All of the races listed below could go either way, but it’s worth speculating on where the election could have an effect on immigration policy:

Majority leader: The Senate race between Sen. Harry Reid (D) and Sharron Angle (R) could open up the position of majority leader, which Reid currently holds. It’s unlikely Republicans will take over a majority of the Senate, but losing Reid would put another Democrat in charge of the push for immigration legislation. Luckily for reform supporters, both of the senators likely to take over as majority leader if Reid loses are equally strong supporters of immigration reform as Reid — perhaps even stronger.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), currently second in command, is the chief sponsor of the DREAM Act, which would provide legal residency states to some undocumented students and military service members, and supports comprehensive immigration reform. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is considered the favorite to take over as majority leader because of his past success as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He also supports comprehensive immigration reform, and wrote a blueprint for comprehensive immigration reform this spring with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Immigration subcommittee: Schumer heads the Judiciary subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security, which will remain in the hands of Democrats unless Republicans take over a majority of the Senate. The committee could see some shifting if the current members lose their seats, but most who are up for re-election have comfortable leads. Schumer looks certain to win against Republican challenger Jay Townsend, while Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) looks like he’ll be safe against Republican candidate Len Britton and his five other challengers. The other Democrats on the committee — Durbin, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse — aren’t up for re-election this year.

On the Republican side, only Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is up for re-election. He is favored to win over Democratic challenger Roxanne Conlin. The other GOP members of the subcommittee — Texas Sen. John Cornyn, Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions — aren’t up for re-election. In the very unlikely event that Republicans win control of the Senate, Cornyn would be the chairman of the subcommittee on immigration.

Other immigration-related races: In the Senate especially, every member’s views on a given issue are important for passing legislation. A few races between pro- and anti-immigration reform candidates could make the difference for passing comprehensive immigration reform or, in lieu of that, smaller-scale legislation such as AgJOBS to create paths to legalization for some farm workers.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) faces a challenge from Republican Carly Fiorina, who supports the DREAM Act and reform of the guest worker system but argues against “amnesty” for illegal immigrants — the derisive term used by conservatives to refer to efforts to allow some undocumented immigrants already in the United States to earn legal status. Boxer, on the other hand, has been a consistent supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, arguing Congress should pass a bill increasing border security and enforcement efforts while also allowing some illegal immigrants in the country to remain here legally.

In New York, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who was appointed to Hillary Clinton’s old seat, is favored to win over Republican Joseph J. DioGuardi. Gillibrand was originally considered an anti-immigrant pick for the Senate seat, but has since shifted to a pro-immigration reform view and advocates legislation that would allow some undocumented immigrants in the country to become legal residents.

Open seats could see the addition of some immigration hardliners. Rand Paul, a Republican running for Senate in Kentucky against Democrat Jack Conway, supports state-led solutions to illegal immigration such as Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law. He also wants to built an electric fence between the United States and Mexico and move overseas military bases back to the country to man the border. Conway, on the other hand, said he supports more border agents but also paths to legalization. “Let’s take people out of the shadows and turn them into taxpayers,” he said during a debate.

Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Alexi Giannoulias are facing off for Obama’s former seat in Illinois. If Giannoulias wins, the Democrats will have a nearly sure vote for comprehensive immigration reform as well as the DREAM Act. But Kirk has said that the Senate should tackle border security first, and that he would vote against the DREAM Act and other immigration reform.

A natural gas pipeline exploded in San Bruno, Calif., Sept. 9. (Flickr, Thomas Hawk)

Once PG&E discovered that a natural gas pipeline had exploded in San Bruno, Calif., earlier this month, employees from the utility company had to drive in rush-hour traffic to manually turn off two separate safety valves in order to stop the flow of gas that was fueling the blaze. It took the employees more than an hour to reach the valves and shut them off.

[Environment1] Lawmakers and pipeline safety advocates said today at a hearing of a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee that this is unacceptable. Utilities that operate pipelines in so-called high consequence areas — or areas near dense populations — should be required to install remote or automatic shutoff valves that will immediately stop the flow of gas in the event of an emergency.

