The challenge of being Blanche Lincoln in 2009-2010

Like one of those Indiana Jones movies -- where each near-death experience is followed by some even more extraordinary feat of derring-do -- the tension only escalates now that Democrats have pushed their healthcare bill to the floor of the Senate.

No one is likely to feel more pressure over the next few weeks than Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln, who waited until virtually the last-minute to announce her support for moving forward with debate -- giving giving Democrats the bare 60 votes needed to avoid a GOP filibuster.

But Lincoln, who faces a tough reelection fight, next year, made it clear her vote Saturday night doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll be there with fellow Democrats on final passage. It’s not pretty, the view from the fence where she sits.

As one longtime observer of Arkansas politics put it in Monday’s print story on Lincoln: "She's getting it from both sides.” Moveon.org and other liberal groups are beating her up for opposing the “public option.” Republicans are beating her up for, well, being a Democrat up for reelection.

During a recent interview, Lincoln talked at length about her political situation, the difficulties of running for reelection in 2010 -- at the midterm of President Obama’s first term, historically a time the White House party loses congressional seats -- and what she would like to see in healthcare legislation.

Lincoln sat the end of a long conference table, in what might have once been the parlor of the red-brick Victorian home that serves as her state headquarters. In the background the telephones rang incessantly.

--On healthcare as an all-consuming matter:  “I think by far the biggest issue on people’s minds is the economy. And I think until we do something with healthcare it’s going to suck a lot of out of air out of Washington, when we really need to be focused on the economy and job creation. … Healthcare’s a part of that, but it’s not all there is.”

Lincoln acknowledged a desire to finish up with healthcare, but not just for the sake of pushing the issue off the table: “It’s not as if we just want to do it and get rid of it. … We want to accomplish a greater value in our healthcare dollars, a greater efficiency in our healthcare delivery system.”

--On the so-called “trigger,” that would introduce a public option if insurance companies fail to enact reforms on their own: “I don’t have a problem looking at making sure there’s more pressure on the private industry to be able to provide more options and that hammer -- I prefer to call it a hammer. … There are going to be other options [in] the marketplace. Not necessarily a government-funded option, but nonprofit, perhaps.”

--On the difficult of running in 2010: “I ran for reelection in 1994. Any time you run in the midterm of a new administration, it’s going be this way. … People's expectations have been heightened. You're the first thing between those expectations and results, so it's going to be a tough year.  [Republicans] are going to seize that opportunity.”

--On criticism she’s being wishy-washy, or indecisive as the debate grinds on: “People think you’re supposed to be for or against healthcare reform. Well, it depends what’s in there.”

--Mark Z. Barabak

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Photo: Office of Sen. Lincoln

Sunday shows: Singh, Fiorina, Coburn, Nelson, Kyl

ABC This Week with George Stephanopoulos: Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), and a round table with ABC's George Will, Liz Cheney, Aspen Institute's Walter Isaacson and Robert Reich.

Bloomberg Political Capital with Al Hunt: Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

CBS Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and CBS medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton.

CNN GPS with Fareed Zakaria: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Newsweek's Maziar Bahari.

CNN State of the Union with John King: Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), CNN's Mary Matalin and James Carville, California Republican Senate candidate and former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina.

Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace: Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Kit Bond (R-Mo.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) with Club for Growth's Chris Chocola and Dr. Bernadine Healy, ex-director of National Institutes of Health; roundtable of Fox News' Brit Hume, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and NPR's Mara Liasson.

NBC Meet the Press with David Gregory: Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.),  Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Race for the Cure's Nancy Brinker and NBC's Chief Medical Editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: Associated Press

Weekly remarks: Obama on Asia trip, Sen. Mike Crapo on healthcare costs, cuts

Weekly Remarks by President Obama, as provided by the White House

Hi. I’m recording this message from Seoul, South Korea, as I finish up my first presidential trip to Asia. As we emerge from the worst recession in generations, there is nothing more important than to do everything we can to get our economy moving again and put Americans back to work, and I will go anywhere to pursue that goal. 

