“I come home every weekend, and what I hear time and time again from constituents is that our country’s unemployment rate is still too high,” Loebsack said Friday in response to the U.S. Department of Labor’s announcement of unemployment figures.

“There are far too many Iowans who are still struggling, and our priority must be job creation and economic development. In order to get our country back on track, we need to start building things in America again and support our country’s workforce.”

Specifically, Loebsack wants more attention placed on his Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success (SECTORS) Act, which passed the U.S. House unanimously last year and was reintroduced days ago by Loebsack and U.S. Rep. Todd Russell Platts, a Pennsylvania Republican. The legislation supports “sector” or “industry parternships” that allow businesses, unions, educators and the public workforce development system to create and implement plans to help workers train for and advance in emerging industries. Sister legislation has also been introduced in the U.S. Senate by Sens. Olympia Snowe and Sherrod Brown.

“By matching workers’ skills and training programs to the needs of industries looking to hire, expand or start-up we can connect workers with industries, helping ensure America remains at the forefront of manufacturing and paving the way for the industries of tomorrow, right here at home,” said Loebsack, a Democrat that represents Iowa’s 2nd District.

SECTORS includes grants that will allow the partners to address training needs of multiple employers, help post-secondary educational institutions and other training providers align curricula and programs to meet industry demands, and improve workers’ job quality through improving wages, benefits, and working conditions while also encouraging the creation, and obtaining of, nationally portable, industry-recognized credentials. It will also help businesses and industries recruit new workers, retrain dislocated and current workers, adopt new technologies, and strengthen connections among businesses in the targeted industry cluster.

“It is more important than ever to invest federal dollars in efficient, cost-effective strategies with proven results,” said Andy Van Kleunen, executive director for National Skills Coalition. “While some policymakers in Washington have turned their backs on America’s workers and industries by calling for the elimination of federal workforce funding, Congressman Loebsack has instead called for better, more effective approaches to training our workforce. We applaud his leadership in championing solutions that will enable our education and training institutions to better meet the needs of regional industries and provide pathways to good jobs for unemployed Americans.”

According to the Labor Department, the private sector accounted for all new job growth in March. Government employment fell by 14,000, part of an ongoing series of public-sector cuts. The new national percentage is the lowest the nation has seen in two years, although the total number of unemployed has stagnated at about 13.5 million.

“Private employment has now grown for 13 consecutive months, with February and March showing the strongest growth since early 2006,” Secretary Hilda L. Solis said in a prepared statement. “And since its low point in February 2010, private sector employment has risen by 1.8 million. The bottom line: The policies and programs of this administration are working.”

Loebsack’s bill has garnered support from workforce and vocational organizations, manufacturing associations, colleges and universities, businesses, chambers of commerce, and training and human services organizations across the country. It has also, along with numerous other bills with Democratic sponsors, drawn criticism from Phyllis Schlafly, president of the anti-feminist Eagle Forum, for subsidizing unmarried women and eliminating the need for husband-breadwinners.

The lame-duck session could be the last chance for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to pass a number of bills. (Pete Marovich/ZUMApress.com)

The midterm hangover having finally worn off, the 111th Congress returns today to kick off the lame-duck session, its last hurrah before its successor takes over. And the 112th Congress will look radically different, with Republicans in control of the House and the Democratic majority in the Senate significantly reduced. These next few weeks, then, could be the last chance for major Democratic initiatives. But the hurdles are high, and Republicans see no reason to grant Democrats any victories after the populace voiced its discontent with the policies of the past two years.

[Congress1] The battle lines are drawn; here are the fields on which they’ll be fought:

Bush tax cuts:

The biggest question before the Senate — and the one that will likely receive the most attention — is the expiration of the 2001 tax cuts signed into law by President Bush. Facing Democratic resistance in the Senate at the time, Republicans set up the cuts to sunset after ten years. Now that they’re set to expire, however, GOP lawmakers have lined up shoulder to shoulder to make them permanent.

President Obama, on the other hand, ran for office on a pledge to extend the existing tax rates for families making less than $250,000 a year, while letting the tax cuts for those making over that number expire. But as the economy continued to falter and Democratic re-election prospects began looking bleak, Democrats in Congress put off addressing issues related to the tax code until after the midterm elections. Now that Republicans have made big gains in both chambers of Congress, Democrats find their confidence further weakened.

