Another Ad Blunder

Mitch McConnell, who is facing steep competition in Kentucky, got some bad press recently for a split second mix-up in his most recent campaign ad. In a clip at the end of the the ad, there is a shot of basketball players celebrating a championship. The intended team was Kentucky's own University of Kentucky Wildcats but unfortunately the shot features two Duke players. His opponents have immediately jumped on the blunder.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/us/politics/mcconnell-increases-lead-in-embarrassing-viral-videos.html

President, Congress, Judiciary

Simulation

A big gaffe

Newt Gingrich, Lessons Learned the Hard Way (1998):

We had not only failed to take into account the ability of the Senate to delay us and obstruct us, but we had much too cavalierly underrated the power of the President, even a President who had lost his legislative majority and was in a certain amount of trouble for other reasons. I am speaking of the power of the veto. Even if you pass something through both the House and the Senate, there is that presidential pen. How could we have forgotten that? For me especially it was inexcusable, because when I was Republican whip during the Bush Administration one of my duties had been precisely to help sustain presidential vetoes.

Rules and The Federal Register

The Congressional Review Act.

Legislative Veto and the Presentation Clause (Art I, sec. 7, clause 3): Every Order, Resolution, or Vote to which the Concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary (except on a question of Adjournment) shall be presented to the President of the United States; and before the Same shall take Effect, shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives, according to the Rules and Limitations prescribed in the Case of a Bill.

NAIL:  Nominations, Appropriations, Investigations, Legislation

Nominations

• Nominations: Senate data
• Cabinet nominations rejected or withdrawn

Appropriations

• Limitation riders

Investigations & Oversight -- more after the simulation

Legislation:  Executive Branch Organization

Supreme Court 

House of Claremont

I will use a video camera to record much of the simulation.  Please add some Underwood-style asides.

You may either make up your own, or draw from Sun Tzu's The Art of War

Congress and the President

LBJ orders some pants.

Article I and Article II
Executive orders
Signing Statements 

Vetoes
Statements of Administration Policy 

1— Strongly Support Passage
2— Support Passage
3— Do not Object to Passage
4— No Position on Passage
5— Oppose
6— Strongly Oppose
7— Secretary’s veto Threat (single and multiple agency)
8— Senior Advisor’s Veto Threat
9— Presidential Veto Threat

Presidential success scores
Presidential approval

The Johnson Treatment

First class flights for members of Congress

House Rep. Paul Gosar (R AZ) asked the Appropriations Committee to ban members of Congress from  using their congressional funds for first class plane tickets. The savings would be a drop in the bucket, but Gosar's request is a matter of principle… and politics. His office has written three press releases in the last two days praising his request.

Also, it looks like Congress will not permanently fix the Medicare doctor pay formula and will instead simply extend the doc fix.

Foreign Travel

Here is a follow-up to the question about foreign travel.

Kent Cooper writes at Roll Call:

Some members of Congress didn’t stick around Washington during the cold month of February, but they found better places to be on free trips to foreign lands.

The big free trips during February included eleven members on the trip to Israel sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation. Another fourteen went to Cartagena, Columbia, with expenses paid by the Aspen Institute, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Other members went to Japan, Australia, and Belgium. The trip to Australia for one member and his spouse was worth almost $50,000.
Family members also traveled free. Seventeen members of Congress took spouses along. Two members took their children. Another took their mother-in-law, all without cost to them.

These foundations are all real.  But other foreign travel has sketchier funding sources, as Shane Goldmacher explained at National Journal in January:

he 2007 rules prevent a lobbyist for a corporate client from planning or paying for a lawmaker's trip. But the same rules allow such a trip if it's paid for by a foreign government. So while it does remain illegal for, say, a Google lobbyist to plan and accompany a lawmaker on a free trip abroad, if that same lobbyist does so on behalf of Turkey, it's perfectly legal. And if that lobbyist happens to have both corporate and foreign-government clients (as most do), they can still go abroad so long as it's a country and not a company footing the bill.

And that's only one of the loopholes the influence industry has exploited to help lawmakers score free travel. Today, a wide network of nonprofits—many with a clear agenda and some with excruciatingly tight ties to Washington's biggest lobbying operations—are putting together international congressional excursions. Some of these paper nonprofits have no staff or space of their own; they simply share with a sister organization that lobbies. Yet ethics officials in Congress have deemed them to be independent enough. In one instance, a lobbyist literally registered a new nonprofit—in his own office—that went on to pay for congressional travel abroad.

Big corporations bankroll some nonprofits, whose trips, in turn, can feature stops at the businesses of their corporate funders. As a bonus, the growing use of 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which occupy the same charitable rung of the tax code as soup kitchens and the American Red Cross, means that the wealthy and corporate donors underwriting congressional travel can do so in secret and get a tax write-off along the way.

Feel free to make up your own Frank Underwood-style epigram.

Reconcilation

In the fall, House passes one version, with public option.  The Senate, rather than use the House-passed health bill, instead uses an unrelated tax bill (HR 3590) as the shell for its version (See Sinclair, p. 211 for a discussion of the differences.)

Scott Brown's election prompts a different kind of procedure:  passing the Senate version, with agreed-upon changes in the reconciliation bill.

The final legislation.

House Leaders contemplate "Deem and Pass," then decide on a direct vote.

The real Frank Underwood explains:

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