That’s one of the main reasons I took this trip. Asia is a region where we now buy more goods and do more trade with than any other place in the world – commerce that supports millions of jobs back home. It’s also a place where the risk of a nuclear arms race threatens our security, and where extremists plan attacks on America’s soil.  And since this region includes some of the fastest-growing nations, there can be no solution to the challenge of climate change without the cooperation of the Asia Pacific.

With this in mind, I traveled to Asia to open a new era of American engagement. We made....

Sen. Roland Burris admonished by ethics panel for being 'less than candid' during probe

The Senate Ethics Committee admonished Sen. Roland Burris today for being "less than candid" about his contacts with impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevich in the months before Burris' appointment to the Senate.

In a letter to the Illinois Democrat, the ethics panel said it "found that you should have known that you were providing incorrect, inconsistent, misleading or incomplete information" during its investigation into whether Burris had been truthful about his contacts with Blagojevich associates.

The panel said, however, that it "did not find that the evidence before it supported any actionable violations of law."

Our colleagues at D.C. Now have more on the public rebuke. To read the letter from the Senate Ethics Committee, click here.

-- Kate Linthicum

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Photo: Sen. Roland Burris attends an Armed Services Committee hearing in January. Credit: Michael Reynolds / EPA

Five things you could do in the time it would take to read the Senate's healthcare bill

 
The latest version of the healthcare bill may have to be airlifted from the Senate floor. It weighs in at a whopping 2,074 pages.

The House's version was certainly large at 1,990 pages, but this new one adds some hefty love handles. The table of contents alone takes up 14 pages.

As Politico noted, it could take as much as 48 hours, by some accounts, for someone to read the bill in its entirety.

That got us thinking. What else could these politicians be doing in the time it would take to read this cinder block of legislation -- because we know each and every one of them will read every last word of it, right?

5. Watch the last three seasons of "ER": For some perspective on what it's like to work in healthcare (or what it's like to be an actor on a series that wouldn't die), you could watch the last few seasons of "ER." You may be the first person ever to do so.

4. Take a motorboat from Alaska to Russia: Sarah Palin may be able to see Russia from her window (but probably not). However, it'll take about two full days to get there with a top-of-the-line motorboat. Trips like these make us wish for offshore drilling so we can make a pit stop along the way.

3. Read the Bible one and a half times: This one depends on your version of the Bible, but many prints are in the neighborhood of 1,200 pages -- that includes both the Old and New Testaments.

2. Accrue enough radio experience to host a national talk show: In Glenn Beck's "The Real America," a 2005 book by the political pundit, he writes, "After doing a total of maybe 40 hours of talk radio, I was asked to host a national show."

1. Watch 12 episodes of "Glenn Beck," 21 episodes of "The O'Reilly Factor" and a full week's worth of "The Rush Limbaugh Show:" That prescription of nonstop ranting should ensure you will vehemently hate the healthcare bill without ever reading a word of it.

-- Mark Milian

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Photo: The House version of the healthcare bill on display this month, courtesy of Republican Reps. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, left, and Steve King of Iowa. Credit: Associated Press

Video shows Sen. Obama thought a military tribunal was fine for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed

As The Ticket reported earlier today in this space, Atty. Gen. Eric Holder was on the Senate Judiciary Committee hot seat defending his decision to bring the alleged 9/11 terrorist masterminds onto U.S. soil for civilian trials instead of keeping them far away in Guantanamo Bay for a military tribunal.

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, himself a former federal prosecutor, says he's amazed at Holder's simplicity claim and remains unconvinced that such a move, which could make New York City a target for potential new attack, makes any legal sense whatsoever.

Speaking of military tribunals, we went back into the video archives and found this C-SPAN tape below. Holder might want to watch it.

It contains his boss, Barack Obama, a brief member of that same Senate, in 2006 stating that a military tribunal was a perfectly fine way of handling such dangerous individuals as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Obama said the fight against terrorism was "an extraordinarily difficult war" where terrorists could plot undetected from within our own borders.

The freshman Illinois senator was defending a legislative amendment and pointed out that a military tribunal for Mohammed seemed just fine to him.

"The irony of the underlying bill as it's written is that someone like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is going to get basically a full military trial with all the bells and whistles. He's gonna have counsel. He's gonna be able to present evidence to rebut the government's case.... I think we will convict him. And I think justice will be carried out."