Following the midterms, the White House has signalled that Democrats might be willing to compromise on the idea of a permanent extension of tax cuts for middle-class families and a temporary extension of cuts for the two percent of Americans families making more than $250,000, but it won’t stomach the approximately $700 billion in additional debt that would be required to extend those cuts permanently. Republicans, on the other hand, haven’t deviated from their position that the tax cuts for all Americans be kept together as a package deal.

If neither side blinks, taxes are set to rise for all Americans effective January 1. Neither party wants to be seen as responsible for a tax hike during difficult economic times, but Democrats have appeared far more worried at the prospect of getting blamed should negotiations break down. Polls favor the Democrats’ position that the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans should be allowed to expire, but without the votes of at least two Republicans in the Senate, the proposal is likely to fail. Barring momentum in Congress for the creation of a new tax bracket — for people making half a million dollars or a million dollars per year — in order to better rhetorically define the class of folks for whom Republicans are advocating tax relief, the easiest and most likely outcome will be a bill that temporarily extends all the tax cuts, simply kicking the decision of what to do to some point farther down the road.

Unemployment insurance benefits

As Congress frets over whether the marginal tax rate for incomes over $200,000 should be raised three percentage points, the Senate is also on the verge of allowing federal unemployment benefits to lapse — again. Extending the benefits before they expire on November 30 might seem like a no-brainer: It would prevent somewhere between 1.2 and 2 million unemployed Americans from having their subsistence checks cut off just in time for Christmas and would reduce the risk of a drop in consumer spending and economic growth as high as 0.4 percentage points from December to February.

Republicans might have trouble arguing that deficit reduction trumps other priorities, including unemployment benefits, when the only major initiative the GOP is pushing — extending the Bush tax cuts for the upper 2 percent of wage earners — would increase the deficit by $700 billion over ten years. That said, Republicans in the Senate, along with Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), are likely to vote against any extension of unemployment insurance benefits unless Democrats can come up with ways to offset their cost.

The last time unemployment benefits were set to lapse, back in early June, the Senate was unable to muster enough votes to renew an extension for 51 days. With Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine joining Democrats to vote for cloture, and Nelson joining with Republicans to vote against debate, Democrats had no choice but to wait for Sen. Carte Goodwin (D-W.Va.) to be sworn in as a replacement for the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D- W.Va.) in order to garner a 60th vote.

This time, assuming all the senators maintain their positions in the debate, the hurdle will be that much higher for Democrats after Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) takes the seat of Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.) on Nov. 29. With one fewer assured vote, Democrats would either have to come up with a package of equivalent spending cuts that satisfies Republicans’ demands or persuade one more Republican to join their cause. Neither scenario appears particularly likely, however, which is why many unemployed Americans are bracing for the worst come Nov. 30.

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

A long-awaited Pentagon study on ending the practice of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the 17-year-old law that requires military service members to keep their sexual orientation secret, isn’t due to President Obama until December 1, but early media reports indicate that it will buttress gay rights advocates’ arguments to repeal the law. More than 70 percent of the respondents in the Pentagon survey indicated that repeal would have either positive, mixed or nonexistent effects, leading the authors to conclude that the military can lift its ban on gay and lesbian Americans serving openly in uniform while incurring minimal risk in its current war efforts.

If the study brings good news to those hoping to repeal the law, however, the current situation in the Senate should not. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) attempted to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” before the midterm elections, tacking the provision onto a defense reauthorization bill that failed to overcome a Republican-led filibuster in the Senate. The bill was weighed down by many add-ons — including the DREAM Act, which seeks to extend a path to citizenship to some undocumented immigrants who attend college or serve in the military — giving too many senators excuses to vote against it, but advocates remained hopeful that repeal could pass along with the defense bill when Congress resumed for its lame-duck session.

Now Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, is said to be negotiating with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, to remove the DADT repeal provision from the defense bill. McCain had previously voiced openness to authorizing a repeal of the law following the Pentagon’s review, but since that time his views have hardened. During his re-election battle earlier this year, McCain faced a primary challenger from the right and promised during his campaign to preserve the law.

In the absence of support from McCain, advocacy groups have identified 10 senators who have indicated in the past that they’d like to see the Pentagon’s study before deciding on whether to lift the military’s policy. The list includes Sens. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Oympia Snowe (R-Maine), George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Jim Webb (D-Va.). Once the results of the study are known, gay rights groups hope these senators will take them to heart and vote for repeal. If they follow McCain’s lead and renege on their previous openness to getting rid of the law, however, it may be a long time before Congress can muster sufficient votes to repeal the policy.