This is not a new idea. Rick Kessler — vice president of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a non-profit group that advocates for pipeline safety — said his group has been calling for federal regulations that require the use of remote shutoff valves for about a decade. And Sen. Frank Lautenber (D-N.J.), chairman of the subsurface transportation subcommittee that held the hearing, has been calling for the valves since a massive 1994 natural gas pipeline explosion in Edison, N.J., killed one person and left 100 people without homes.

The San Bruno explosion killed eight people, injured many more and destroyed dozens of homes. The disaster has refocused attention on the issue of pipeline safety, an issue that was thrust into the spotlight earlier this year when a pipeline break in Michigan spilled 1 million gallons of oil into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. As The Washington Independent reported in  its series on pipeline safety, regulation, both at the state and federal levels, is severely lacking.

Now, Congress is moving forward to take action. The Obama administration offered its own proposal to reform pipeline oversight (the administration is also developing new leak detection rules), a proposal that Kessler said was woefully inadequate. The administration “put out a proposal that doesn’t address any of the issues raised by San Bruno,” he said, adding that it’s “too little, too late.”

Kessler recommended that any pipeline safety proposal require the installation of remote shutoff valves in high consequence areas, require companies to upgrade pipelines that cannot accommodate the best inspection equipment and mandate a complete review of the federal government’s requirements that the public be made aware of the existence and location of pipelines.

There are two other pipeline safety proposlals on the table in Congress. The first comes from California’s senators — Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D) and Barbara Boxer (D). The proposal is largely based on the Obama administration’s plan, but it would also require the use of remote shutoff valves, mandate advanced inspection technology, and require that the Obama administration write leak detection regulations. Lautenberg, along with full committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.),  introduced their own pipeline safety bill today that requires remote shutoff valves.

Meanwhile, in the House, the Transporation and Infrastructure Committee is in the process of reviewing the administration’s pipeline proposal and developing its own plan. As I’ve reported, it’s unlikely that any of these proposals will pass any time soon, since Congress is focusing on the mid-term elections.

Boxer, noting the potential for the legislation to take some time to move through Congress, pressed California Public Utilities Commission Executive Director Paul Clanon to require PG&E, the owner of the San Bruno pipeline, to begin installing more remote shutoff valves. Clanon said he had asked PG&E to identify the areas that it makes the most sense to install the valves.

PG&E President Christopher Johns, pressed by Boxer on the issue, said, “I will work with the PUC to put them in wherever it makes sense to put in.” Boxer said the valves should be put in all high-consequence areas. There are 3,600 miles of natural gas pipeline in high-consequence areas in California alone.

Installing the new valves across the whole country would be a massive undertaking that would require significant additional resources. As it stands now, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the federal agency in charge of overseeing pipeline safety, is already significantly under-resourced.

PHMSA Administrator Cynthia Quarterman, pressed by Boxer on what the agency is doing to improve pipeline safety in light of the San Bruno disaster, said she is looking into the possibility of requiring more remote shutoff valves, but added that she was waiting to make significant decisions until the National Transportation Safety Board finished its investigation into the explosion.

Boxer said Quarterman should not wait. “It’s on our collective shoulders now. We have been warned,” she said. “I think you need to be proactive on this one and not wait for new information to come out.”

In a statement, Boxer said:

The tragic explosion in San Bruno shows why we must increase inspections of our nation’s pipelines. This legislation will put more inspectors on the job protecting our communities while increasing penalties for safety violations.

And Feinstein added:

We are going over the legislation proposed today by Secretary LaHood very carefully, will retain the best parts, and introduce it as quickly as possible.

“Her actions punished the military and demeaned our soldiers as they were courageously fighting two wars overseas,” Sessions said.

The Defense Department released 850 pages of documents earlier this month that indicate Kagan did not completely ban recruiters from Harvard Law’s campus. However, she did place restrictions on their access, claiming the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy meant the school had to consider the military a discriminatory employer. The Christian Science Monitor notes that these restrictions, including barring recruiters from holding interviews in the school’s career center, had a negative effect on recruiting there.

The issue will no doubt play a major role in Republican questioning and criticism as the hearings continue. Three members of the military are on the Senate GOP’s witness list — Army National Guard Capt. Pete Hegseth, Air Force Colonel Thomas N. Moe and Army Capt. Flagg Youngblood.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) defended Kagan’s handling of military recruiters, noting that the number of recruits from the school did not decrease as a result.

Updated at 1:19 p.m.

