President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner are continuing to work on a deal that would allow a debt-ceiling increase, even as both sides denied reports Thursday that an agreement was imminent.

According to a Democratic congressional aide, discussions have centered on a version of the so-called grand bargain the two leaders have sought — minus a key element, new tax revenues, that has been rejected by Republicans. The White House told congressional Democrats about this proposal during the last 24 hours.

The deal would amount to as much as $3 trillion in spending cuts, and would likely be deeply opposed by rank-and-file Democrats who have insisted that any package that includes cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security must also include new tax revenue.

For both sides, a deal of that sort would also amount to a bet on the next election, because the tax cuts enacted under George W. Bush expire at the end of 2012.

Republicans want to renew those tax cuts, while Obama has promised to allow taxes to go up on higher-income Americans when the current rates expire.

Boehner’s spokesman flatly denied that such a deal was underway.

“While we are keeping the lines of communication open, there is no ‘deal’ and no progress to report,” said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.

Arriving for his daily briefing, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney also immediately denied a New York Times report that the sides were closing in on a major deal.

“There is no deal. We are not close to a deal,” he said. Still, he allowed that there was “the potential here for a significant agreement.”

“We are not there, but we remain hopeful that we could get there,” he said.

Boehner has called a Friday morning meeting of the entire GOP conference in the House. He is not expected to unveil a proposal at that time, a GOP aide said.

Other congressional aides, including a spokesman for Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, also said they were not familiar with a pending deal.

“Eric is not aware of any deal or that any deal is close,” said Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring.

Boehner reiterated at his weekly news conference earlier Thursday that House Republicans continue to work with the president to achieve an agreement and avoid default by Aug. 2, when the Treasury Department has said it will run out of money to pay all of the nation’s bills.

“The ball continues to be in the president’s court,” Boehner said.

Also on Thursday, freshmen lawmakers will meet with representatives of Standard Poor’s, the rating agency that has said it would downgrade U.S. bonds if the nation defaults. The meeting was arranged by freshman Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-N.Y.).

Congressional leaders met behind closed doors Wednesday, among themselves and at the White House, and more talks may occur Thursday, though none have been formally announced.

At a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats, reports of a cuts-only deal drew outrage. “Many of us were volcanic,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.).

Senators were not briefed on the proposed deal during the lunch meeting with Jacob Lew, director of the Office of Management and Budget, but news reports trickled in during the session.

Staff writer Michael A. Memoli contributed to this report.

A long-standing feud between South Florida House members Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Allen West turned to insults Tuesday after an exchange of speeches on a debt-reduction bill.

Wasserman Schultz chastised West on the House floor for supporting a bill that would cut Medicare and other spending.

“The gentleman from Florida, who represents thousands of Medicare beneficiaries, as do I, is supportive of this plan that would increase costs for Medicare beneficiaries — unbelievable from a member from South Florida,” said Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat.

West, a Republican from Plantation who lives in Wasserman Schultz’s district, responded with an email to her and House leaders: “Look, Debbie, I understand that after I departed the House floor you directed your floor speech comments directly towards me. Let me make myself perfectly clear, you want a personal fight, I am happy to oblige.

“You are the most vile, unprofessional and despicable member of the U.S. House of Representatives. If you have something to say to me, stop being a coward and say it to my face, otherwise, shut the heck up. Focus on your own congressional district!”

West said her behavior “dates back to the disgusting protest you ordered at my campaign headquarters, October 2010 in Deerfield Beach.”

He was referring to a demonstration by Wasserman Schultz and others outside West’s campaign headquarters, claiming West showed insensitivity by writing a political column in a local biker magazine that includes pictures and articles that they said disrespected women.

Jonathan Beeton, communications director for Wasserman Schultz, responded: “I don’t think that Congressman West is upset at the congresswoman, but rather with the fact that she highlighted that he and other Republicans are once again trying to balance the budget on the backs of seniors, children and the middle class.”

The dust-up generated considerable attention because of Wasserman Schultz’s role as chair of the Democratic National Committee and West’s prominence in the new “tea party” crop of freshman Republican lawmakers.

Has New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie already seen his “Glory Days?”

According to a new poll by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning firm, the man who has become a Republican rock star nationally could face some troubles at home. The poll showed that Christie’s approval rating in New Jersey has sunk to 43%, a 10-point drop since the beginning of the year.

The PPP poll shows that Christie has particularly lost support among independents, a bloc crucial in a state where Republicans need such swing voters to win statewide. And the poll shows Christie losing in a hypothetical 2013 reelection match-up with Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a Democratic rising star.

The more intriguing race is a fantasy showdown between Christie and one of his biggest critics, the real, nonmetaphorical rock star, Bruce Springsteen.

According to PPP, the Freehold, N.J., native would start off any race tied at 42% with Christie, but with room to grow among Democratic voters.

Unlike Christie, Springsteen’s favorability numbers stand at 50%, with Democrats unsurprisingly thinking more highly of the performer than Republicans. Unlike Springsteen, Christie has actually run a state and succeeded in politics.