Campaign finance reform

Following an election season that saw record amounts of cash — including a fair chunk from undisclosed sources — spent on political advertising by outside groups, campaign finance reform advocates are still hoping that Democrats in Congress might take advantage of their remaining time in charge of both chambers to pass legislation to shore up the loophole-ridden landscape of campaign finance law. The most popular effort, by far, during the last year has been a bill called the DISCLOSE Act, which would require all groups spending money on electioneering activities in future elections to disclose their major donors.

While premised on a fairly bipartisan concept of full disclosure, the bill soon ran into trouble in the Senate over additional components that had been added on to it. Measures to prohibit campaign spending by companies holding government contracts or those exceeding a certain threshold of foreign ownership were read by Senate Republicans as an attempt to privilege union speech over that of corporations. Traditional campaign finance reform advocates like Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) held onto such objections and voted against cloture for the bill when Democrats declined to take them out.

Now Democrats in the Senate are contemplating one last attempt to pass a stripped-down version of the DISCLOSE Act — one that sticks strictly to the principle of transparency that Republicans once advocated as their gold standard for effective campaign finance legislation. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a staunch opponent of nearly all campaign finance legislation, might prove an even bigger obstacle to the bill’s passage than any single aspect of the legislation. While Snowe or Collins, or even Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) or Senator-elect Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), might prove receptive to the measure in principle, it appears highly unlikely that any of them are willing to buck their party leadership for the cause.

Energy/environment

Even if the lame-duck session likely represents the best opportunity for Democrats to pass key pieces of energy legislation before a more Republican Congress comes to town, it seems unlikely that anything significant will move.

The House, for its part, has already passed a cap-and-trade bill and an oil spill response bill, and all eyes are now on the Senate. But it looks like major energy action in the chamber will have to wait until next year, if it happens at all.

One clean energy advocate with close ties to Congress downplayed the likelihood that energy legislation will pass during the lame duck. “Little will happen, probably,” he said.

The only energy-related bill that is likely to see the light of day during the lame-duck session is a proposal to encourage the production of electric and natural gas vehicles. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has scheduled a cloture vote for Wednesday on the bill, the Promoting Natural Gas and Electric Vehicles Act of 2010. The bill has bipartisan support.

Asked about the prospects for energy legislation during the lame duck in the Senate, Regan Lachapelle, a spokeswoman for Reid, said, “We filed cloture on a motion to proceed to a natural gas bill before we left. Other than that, we have many items that are possible for consideration during the lame duck.” Lachapelle did not elaborate on the pieces of legislation to which she was referring.

Backers of a renewable energy standard, which would require that a certain percentage of the country’s electricity come from renewable sources like wind and solar, are keeping their fingers crossed that such a proposal can move in the lame-duck session. “We’re optimistic about the lame duck,” said one RES proponent who was not authorized to talk on the record.

Reid and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) spoke on the phone Tuesday about the possibility of moving an RES during the lame duck. Bingaman’s spokesman, Bill Wicker, would not discuss the call. “This was a private conversation between two Members, so I have to respect that,” he said in an email. “But we all should know more about the lame duck before much longer.”

But a senior Senate aide with knowledge of the conversation downplayed the possibility that an RES would be brought up for a vote during the lame-duck session. “They had a good conversation and agreed it will be challenging to get 60 votes for expedited consideration of an RES during the limited time left in the session,” the aide said of discussion between Reid and Bingaman. Indeed, RES supporters would need to secure the support of two to four Republicans in addition to the four who already support the bill in order to get 60 votes.

An oil spill response bill and various pieces of legislation to promote energy efficiency and home weatherization are all pending in the Senate. But it looks like consideration of those bills will have to wait until next year.

DREAM Act

Reid and Pelosi have vowed to push for a lame-duck vote on the DREAM Act, a bill that would allow some undocumented young people who came to the United States as children to gain legal status for attending college or serving in the military.

In the House, the vote could come as early as this week, Democrat sources told Politico. Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) were reportedly tasked by Pelosi with determining whether the caucus would be able to pass the bill.

If the act does not pass in the lame-duck session, it has very little chance of passage before 2013. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who is expected to head the House subcommittee on immigration, refers to the DREAM Act as “amnesty” and promised he would use his authority in the GOP-led House to block the act. GOP gains in the Senate also lessen the likelihood of passing the bill next session.