Kam Kuwata, former campaign manager for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), has some advice for Meek and McCollum.

In the 1994 U.S. Senate race in California, Michael Huffington (ex-husband of Arianna Huffington) took the Republican primary by storm to face Feinstein, a one-term incumbent, in the general election. Huffington was largely self-funded — he is the heir to the natural gas/energy company Huffco. He was a relative newcomer to California, moving there only a couple years earlier from Texas. And Huffington saw his ratings shoot up as he spent heavily on his campaign — an estimated $28 million.

“I remember it more clearly than a lot of races that came after it,” Kuwata recalls. “We had a huge lead, like 25 points, going into this.” But they knew to take Huffington seriously. They had seen him spend wildly to win a congressional seat in 1992, then go on to win the Republican Senate primary. “He started advertising during the Winter Olympics for a June primary,” Kuwata marvels. By the time Huffington won the primary, Feinstein’s 25-point lead had dwindled to a dead heat in the polls, Kuwata recalls. Throughout the rest of the summer and fall the polls seesawed.

“I was more than sweating,” Kuwata says. “I wasn’t sleeping. I was eating too much and drinking too much. So yes, it was a nerve-wracking effort.”

The strategy was simple. Start with “message discipline”: Have a simple, easily understood message, and repeat it over and over. “Huffington, the Texas oil millionaire Californians can’t trust,” was the tag Kuwata used. Then Kuwata made sure to identify swing voters. Finally, the campaign had to hold steady and wait till the timing was just right to unleash its paid media blitz.

In Feinstein’s case, Kuwata says, they clearly couldn’t match their opponent’s spending, so they spent the summer reaching out to “earned media” (journalists), trying to make sure they were informed about every questionable thing Huffington had ever done. Then about eight weeks before the election Kuwata unleashed the paid ads. That was the period in which he believed voters were starting to make up their minds and paying the most attention.

Feinstein won the election by less than 2 percentage points — 46.7 percent of the vote to 44.8 percent.

Meek’s challenge is that, unlike Feinstein, he doesn’t have much name recognition outside of Miami. But Meek has not unleashed his paid media campaign yet. His camp is hoping for a surge when he starts appearing on TV.

McCollum, meanwhile, has been criticized for ignoring Scott, whose controversial past running a hospital chain that pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud initially made him an implausible candidate. But Scott’s ads helped turn him into a recognizable figure throughout the state. (McCollum spokesperson Kristy Campbell contends they took Scott seriously right away.) The McCollum camp is also hoping for a surge when it starts its paid campaign.

“We had to really make every bullet count,” Kuwata says. “It was tough.”

It’s not clear why that communication didn’t occur. As Fisher writes, President Obama has stated that he believes the Director of National Intelligence — his principal intelligence adviser — needs to head the community. But in practice, he hasn’t taken any measures to strengthen the office’s statutory authorities, leading me to think that the White House doesn’t see any political upside in a major intelligence overhaul barely five years after the last one. The major advocate for such an overhaul is Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. And she probably wants to see the PIAB report in full.

Good David Ignatius column on What James Clapper’s Nomination Means:

The DNI flap has been fascinating in what it shows about Obama’s approach to intelligence. He wants facts, not commentary; he mistrusts aides such as Blair who let their personal opinions show, and he correspondingly values low-key colleagues such as Gates; he wants to oversee intelligence not from a separate fiefdom but from inside the White House, where former CIA official John Brennan serves as deputy national security adviser.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), read this column. Ignatius’s insightful observation indicates that your problem isn’t whether Clapper is an obstacle to a strong director of national intelligence. It’s whether John Brennan and President Obama are those obstacles. Institutional powers matter. They matter a lot. But unless the structure of the intelligence community changes radically, the strongest you can make the job is akin to a powerful congressional committee chair, not a cabinet secretary, to use the formulation of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a former CIA director. More radical changes would require a presidential commitment, and clearly Obama would prefer intelligence to be ultimately answerable to John Brennan at the White House. Accordingly, that’s going to be the official to whom the leadership of the intelligence agencies look to for their cues, whether or not Clapper gets confirmed and no matter what Clapper tells Feinstein when they parley in the coming days.

