With the 2012 elections looming, Florida and other states have passed a slew of laws that make it harder for people to vote and harder for groups to register voters. Opponents of the new laws say the rules will make it harder for minorities and young people — largely been considered a significant part of the Democratic base — to vote in the upcoming election.

The office of Democratic Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., announced that he “led a letter sent to Secretaries of State today urging them to oppose new state measures adopted over the last year that would make it harder for eligible voters to register or vote.”

“A year from now, millions of Americans will head to the polls to exercise their most fundamental right – the right to vote,” Hoyer said in a press release. “Unfortunately, in states across the country, partisan measures have been adopted that would make it more difficult for nearly five million voters, particularly the poor, young people, the elderly, and minorities, to register and vote.”

“Voter suppression has no place in our country,” Hoyer said. “That’s why Democrats are sending a letter to Secretaries of State urging them to oppose these partisan efforts to hinder access to the ballot and urging them to work in a bipartisan way to ensure all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to be heard.”

In the letter to the secretaries of state, House Democrats wrote:

A disturbing trend is emerging. Election legislation and administration appear to be increasingly the product of partisan plays. Election officials are seen as partisan combatants, rather than stewards of our democracy. It is critical for our democracy that this does not continue. Voting hours, voting sites, identification requirements, voter registration regulation and access to mail ballots should not be used as weapons to achieve a preferred electoral outcome.

We are asking you, as front line participants in this process, to put partisan considerations aside and serve as advocates for enfranchisement. Critical to your role is the fair presentation and evaluation of the costs and benefits associated with any proposed change in election administration. We ask that you be vigilant in protecting against fraud but equally vigilant in protecting the franchise for all our citizens. History has taught us that our democracy has suffered far more from elected officials who chose to deny some of our citizens the opportunity to vote than from any other cause. There is no greater threat to our democracy than a diminished belief that the rules are fair and fairly administered.

The letter sent today was signed by six Florida Democrats: Corrine Brown, Kathy Castor, Alcee Hastings, Ted Deutch, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Frederica Wilson.

House Democrats are not the only Florida lawmakers fighting the laws. This week Sen. Bill Nelson wrote to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder requesting that the Justice Department launch an investigation into whether the “new state voting laws resulted from collusion or an orchestrated effort to limit voter turnout.” He also sent a letter to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asking him to consider “conducting investigative field hearings” to see if the new voting laws were “an orchestrated effort to disenfranchise voters” in a manner that is possibly illegal.

Florida is currently waiting for a ruling on controversial aspects of the law from a court in the District of Columbia.

“Today is the eve of a major day… It’s almost like Christams Eve or Passover for many of us in this community,” said state Senator Lucia Guzman. “Tomorrow brings a new era. Nowhere in America should anyone be asked to lie about who they are or about what they stand for.”

Guzman said that active gay service members would now openly be representing core U.S. values they were fighting for overseas.

“As the sun goes down… the gentle cool breeze here in Colorado will connect with a breeze all over the world and say to our men and women in uniform ‘You are now free not only to fight and die for our country but also to be our country.”

“Many people fought to make this day possible,” said Colorado Democtaic Party Chairman Rick Palacio who, as a staffer for Maryland Representative Steny Hoyer, helped draft and push the legislation that will end the policy. “Colorado’s senior Senator Mark Udall, [independent] Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and [Republican] Senator Susan Collins of Maine were pivotal in ensuring this legisaltion passed. They are proof that bipartisanship still exists.”

Palacio referenced the fact that 14,000 service men and women had been discharged under the policy.

Government accountants estimated last year that the process of identifying gay service members and discharging them under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” cost the country more than $200 million since its implementation.

In arguing for repeal, Senator Udall said repeatedly that seeking to expel men and women the country had paid to train was extremely detrimental at a time when the nation was fighting two wars.

“These are jet pilots, translators of Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun– languages so important in the War on Terror. All the skill sets needed in the military are met by gay Americans.”

Most of the countries of the European Union, as well Israel, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan and Uruguay all embrace open gay military service and have in most cases for years.

Vietnam veteran Dennis Daughtery spoke to the small crowd outside the capitol today about the kind of closure the repeal would bring for him.

“I have two friends whose names are chizzled into a wall in Washington DC. I just want to go back and say to them welcome home.”

State Senator Pat Steadman, who sponsored a same-sex civil unions bill in Colorado that gained bipartisan support before being killed in a House committee last year, said he saw the repeal as the end of a chapter in the larger story of gay equality.

“This is one step in a much larger movement,” he said. “It is a movement that has seen continual progress, from what is happening in different states around the country to, finally, the legislative changes coming out of our nation’s capital. This particular policy was a policy of exclusion and discrmination that way outlasted any usefulness and it was really time for it to go.