Reid recently said he would need support from “a handful of Republicans” to pass the bill during the lame duck, echoing estimates by bill sponsor Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that at least five Republicans would need to support the bill for it to pass. A spokesman for Reid confirmed last week that he plans to bring up the DREAM Act for a vote during the lame-duck session, although it is still unclear whether it would be as a standalone measure or as an attachment to another bill.

The problem is that Reid doesn’t have much time — or sure support for the DREAM Act from his caucus. The act last came up for a vote in 2007, and seven of the eight Democrats who voted against it then are still in the Senate. While a few might support the bill this time around, five told The Hill in September they are still undecided on the DREAM Act.

Complicating matters, Mark Kirk’s assumption of Roland Burris’ seat in the Senate turns a sure “yes” vote into a likely “no.” Kirk has been lobbied heavily by DREAM Act supporters, but said before the election that he would vote against the act unless border security measures were pushed first. “It’s not time for the DREAM Act right now,” he told reporters in October. “If the DREAM Act came up for a vote right now, I would vote ‘no.’”

All current Republican senators voted in September to filibuster the defense authorization bill after Reid announced plans to attach the DREAM Act. But given the additional controversy over that bill — it included a repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and would have allowed for only limited changes from Republicans — it’s tough to extrapolate much from it about how senators would vote on the DREAM Act as a standalone bill.

Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) said he would support the bill if it were brought to the floor on its own, even though he opposed it as part of the defense authorization bill. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), who co-sponsored the bill, would also almost certainly vote for it if it comes up in the lame-duck session.

Several other Republicans voted for the DREAM Act in 2007, but their support this year remains uncertain because of rightward shifts on immigration policy and the possibility of the bill again being attached to other legislation. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) was an original sponsor of the bill when it was first introduced in 2001 and voted for it in 2007. This year, he said the government should secure the borders before it focuses on the DREAM Act.

Written by Jesse Zwick, Andrew Restuccia and Elise Foley.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is pressing his Republican colleagues to put a moratorium on earmarks. (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

With a fight brewing between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Tea Party ringleader Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) over the practice of requesting earmarks in the Senate, most Republican Senators have been desperately hoping to avoid picking sides. But Tea Party groups, which are eagerly monitoring a closed-door Republican Party vote on the issue next Tuesday, have decided to make sitting on the sidelines that much more difficult.

[GOP1] “It might not ever be known, but if somebody won’t come out and say they’ll vote against earmarks, then we’ll be pretty sure we know they voted for allowing them,” said Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, a national network of Tea Party groups. “And if that’s what they’re going to do, then a lot will see themselves facing primary challenges.”

The added pressure leaves many Republican senators between a rock and a hard place in the lead-up to Tuesday’s vote. On the one hand, they don’t want to undermine McConnell’s leadership or appear hypocritical should they continue the routine practice of requesting earmarks in the next Senate session. But they risk finding themselves on the wrong side of the GOP’s anti-spending campaign and alienating Tea Party groups that have made earmarks an important symbol of all that’s wrong with Washington.

Between now and Tuesday, Republican senators must weigh the dangers of speaking out versus straying mum and then cast a decisive, albeit non-binding vote that activists are looking to as a first sign of the character of next year’s Senate Republican caucus.

Following last week’s elections, DeMint wasted no time in capitalizing on the anti-spending fervor in Washington — and the anti-earmarks platforms on which many Senate Republicans had run — to announce a new push for a vote to place a year-long moratorium on the practice of earmarking at the upcoming Republican Conference meeting among Republicans. The issue quickly drove a wedge between the Tea Party and McConnell, who pushed back against DeMint’s proposal on television and in private. Tea Party leaders like Meckler couldn’t believe it.

“I think McConnell’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with the GOP and has been wrong for a long time,” said Meckler. “Following the election, he has a chance to be a hero and he’s being a zero. It’s very clear that the vast majority of Americans are anti-earmark. He’s a classic example of the arrogance of the ruling class.”

DeMint released a letter indicating that he had gathered the signatures of ten fellow Republican senators, including six fresh faces — Marco Rubio (Fla.), Pat Toomey (Pa.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Mike Lee (Utah), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) — many of whom had run on explicitly anti-earmark platforms.