Obama, meanwhile, continued his journeys around Asia and told....

...inquiring reporters that he has never been closer to a strategic decision on what to do next about the deteriorating military situation in Afghanistan.

He also confirmed to Fox News' Major Garrett that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility would not, in fact, be closed by the end of next month as the new president had promised on his first day in office. The latest target is now sometime next year.

In late August the Democratic president received the recommendations of the commanding general in Afghanistan, involving the addition of more U.S. troops to the 68,000 already on the ground from Obama's first troop surge last March.

The general's recommendations reportedly also said that allies had about one year left to save the strategic situation there. Nearly a quarter of that year have passed in deliberations. As The Ticket reported here earlier today, an angry Obama has said that leaks of such contents are firing offenses.

Obama says it might be a few more weeks before he makes his final decision, but that when he did the American people would be clear about it and what his goals were.

As we reported here Tuesday, new polls indicate the American people have moved further along in their decision-making process about the war than the president. And their emerging decision appears to be that the eight-year conflict wasn't and isn't worth the cost.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Stung by restrictions in healthcare bill, abortion rights supporters fight back

As the fight over a healthcare bill moves from the House to the Senate, abortion rights groups are rallying to make sure the Senate's version does not contain antiabortion language approved by the House.

After a pitched, months-long battle and a successful lobbying effort by the country's Catholic bishops, the House's narrowly passed version would make it impossible for many women to purchase health insurance that covers abortion. 

The Stupak-Pitts amendment says health plans purchased with the help of government money cannot include abortion coverage. Low-income women using federal subsidies, even small ones, to buy heath insurance would not be able to buy plans that cover abortion. Abortion foes contend that this is simply an extension of existing law, which for 30 years has prohibited the use of federal money for most abortions.

But supporters of abortion rights say Stupak-Pitts is more restrictive than current federal law. If the country ends up with a public option, Stupak-Pitts would prevent any of those plans from offering abortion coverage, which means a woman using her own money to purchase a plan through the (presumably less expensive) public option would not be able to buy a plan that covers abortion. Also, they claim, insurers would have less incentive to offer abortion coverage.

Such restrictions, say abortion rights groups, are unacceptable since abortion is a legal medical procedure.

This week, the Center for Reproductive Rights unveiled a new campaign, "Abortion Coverage is No Joke." At a press conference in Washington, Nancy Northup, the group's president, introduced a woman whose insurance company would not pay for an abortion even though her fetus was diagnosed with a fatal abnormality. Not exactly stand-up material, but check out this video, which will play for a week on cable in the DC area:

Meanwhile, 20 House Democrats who voted for Stupak-Pitts are the subject of a new Internet petition. All 20 are identified by both Planned Parenthood and National Right to Life rankings as either solidly in favor of abortion rights, or nominally so, and some are believed by abortion supporters to have "buyer's remorse" over the restrictive amendment they voted for. 

For every signature, Credo (a division of  Working Assets, the telecommunications company that donates a portion of its profits to progressive causes), will send a coat-hanger, that hoary symbol of the back-alley abortion, to the 20. So far, according to the petition's website, more than 113,000 hangers have been sent.

-- Robin Abcarian

Video: Center for Reproductive Rights

Atty. Gen. Eric Holder on hot seat about sending 9/11 trials to NYC: 'We need not cower in the face of this enemy'

It was a hearing in which both sides gave as good as they got.

The ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Alabama's Jeff Sessions, criticized Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. for deciding to hold the trials of alleged 9/11 plotters in New York City, calling the move "dangerous, misguided and unnecessary" because it would put the city at greater risk and give Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the attacks, a platform.

But Holder, noting the long and successful record of New York prosecutors in managing terrorism trials, scoffed at that, insisting that the defendants' "hateful ideologies" will be no louder in civilian court than before a military commission. Noting that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Chief Ray Kelly think the city can be protected during the trial, Holder said:

I have every confidence that the presiding judge will ensure appropriate decorum. And if Khalid Shaikh Mohammed makes the same statements he made in his military commission proceedings, I have every confidence the nation and the world will see him for the coward he is. I'm not scared of what Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will have to say at trial, and no one else needs to be either. 