“We are now at a point where most of these policies of exclusion are history and we can start talking more about what we can do legislatively to focus on inclusion and equality. I hope that momentum continues to sweep our nation’s capital and where we are right now,” he said, referring to the state capitol building behind him.

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The move was not unanimous among Republicans. Libertarians such as Rep. Ron Paul of Texas voted against it, as did fellow Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, who said the bill “violates my conscious and the Constitution, and I cannot vote for it.”

All of Minnesota’s Republican members of Congress voted for the self-executing rule.

On Sean Hannity’s Fox show last year, Bachmann said of the deem-and-pass strategy and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “That should laugh her out of the House and there should be people that are calling for impeachment off of something like this. That’s how bad this is. I mean, trust me, Dennis Hastert never could have gotten away with this.”

In fact, Bachmann took to numerous media outlets to oppose the strategy, which Democrats soon dropped in favor of an up or down vote. The measure at the time was being proposed by New York Rep. Louise Slaughter.

“They use the Slaughter rule in the House, something that hasn’t been done before,” Bachmann told NewsMax’s Ronald Kessler.

And on Fox’s Red Eye, Bachmann told the host, “It does great violence to the Constitution. We call it the ‘slaughter the House rule.’ It’s never been done before in the history of the Congress.”

Bachmann was rebuked by fact-checkers when she made the claim that deem and pass was never used before, and she quickly backtracked.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, criticized Bachmann on the House floor on Thursday over the bill.

“But they pretend in their language what is clearly contrary to the Constitution. Because they say, if it doesn’t pass, the provisions of H.R. 1, the bill they’ve sent to the Senate, passed by the house on February 19, 2011, are hereby enacted into law. In other words, we’re going to deem it passed,” he said. “Michelle Bachmann, apparently may be a candidate for president said this, that deem and pass ‘ignored the constitution and warranted the impeachment of the House Speaker… there should be people that are calling for impeachment off of something like this.’”

Making the case as to why she should be considered for the 2012 Republican nomination for president, the Minnesota representative told Fox News last week, “I have been able to raise more money than any member of the House of Representatives in the history of the United States Congress,” according to The Washington Post’s ‘Fact Checker blog.

The Post found that Bachmann raised more money in the 2009-2010 election cycle than any other House member, bringing in $13.5 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; her contributions came mostly from individuals, 50 percent of whom contributed $200 or less.

“Bachmann is a prodigious fundraiser, but once again her talent for hyperbole has stretched the truth a bit,” writes the Post’s Glenn Kessler. ”Her statement would have been accurate if she had added the words ‘in an election cycle.’ But instead she choose to make a sweeping statement that, as of yet, is not quite true.”

Using CRP data, the Post found that Bachmann is in fourth place in terms of total fundraising by current House members, though those figures do not include money raised from leadership Political Action Committees:

• Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio): $26.4 million
• Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.): $21.7 million
• Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.): $20.5 million
• Bachmann: $19.6 million
• Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.): $18.5 million
• Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.): $17.6 million
• Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.): $12.5 million.

The only job that remains up in the air for Democrats — chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) — is a result of the fact that no one seems to want to take it. The position, which is appointed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), has reportedly been turned down already by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), and it’s unclear who will step up to fill the important shoes of going toe-to-toe with National Republican Senatorial Committee leader Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) in the battle for the Senate in 2012.

The reason, it seems, is that the position, typically a launching pad to the upper echelons of Democratic leadership, is looking more and more like a sand trap when it comes to 2012. In two years, 21 Democratic senators — along with two independents who caucus with the Democrats — will come up for re-election, compared to only 10 Republicans. Even with President Obama on the ticket, those numbers make the odds of notching a winning record nearly nil, while the potential for a drubbing is much greater.

On the Democratic side, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has announced her desire to be Minority Leader and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) says he wants to remain whip. According to TPM’s Josh Marshall, the practical effect is that there’s no room for Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.):

The next person down the totem poll is John Larson as Caucus Chairman. According to Roll Call, Pelosi is encouraging (sub.req.) him to run for Caucus Chair again. So Pelosi moves down, Clyburn and Larson remain in place. So there’s no room for Hoyer. He’s standing when the music stops. And he’s got no chair.

The key tell here is that Pelosi seems to be encouraging the people down the totem poll to stay in place. So she’s blocking Hoyer’s ability to perhaps get Clyburn to agree to step down the ladder with him.

I think I remember this scene from The Godfather.

Pelosi hasn’t officially weighed in on the budding Hoyer v. Clyburn battle for Whip, but Marshall is right to note that by not encouraging the rest of her leadership team to move a step down the rung, she’s effectively squeezing Hoyer out.