But many Republican senators hoped to avoid declaring either way, buoyed by the prospect that Tuesday’s vote would remain anonymous. The last time Senate Republicans had voted on a moratorium to end earmarks was in March, when DeMint led an open vote of the full Senate, and while a majority of Republicans had voted for the measure then, they had the benefit of knowing that with most Democrats voting against it, it had little chance of passing.

“It got a majority of the Republican conference last time, but like Bob Dole once said, you never get in trouble for voting for something that fails or against something that passes,” said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that advocates for reforming the congressional earmark process.

The secret ballot in Tuesday’s vote appeared to make approval of DeMint’s resolution that much less likely. “If you have a closed-door vote, then certainly there are people who can talk one way and vote another or won’t worry about the pressure back home or whatever else,” Ellis said.

The news that Tea Party groups will consider silence on the issue an admission of guilt, however, has thrown GOP senators’ previous calculations into flux and brought increased pressure on them to reveal their intentions. DeMint’s office confirmed on Wednesday that two more senators — Richard Burr (R-N.C) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) — have signed on as cosponsors to his proposal and Sen. Bob Corker’s (R-Tenn.) office responded via email on Wednesday night to say that he, too, had signed the letter. Tea Party groups across the country, meanwhile, have rallied to DeMint’s cause.

“We support it because we would like for our elected officials to vote on the bills at hand and not attach other things to it that might cause them to vote for bad legislation,” said Phillip Dennis, who sits on the steering committee for the Dallas Tea Party. “Let them vote on each bill on its own merits.”

As for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), who voted against DeMint’s proposed moratorium in March and has yet to signal a position on the upcoming vote, Dennis added that his group will be “very interested in what she’s doing.”

Indeed, Hutchison is considered among the most vulnerable of GOP incumbents who are being scrutinized and asked to take a stand. She, Richard Lugar (Ind.), Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Roger Wicker (Miss.) all voted against DeMint’s earmark moratorium in March, and all are facing re-election in 2012. All four offices have refused to reveal their positions this time around, but by doing so they risk incurring renewed calls by the Tea Party to run primary challenges against them in two years’ time.

“We’ll do what we always do,” said Meckler. “Our members will put immense pressure on every senator to vote against earmarks. This is a fundamental issue — it’s both substantive and symbolic. Will they vote against the politics of the past or are they still stuck in it? This is a vote that will never go away, like TARP. Tea Partiers have long memories. Politicians have always taken advantage of the fact that voters have short memories, but we’ll know, we’ll remember, and in 2012 when they have aggressive, well-funded primary challengers, they’ll know why.”

One Republican Senate office, which asked to remain anonymous, urged Tea Party groups not to make assumptions about the senator’s lack of public commitment at this time. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who is also up for re-election in 2012, will wait until talking with his colleagues next week before coming to a decision. The office of Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), who has also thus far declined to indicate how he will vote, did not return requests for comment.

Staying silent, however, no longer seems like the safest option.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) criticized the DISCLOSE Act in July, but Democrats hope for her vote on a modified version of the bill. (Louie Palu/ZUMA Press)

Despite widespread public opposition to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and multiple exhortations by the president for Congress to act, Senate Democrats were unable to overcome a Republican filibuster to pass the DISCLOSE Act, a bill requiring interest groups to name the donors behind their campaign ads, in the months leading up the midterm elections. Next year, when the GOP claims a majority in the House, the odds of passage are slim. “Um, no,” said presumptive House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman when asked if Republicans might introduce a version of the DISCLOSE Act next year.

[Economy1] The last chance, then, for Congress to put some form of disclosure legislation on the books before the shadowy spending process repeats itself, in grander fashion, in 2012 might be now, the lame-duck session in advance of the swearing-in of the much more Republican 112th Congress in January.

But if the numerical chances of the bill’s passage in the Senate — it will only need the votes of two Republican senators to overcome a filibuster when Congress returns from its campaigning break next week — will never look better, the level of trust and communication between key Democratic and Republican Senate offices typically engaged on the issue of campaign finance stands at a seeming all-time low.

Democrats in leadership are now weighing the idea of stripping the less essential provisions of the DISCLOSE Act — measures to prohibit spending from companies holding government contracts or those exceeding a certain threshold of foreign ownership — as an act of good faith in order the counter Republican qualms about the bill and make one last-ditch effort to pass it. They’ll only do so, however, if they anticipate success, and the current breakdown in negotiations between the key parties is making them wary about the bill’s chances of garnering any GOP support at all.