The attorney general also took a swipe at the George W. Bush administration, saying, "For eight years justice has been delayed for the 9/11 attacks. No more delay. It is time; it is past time to finally act." 

In short, said the attorney general, "we need not cower in the face of this enemy."

 -- Johanna Neuman

Photo: Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images

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Eric Holder defends decision to try 9/11 terrorists in federal court

West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd makes history, serving in Congress longer than anyone, ever

(UPDATE: 2:02 p. Pacific. A photo of a celebratory Sen. Byrd on the Senate floor minutes ago this afternoon has been added to this item above, courtesy of C-SPAN.)

Ever since Jan. 3, 1953, Robert Carlyle Byrd has represented West Virginia in Congress, first in the House, then in the Senate. If you're counting, that's 56 years, 10 months and 16 days.

Today he became the longest-serving member of Congress, eclipsing Carl Hayden, who represented Arizona from 1912, when the state joined the Union, until he retired in 1968. Hayden was known as the silent senator, so reluctant to speak that The Times once said of him, "No man in Senate history has wielded more influence with less oratory."

No one would make that claim about Byrd, known for his speeches on the history of the Senate, often delivered to an empty chamber, a 2-million-word extravaganza that is now available in printed form.

A lifelong Democrat who filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights bill, Byrd has since recanted his stance against equal rights for African Americans and called his membership as a young man in the Ku Klux Klan "the greatest mistake I ever made."

Known as "the champion of earmarks," Byrd has been in the Senate so long that many of the buildings and institutions in West Virginia are named for him. And because of his seniority, Byrd is now third in line in presidential succession -- behind Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The ailing Byrd, who turned 92 on Friday, spends much of his time these days at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. But on the Senate floor today, colleagues saluted him for his longevity.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid likened him to New York Yankees legend Lou Gehrig, who played in 2,130 consecutive baseball games, a record later topped by the Baltimore Orioles' Cal Ripken Jr..

"Throughout history, forecasters have sentenced themselves to ridicule for prematurely assuming a skyscraper's height would never be topped, for promising an invention’s ingenuity would never be outdone," Reid said."Even so, I am willing to risk predicting that many of the records set by Sen. Robert Byrd will never be matched."

-- Johanna Neuman

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Sen. Robert Byrd becomes longest-serving lawmaker in congressional history

Photo: C-SPAN

Will prayers sway Lieberman on healthcare? Rabbis rally. Priests, ministers, imams too

Connecticut's Joe Lieberman is a unique figure in Washington. He's an independent who caucuses with the Democrats but campaigns for Republicans like Arizona's John McCain.

He's also an observant Jew who honors the Sabbath. The senator makes an exception for work when the Senate is in session on Saturdays.

Now, an interfaith group of clergy is lobbying him to drop his plans to filibuster any healthcare bill that contains a public option. Their strategy: prayers.

During a Sunday night vigil, a crowd walked from Stamford High School, Lieberman's alma mater, to his condo building across the street. According to the Stamford Advocate's Devon Lash, residents went out on their balconies to listen to rabbis, ministers, priests and imams speak from behind a sidewalk pulpit.

"We are praying for the senator to change his heart and his mind," said the Rev. Tommie Jackson, of Faith Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church in Stamford. 

Then Monday, a multi-denominational group of clergy sent a letter to Lieberman asking him to abandon his filibuster threats. "A lot of groups who have historically supported [Lieberman] are praying for him to come back home," Rabbi Ron Fish, leader of the Concerned Clergy Of Connecticut, pictured above.

The letter, signed by 70 members of the clergy, posed this argument: "Whether from the words of Torah or the Gospels of Jesus, whether from the Talmud or the Koran -- our traditions all are explicit and clear on one thing: We are commanded to seek the welfare and healing of all those in our midst, especially the weak, especially the vulnerable."

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: Rabbi  Ron Fish, of Congregation Beth El in Norwalk, Conn., participates in candlelight vigil urging Sen. Lieberman to back healthcare reform.  Credit: Chris Preovolos / Stamford Advocate

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