On the other side of the aisle, Republicans are delicately — or, at times, not so delicately — trying to foil Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-Minn.) bid to challenge Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) for a Republican House leadership position:

“Bachmann will have a tough time convincing anyone that Hensarling isn’t conservative enough,” a House Republican aide told The Daily Caller. “She’ll have an even tougher time convincing the conference that she wouldn’t take our whole team down in flames with her antics.”

Another House Republican staffer aligned with the most conservative elements of the party called Hensarling “literally unbeatable.”

Working in Republicans’ favor is the fact that Hensarling is widely considered to represent that same kind of “constitutional conservatism” (he opposed TARP, etc.) that Bachmann says she could bring to the table. Working against them is the fact that few people outside of his district have ever heard of Hensarling and his nomination could thus be seen as a slight to the budding Tea Party caucus which is just starting to feel its oats.

It’s clear that there’s a growing chorus of Democrats here in Washington, including the Majority Leader Mr. Hoyer, and Mr. Van Hollen, and others, who agree with Republicans that raising taxes on anyone, especially small businesses, is the wrong thing to do in a struggling economy. This week I sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi asking her to allow nothing short of an up-or-down vote on a bill to stop all of the current tax hikes. In my letter, I reminded Speaker Pelosi and Representative Slaughter of the public backlash that occurred when they tried to short-circuit the rules to ram through the President’s health care bill. It became known as the “Slaughter Solution.” And the American people forced them to call it off.

On the issue of job-killing tax hikes, the American people are not going to accept anything less than the vote that they deserve. The Speaker should pledge to the American people, and when she stands before these cameras later on today, she ought to pledge that there will be an honest up-or-down vote on stopping all of the coming tax hikes. Anything less than that is unacceptable. If the Speaker allows an up-or-down vote, I’m confident that the American people will not see increases in their taxes.

Of course Democrats would rather vote for a temporary extension of all of tax cuts than let all of them expire, raising taxes even on low-income families. That is precisely why Democrats are in the process of hammering out a bill extending all the tax cuts for a certain period of time, or keeping the cuts for all but the richest 2.1 percent of Americans.

But a straight up-or-down vote would prove contentious, given that even some Republicans want to see the cuts expire. And Republicans thrive on that contention, that slowing-down of initiatives. In the words of Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), “complete gridlock” is a goal.

House leadership could decide to send the bill back to the Senate with no action, but instead will likely choose to start the process over with a new bill, aides said.

“As we wait for all the facts to emerge about Monday’s events, several things are already clear. First, the loss of life was tragic. Second, Israel – rightfully so – invoked its right to self-defense on the Mavi Marmara.”

While the majority of ships in the flotilla – 5 out of 6 – reacted peacefully when approached by Israeli Defense Forces, activists on board the Mavi Marmara were clearly bent on a violent confrontation.  They further chose this path despite two week’s worth of repeated warnings from Israel that the ship would not be allowed to come ashore, and despite Israel’s offer to instead receive the humanitarian goods at Ashdod, inspect them there for weapons, and ensure their distribution to Palestinians in Gaza.

Finally, to the extent that this act was in protest of the Gaza blockade, let’s be clear: Hamas could end the blockade at any time by recognizing Israel’s right to exist, renouncing violence, and releasing Gilad Shalit.

The Administration and Congress are determined to prevent condemnation of Israel at the UN Security Council.  In times of increased tension such as now, it is imperative that we not allow these events to distract from our main goals of achieving peace in the region and preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Not only have House Democrats — who’d hoped to have their bill wrapped up and delivered to the Senate by Wednesday — failed to rally the support of the budget hawks in their own party, but whatever the House does send over to the upper chamber, “Senate Republicans will not allow us to pass [this week] and maybe not ever,” said one Senate Democratic aide familiar with the negotiations.

As a possible Plan B, Senate Democratic leaders might offer a much smaller proposal Friday: a $4 billion package to provide a 14-day extension of the programs scheduled to expire next week while Congress is gone, including unemployment benefits, COBRA health benefits, payments to Medicare doctors, SBA loans and flood insurance. (None of the proposals under consideration would create new tiers of unemployment benefits.)

Trouble is, the Democrats don’t intend to pay for the short-term extensions with offsets elsewhere in the budget, meaning that Republicans will almost certainly object. (GOP leaders don’t reject the policies, but they want them paid for with unspent stimulus funds — a notion that Democrats oppose.)

There, in a nutshell, is the source of the stalemate — a stalemate that will allow these benefit provisions to expire, and force Democratic leaders to try to forge a deal that can pass both chambers quickly when they return to Washington June 7. The bill they produce, said the Democratic aide, will likely be retroactive.