How has a year’s worth of legislative effort on a popular measure now found itself on the brink of failure, and what might make it still succeed? An understanding of the bill’s chances in the lame-duck session requires a look back at its struggles through Congress and the reasons for the current standstill.

*****

The DISCLOSE Act’s problems began with its personnel. The bill originated in the offices of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), legislators best known for their efforts, as chairmen of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, respectively, to get their fellow Democrats elected. Consequently, it was viewed with suspicion by House Republicans.

“When you immediately go to the two lawmakers who are responsible for getting Democrats elected and say, ‘Please write us the bill,’ a lot of Republicans looked at that and said, ‘Huh, that’s a curious choice,’” said Sean Parnell, president of the Center for Competitive Politics, which advocates against imposing limits on campaign spending. “It was the chair of the DCCC and former chair of DSCC leading the process. There was no way that was not going to be seen as partisan. From there it just kind of all went downhill.”

With the Senate calendar and key staffers still tied up with health care reform and financial regulation, it fell to the House to get the ball rolling — but House Democrats said the bill’s basic idea never gained traction among Republicans.

“We released a framework to the public four months in advance of introducing the bill and we reached out to specific Republicans who normally engage in campaign finance issues,” said a Democratic aide who worked on the bill. “We never were approached by Republicans to say they’d vote for stripped-down disclosure provisions.”

Only two Republicans — Reps. Ahn Cao (La.) and Mike Castle (Del.) — signaled support for the bill, so House Democrats proceeded to make it something of a wish list. They added provisions barring companies with federal contracts or those exceeding a certain threshold of foreign ownership from spending independently to influence elections. And they also made an exception for longstanding nonprofits — like the Sierra Club or the National Rifle Association — that met certain membership requirements.

The result was a bill that arrived fully formed in the Senate at the end of June, but one that also provided ample opportunity to its opponents (or would-be supporters) to hammer it as partisan or unfair. The provisions barring certain companies from spending looked to some like built-in advantages for unions, while the NRA carve-out, as it became known, provided an ironic special-interest twist on a bill meant to be about good government.

When the bill came up for its first Senate vote in July, however, Democrats hoped they could still pressure Republicans with a reputation for past leadership on campaign finance issues — like Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins — or newly elected Sen. Scott Brown to cast a vote in favor of the overarching concept of disclosure. But these senators objected to the lack of a committee mark-up or other opportunities to make constructive changes to the bill.

“Unfortunately, the Senate Majority Leader chose to bring forward a bill that doesn’t live up to its title,” Collins wrote in a statement after her first procedural vote against the DISCLOSE Act. “It was drafted by Democrats behind closed doors. No committee hearings were ever held on this legislation; therefore, there never was an opportunity to make any changes to this bill or mark-up in the committee process before we were asked to consider it.”

Democratic aides in the Senate, however, insist they gave Republican senators like Snowe, Collins and Brown every opportunity for input into the bill.

“When I say we offered them a seat at the table it was, literally, ‘Come write the bill with us. Here’s a list of principles and tell us how you’d like to write it,’” said a Democratic staffer who worked on the bill in the Senate. “It could not have been a more welcoming process, but there was very little input offered.” After initial signs of engagement on the issue, Republican offices stopped responding to emails from Democratic staffers. (The offices of Sens. Snowe and Collins also did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)

But by allowing a vote on the same bill that had passed the House and not anticipating the attacks that would be leveled against it, Senate Democrats failed to move the bill and, worse, lost the battle of public perception over whether the bill was a push for transparency or a thinly veiled attempt to sway the outcome of the pending midterm contests in their favor.

By the time the bill was slated to be brought up again in Congress for a vote in late September, it suffered from a breakdown in trust. Both sides realized that the current bill was a nonstarter, but there was no time in the packed legislative schedule to take the multiple days required to introduce a new, stripped-down version. Instead, Democrats urged Snowe and Collins to vote for cloture on the bill as it stood, on the assurance that the Democratic leadership would scrap whatever the senators didn’t like when it came time for debate and amendments. But such a deal would have required the confidence of all parties.

“My understanding — and I’ve talked to both Republican and Democratic offices — is that Democrats were saying, ‘Well, just tell us what you want,’ and Republicans were saying, ‘Tell us how you’ll change it and then we’ll talk,’” said Meredith McGehee, who lobbies for greater transparency in campaign finance for the Campaign Legal Center.

