what individual thing we pull out — we take a blank piece of paper and start over,” Camp said in an interview on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” today. “There has been a lot of layering upon layering and tinkering of the tax code. The complexity is really the big thing that we’re going to try to get at.”

“One thing I know we agree on, and I know the American public agrees on, is loopholes, which allow corporations, many corporations, not to pay any income taxes,” Baucus said. “That’s just not right… When we start from scratch, start from no deductions, no credits, no exclusions, that puts the burden on them as those who want those provisions to state a better case as to why they should be there.”

The big question is what comes out of this potential tax reform: A gain in federal revenue that the White House is seeking, or the “revenue neutral” result of no additional revenue the House’s Republicans are demanding.

“That’s the fundamental question that’s being asked in this debate,” Baucus said. “My sense is, like a lot of things in this town, that we’re going to have to compromise. There is going to be some rate reduction. There is going to be some revenue raised.” The amount, he said, is what will have to be negotiated.

“I think that’s getting to the end game before we get there,” Camp said. “I can tell you right now most of my caucus is not in favor of more revenues. They think we did that at the end of last year. We’ve got to move forward on getting the policy right and working together to get the best possible tax code and then we’ll resolve those issues.”

While Camp promises a bill this year, Baucus is less confident: “We’ll see. I don’t know. I cannot answer that question definitively. It depends on how quickly we can get an agreement in our committee…

“We’ll reach a point where I think we’ll pass legislation,” Baucus said. “And if it’s good legislation that tends to make some sense, then it’s more likely that Majority Leader Harry Reid will want to schedule it on the floor, and it’s more likely that we’ll be able to pass it with 60 votes.”

Original post is Zero-Based Tax Reform: Camp, Baucus (‘Max and Dave’) by Political Capital.