In March, Springsteen, who now lives in Colts Neck, wrote a letter to a local newspaper criticizing Christie’s state budget cuts.

“The article is one of the few that highlights the contradictions between a policy of large tax cuts, on the one hand, and cuts in services to those in the most dire conditions, on the other,” Springsteen wrote to the editors of the Asbury Park Press. “The cuts are eating away at the lower edges of the middle class, not just those already classified as in poverty, and are likely to continue to get worse over the next few years.”

The governor is a die-hard Springsteen fan who has said that he’s seen the Boss play more than 120 times.

Christie has continued to resist calls that he run for president. On Tuesday, he reiterated his disinterest to a group of prominent donors in Manhattan. Politico’s Mike Allen reported that Christie listed his family and his desire to stay to finish his first term in New Jersey as the two biggest reasons for not getting in.

PPP surveyed 480 New Jersey voters from July 15-18. The margin of error for the
survey is plus or minus 4.5%.

Springsteen’s songs have been adopted/co-opted by presidential aspirants from Ronald Reagan to John Kerry, but we think that if Bruce actually did enter politics, some of the items from his catalog would have to be reworked in light of the modern climate. Here are some possibilities:

Meet Me at a Fundraiser Tonight in Atlantic City

Because the Night is Better for Cable-news Ratings

Born to Run if Booker Doesn’t Get In

That Mansion on the Hill isn’t Mine

Fox News Channel Freeze-Out

The Price You Pay Also Helps Support the DNC

The Ghost of Tom Kean

You Can Look, But You Better Not Touch Because Security Will Beat You Senseless

The Rising, but What Do the Cross Tabs Say About White Men, Ages 36-54?

I’ve Never Met That Jersey Girl

My Hometown is Whatever Town I’m in Today

Campaigning in Iowa Wednesday, Rep. Michele Bachmann brushed off recent reports that she has severe migraines that have led her to seek hospital treatment.  

The Republican presidential candidate told reporters after her “backyard chat” with voters here that she had been in Washington on Tuesday night voting on GOP-proposed budget legislation and had arrived in Iowa well after midnight.  

“I keep a very rigorous schedule,” she said. “I feel great. So we’ve answered that.”

“What I’m here to talk about is the debt ceiling, and I think it’s been very clear that people in Iowa do not want us to continue government spending and increase the debt ceiling. Everywhere I go, this is what people are talking about,” the Minnesota congresswoman said. “They want the economy turned around. They want job creation; that’s my focus.”

Bachmann did not answer any additional questions about the news reports, directing reporters to read the statement that she released Tuesday. Her staff surrounded her and escorted her inside the home of the supporter who was hosting the event, pushing back reporters.

During her remarks, Bachmann did not mention the recent news coverage and instead focused primarily on a message of curbing federal spending and her opposition to raising the federal debt ceiling as she spoke to more than 50 voters in a shaded backyard about 20 miles south of Des Moines.

She opened her remarks by writing figures on a whiteboard on stage — showing what she said was the increase in the nation’s debt from when she first arrived in Congress ($8.67 trillion) to when President Obama took office ($10.62 trillion) to today ($14.3 trillion).

“We’ve seen one outrageous bill after another,” she said, listing the nation’s economic “bailout” package approved in 2008 and President Obama’s stimulus and healthcare programs as examples. “I have taken on a Republican president, my Republican leadership, because I put principle over party.”

I love my party; I’m proud to be a Republican, but I believe more in the principles of this country.”

The White House signaled Wednesday that President Obama could accept a short-term deal to raise the debt ceiling, but only if it appeared lawmakers were close to an agreement on a significant deficit reduction plan.

The hope of such a “grand bargain” was revived Tuesday by the so-called Gang of Six senators, who outlined a deal that would achieve nearly $4 trillion in deficit reduction in the next decade through spending cuts, entitlement reform and an overhaul of the tax code.

But Congress must act to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2, and the plan discussed in the Senate Tuesday was just a framework, not specific legislation that could take weeks to move through Congress.

Obama has repeatedly called for a debt limit increase that would carry the government through to 2013, arguing that the political environment for another increase would only grow more challenging with both the White House and Congress at stake in 2012.

Press secretary Jay Carney said at his daily briefing Wednesday that the president still believes that. But, “if both sides agree to something significant, we will support the measures needed to finalize the details of that.”

“We need to be sure that that fail-safe option is there, even as we pursue aggressively the possibility of doing something bigger,” Carney told reporters.

A plan based on a legislative maneuver devised by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell may be that fail-safe option, or perhaps it would be a simple extension for a matter of weeks or months that would allow time for the Gang of Six plan to move through. It is unclear, though, which if any plan could pass both the Democratic-controlled Senate and Republican-led House.

Obama reached out Tuesday night to House Speaker John Boehner, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and McConnell. Both parties’ leadership will be coming to the White House Wednesday for separate meetings.

—The House Ethics Committee on Wednesday announced the hiring of an outside counsel to review the case against Rep. Maxine Waters and misconduct allegations against the committee staffers involved in investigating the veteran Los Angeles congresswoman.