Other campaign finance reform advocates take a more cynical view. “A pared-down version was being discussed in the last round and that wasn’t what the issue was,” said Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert at Public Citizen, a citizen lobby group. “The Republicans, down to Collins and Snowe, even though their public denunciations were about unions, none of them ever meant that. All they wanted was anonymous corporate support in 2010 and 2012.”

In either case, the Maine senators, having already decried the bill once, cited their same complaints and voted ‘no’ once again. A vote for cloture was too close to a vote for the bill itself, and moreover, it opened the door to the possibility of Democrats pulling a fast one and passing the bill without amendments, denying them any input and earning them the wrath of the Republican caucus for enabling Democrats to enact their agenda. The bill failed to overcome a filibuster by a single vote.

*****

Now, facing a lame-duck session with a host of pressing items on the agenda — from the START Treaty to an unemployment extension to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts — Senate Democratic leaders are skeptical that a disclose-only bill can earn Republican support. On the one hand, it would address the bulk of Republicans’ complaints about the current bill, but on the other hand, trust is so frayed that neither side is able to receive assurances as to the other’s thinking on the issue.

The impending seating of a new Republican senator later this month, special election winner Mark Kirk of Illinois, has added a new element of suspense to the mix. While his arrival raises the bar of Republican support required to proceed with debate, some campaign finance experts see in Kirk the kind of moderate voice who spoke in favor of better disclosure laws on the campaign trail and could champion a stripped-down bill as a triumph of good, clean government over the larded Democratic bill. But others doubt that casting a vote against the wishes of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who has made a personal mission out of rolling back campaign finance laws — is high on the to-do list of the incoming freshman senator. (Requests for comment from Kirk’s office were not returned by the time of publication.)

Even if the bill is unlikely to pass, argue some advocates, at least Democrats could finally get Republicans to go on the record definitively on the issue of disclosure.

“Bring up a bill with just the disclosure provisions and take away a number of arguments that we feel are not correct but others have used to make excuses about not voting for it,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of the campaign finance reform group Democracy 21.

Whether the benefits of a symbolic vote on disclosure outweigh the importance of floor time that could be spent on other issues, however, remains an open question. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office said that Reid will defer to Schumer on the content of the bill and that the Democratic leadership has not yet reached any decisions on what it will push in the lame-duck session.

But Holman, speaking on the eve of the election, was less hopeful. “If the results are a fairly sweeping Republican victory,” he said, “then I would fully expect the lame-duck Congress to honor the tradition of doing lame-duck work.”

But will a vote on a new, leaner bill make it onto the Senate’s packed lame-duck schedule? Democrats following the issue assure me that they’re fighting to include it in the mix, but they’re up against a lot of competing demands that Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) must juggle, from the Start Treaty to an omnibus appropriations bill to food safety to the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts. They also note that a stripped-down version of the bill couldn’t be called up at a moment’s notice — like Reid was able to do the last time he called a vote on DISCLOSE — but would instead have to be introduced the old fashioned way and would probably eat up between two and three days of precious Senate floor time as a result.

The biggest issue weighing on the Democrats’ decision, by far, is whether a disclosure-only bill would actually convince any GOP senators to change their mind on the issue. Both Democrats and campaign finance advocates make it clear that they’ve been reaching out the offices of Republicans like Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe (R) and Susan Collins (R) since the spring, asking for their views on what they’d like to see (or not see) in the bill. In recent months, however, that line of communication has basically gone dead.

So would a disclosure-only bill represent the right show of good faith to win back their support? Or would it simply lead to a symbolic floor vote in which Democrats force Republicans to take a stand on the issue of disclosure? I’m waiting to hear back from Snowe and Collins’ offices to get their version of events and whether they think there’s any hope of reviving the conversation, and I’ll write about it if and when I hear back.

The New York Times obtained a draft of a confidential memo to be distributed to all incoming House Republican lawmakers, in which Armey and FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe tell lawmakers that working to repeal health care reform is “nonnegotiable,” and they’ll become the target of a major backlash if they don’t succeed in doing so.

“Politically speaking, your only choice is to get on offense and start moving boldly ahead to repeal, replace and defund Obamacare in 2011, or risk rejection by the voters in 2012,” Armey and Kibbe wrote.