The long statement conspicuously withholds approval for Clapper’s nomination. “I am very much in favor of a strong DNI, which I believe to be essential to national security,” Feinstein clarifies, and to that end, she says she wants to hear what Clapper thinks of the expanded authorities for the job that she put in last year’s intelligence bill. (The relevant sections begin with Section 303, for those keeping score.) Before she takes up Clapper’s nomination in committee — “we are now preparing questions,” she pledges ominously — she wants the committee to finalize next year’s intelligence bill, and strongly hints that bill will contain provisions that give the nation’s top intelligence chief greater authority over the Defense Department intelligence assets Clapper currently overseas.

Key to Clapper’s nomination, Feinstein hints, is his answer to “whether he believes a stronger DNI would weaken the authorities of the Secretary of Defense.” That’s the oversight equivalent of a well-forecast high inside fastball. But Clapper hinted in April that he doesn’t believe a DNI should hit for power. I’m going to stop this metaphor. But clearly the central question surrounding Clapper’s prospects for becoming DNI is, to put it cynically, whether he’ll tell Feinstein what she wants to hear.

The full statement follows:

“I intend to meet with General James R. Clapper in the next couple of days to discuss his nomination to be the next Director of National Intelligence. In line with the standard Committee process for reviewing nominees, we are now preparing questions for General Clapper to answer before we will hold a confirmation hearing.

I intend for the Committee to do its due diligence on General Clapper’s nomination, as we do for all nominees. I am particularly interested in his views on the powers of the DNI, the appropriate role of the DNI with respect to agencies within the Department of Defense, and his views on the importance and appropriate role of congressional oversight of intelligence.

I believe that any DNI will be effective only if he has the authority – both on paper and in practice – to oversee and have strategic direction over the 16 agencies that make up the Intelligence Community. I am very much in favor of a strong DNI, which I believe to be essential to national security. The Fiscal Year 2010 Intelligence Authorization bill provides additional authorities and flexibilities for the DNI, and I will ask General Clapper his view of those provisions, and whether he believes a stronger DNI would weaken the authorities of the Secretary of Defense.

The Intelligence Authorization bill is the Committee’s top priority right now. We have already begun to review General Clapper’s record, and I would intend to take up his nomination once the authorization bill is passed.”

“I have concerns about Clapper as a choice,” committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, told The Cable in an interview, saying that the widely expected nomination of Clapper, who now is under secretary of defense for intelligence, would give the military too much control of the intelligence community. “The best thing for intelligence is to have a civilian in charge. The elbows are less sharp.”

In a bit of irony that surely warms hearts at Langley, Feinstein’s choice for the nation’s top intelligence post is — wait for it — Leon Panetta, the CIA director whose nomination Feinstein initially fought hard to scuttle. I suppose you could be cute and suggest that Feinstein secretly just wants the bureaucratic meatgrinder that is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to finally grind Panetta’s flesh and bones. But most likely she’s just been impressed by his job as CIA director.

And so has Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the committee’s GOP vice chairman. Rogin further reports that there’s no daylight between the committee leaders on who they want for Blair’s job. Panetta is “the only one who has the clout to make it work,” Bond told Rogin, “I have reservations about [Clapper] in that job.”

Does Clapper’s (possible, prospective, never official) candidacy survive public opposition from the leadership of the Senate committee that will have to approve him?

Speaking of Blair’s replacement, Feinstein doesn’t come out and say it, but her statement gives a cold shoulder to James Clapper, the Pentagon’s intelligence chief and Blair’s deputy for Defense intelligence, who’s reportedly the leading candidate for the job. “It will be important that any nominee is not beholden to the Pentagon’s interests and can, as needed, provide balance to civilian and military interests in carrying out the nation’s intelligence missions,” Feinstein said in the statement.

No one agency, particularly the Department of Defense, should control the flow of intelligence to the President. The majority of the intelligence budget is already executed by the Department of Defense, and it will always have a strong influence over the Intelligence Community’s operation. That should be balanced, however, by the need for the community to provide strategic intelligence beyond what is necessary for the warfighter.

On the one hand, Feinstein also opposed Leon Panetta’s appointment as CIA director until she got an assurance — in the form of Steve Kappes staying on as deputy director (he recently announced his retirement) — that Panetta wouldn’t jeopardize her prerogatives. On the other, Feinstein didn’t announce any opposition before Panetta’s nomination was announced.