Meanwhile, Erikson wrote yesterday, “We have a significant opportunity to improve the Senate GOP through some primaries [in 2012],” and he provided a list of all the Senate Republicans up for re-election in the next cycle:

John Barasso (WY)
Scott Brown (MA)
Bob Corker (TN)
John Ensign (NV)
Orrin Hatch (UT)
Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX)
Jon Kyl (AZ)
Richard Lugar (IN)
Olympia Snowe (ME)
Roger Wicker (MS)

Note that this is just the list of Senate Republicans running. Not all will be targets, but it will be from these men and women that the tea party movement starts looking for targets.

Now, before you all get giddy about Olympia Snowe, I would respectfully suggest that Corker, Hatch, Hutchison, Lugar, and Wicker make better targets as we have a much greater certainty of both beating them in primaries and also winning the general election.

Wicker and Corker in particular make exciting prospects for the tea party movement.

At this point, the aforementioned writings represent idle threats and not any sort of movement with real popular backing. But with the experiences of their successfully primaried colleagues like Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) fresh in the minds of most Republican congressmen, such threats might be enough to keep them marching in lockstep with the Tea Party’s demands throughout the next legislative session.

Reid claims his caucus is behind him on the act, which would give some undocumented students and military service members a change to gain legal status to remain in the country. “We all support the DREAM Act,” he said on Univision in an interview that aired Sunday. “I just need a handful of Republicans to help me.”

Kirk has said he wouldn’t, despite exhaustive efforts by DREAM Act supporters to convince him otherwise. “This is not the time to do that,” Kirk said in a debate.

How important is Kirk’s vote for passing the DREAM Act? It depends on who Reid means when he says “we all support the DREAM Act.” There are 59 senators who caucus with the Democrats and 41 Republicans. Kirk will change those numbers to 58 and 42. Reid needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster if he hopes to pass the DREAM Act.

If Reid’s right about his caucus, he would only need two Republicans to vote “yes” on the DREAM Act. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) co-sponsored the bill and would almost certainly vote for the it as a standalone measure, although he voted in September to filibuster the defense authorization bill that included it. Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) has also said he would vote for the act as a standalone bill.

But if either of them or any Democrats fall through, other Republicans are tougher to pin down. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who was one of the original sponsors of the DREAM Act, seems likely to vote against it now because he favors a borders-first approach to tackling immigration problems. “The American people want the government to secure our borders, create jobs and reduce the deficit.” Hatch said when he announced plans to vote against the DREAM Act’s inclusion in the defense authorization bill.

Lugar, Hatch and Bennett were two of twelve Republicans who voted for the DREAM Act in 2007. The others still in Senate — Sam Brownback (R-Kans.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) — have been vague about whether they would support the measure as a standalone this year.

When the bill came up as a possible addition to the defense authorization bill, a few Democrats said they were not sure they would support it this time around. Sens. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told The Hill in September they might vote “no” on the DREAM Act.

Reid said he expected full support from Democrats, but needed a few Republicans to vote for the bill. “I have the right to bring that up any time I want, that’s why I brought it up the first time,” he said. “I am a believer in our needing to do something. … We all support the DREAM Act. I just need a handful of Republicans to help me.”

He didn’t seem to expect support from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who once supported the bill but has since shifted far to the right on immigration issues. Reid blamed him, at least in part, for stalling the immigration reform effort this session. “As a result of his unwillingness to help, we have not had a single Republican offer to help us with comprehensive immigration reform,” Reid said. “The system is broken and all they want to do is demagogue the issue.”

Reid didn’t name names when it came to which Republicans he hoped would vote for the DREAM Act during the lame duck session. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) is an almost certain “yes” vote, but other Republicans’ positions remain unclear. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) was an original sponsor, but has since wavered in his support and voted in September for a filibuster of the defense authorization bill that would have served as a vehicle for the act. Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins also voted to filibuster, but might support the DREAM Act as a standalone bill.

In September, bill sponsor Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said he hoped senators who lost their elections would vote for the bill. “Some members of the Senate who are not going to return may vote in our favor,” Durbin said. “I hope that’s the case.”

In a statement, Bingaman said:

We must continue to ensure that the Tax Code contains well-designed incentives that will help us transition to an energy efficient economy. Our bill will significantly expand domestic clean energy manufacturing; help American businesses and families reduce their energy use and dependence on fossil fuels; and create thousands of jobs.  This is a common-sense, bipartisan proposal that deserves priority consideration.

Here’s a summary of the bill’s provisions.