The panel voted unanimously Tuesday night to hire Washington attorney Billy Martin.

“Serious allegations have been made about the committee’s own conduct in this matter,” the panel’s Republican chairman Jo Bonner of Alabama and top Democrat, Linda Sanchez of California, said in a statement. “The committee has not taken these allegations lightly.”

Martin’s hiring comes days after the disclosure of internal committee documents by Politico alleging that staff members working on the Waters’ investigation had unauthorized contacts with Republican committee members and inappropriately withheld information from Waters’ defense team. Waters, a Democrat, contends the revelations showed she cannot get a fair hearing from the panel.

Once the committee receives the findings of the investigation of its own staff’s handling of the Waters’ case, it will then decide whether to pursue the case against Waters, one of Los Angeles’ most enduring African American politicians.

Waters has been accused of intervening on behalf of a bank where her husband owned stock and served on the board.

But the case against her, which grew out of an investigation that began two years ago, has been stalled by partisan strife within the committee, which operates largely in secret.

Earlier Wednesday, a coalition of government watchdog groups including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters called on the committee to bring in an outside counsel to complete the Waters’ probe to ensure the investigation’s credibility.

The committee hired outside counsels in 1988 and 1995 to investigate allegations of misconduct against House Speakers Jim Wright (D-Texas) and Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), saying it was necessary to assure the public that the probes would be fair and objective.

Waters, a high-ranking member of the House committee that oversees banking, came under scrutiny for calling then-Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson to set up a September 2008 meeting during the financial crisis between his staff and representatives of minority-owned banks. The Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent body that referred the case to the House Ethics Committee, said the discussion at the meeting “centered on a single bank, OneUnited.” Three months later, OneUnited received $12 million in federal bailout funds.

The House Ethics Committee also accused Waters’ chief of staff, Mikael Moore, who is also her grandson, of working to help the institution, even as Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), then chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, urged Waters to “stay out of it” because of her husband’s ties to the bank.

Waters, 72, has defended her actions, saying she didn’t benefit financially and was acting on behalf of minority banks in general, not just OneUnited. Waters’ husband, Sidney Williams, served on the OneUnited board from January 2004 to April 2008, and owned stock in the bank when Waters set up a September 2008 meeting between Treasury Department officials and representatives of minority-owned banks. The most recent financial disclosure report filed by Waters shows her husband’s investment in the bank was valued at between $100,000 and $250,000 last year.

Delays in the case have drawn criticism from watchdog groups. Waters was due to go on trial before fellow House members last fall, but the case was put off to allow for further investigation after a new piece of information was discovered during preparation of a witness for the hearing.

richard.simon@latimes.com

President Obama may be stuck in Washington during the debt ceiling debate, but that doesn’t mean he’s not reaching out to voters in key battleground states.

On Wednesday, the president will again sit down for interviews with local television reporters, something he’s done nearly a dozen times this year, according to a review of his daily schedule.

Aside from two weekend trips to Camp David, Obama hasn’t left the nation’s capital since June 30, just after he admonished Congress to get to work on a deal to avoid a potentially catastrophic default.

Though he’s been a regular television presence of late — with multiple news conferences and regular updates on negotiations from the White House — his press office is using these local interviews to maximize his exposure in the places they’re most focused on in 2012.

The latest round of interviewees includes the CBS affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, a key region in the all-important swing state. (Last weekend, the administration also leaked the announcement of Richard Cordray as the new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the city’s largest newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch).

Obama will also sit down with KMBC in Kansas City, Mo., a state he narrowly lost to John McCain in 2008.

The third interview is with KABC in Los Angeles. California has been reliably Democratic in presidential races for two decades. But it just so happens that GOP candidateMitt Romney is in the city Wednesday.

Overall the president has been quizzed by reporters from local affiliates in 16 states since February, most of them key electoral prizes in the 2012 campaign.

Four stations each from Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia have gotten these prized opportunities (the Virginia total includes an interview with Washington-based WRC-TV, which reaches millions of homes in the commonwealth).

Obama has done three interviews with North Carolina stations, and two each with outlets in Florida, Michigan, Texas and Wisconsin. The list also includes six interviews with Spanish-language outlets — and just one with a local Fox station, out of about three dozen interviews.

White House aides have regularly stressed the need for the president to utilize a variety of platforms to get his message out in this new media age. He recently held the first-ever White House Twitter town hall meeting.

These interviews, often heavily promoted as “exclusives” by the local stations, are seen as a particularly effective technique.

On Friday, the president will leave Washington briefly for a more traditional town hall meeting, on the campus of the University of Maryland just outside the district boundary.

After representatives of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the State Department and the Defense Department touted the success of U.S. counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan for more than an hour Wednesday, lawmakers aggressively questioned them about a subject that forced panelists into near silence: corruption in President Hamid Karzai’s government.
 

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, noted that in April 2009, Karzai issued a decree to release drug traffickers who were caught with more than 260 pounds of heroin.
 
“True or false?” Feinstein asked.
 
Thomas Harrigan, chief of operations for the DEA, paused and answered: “I believe they were pardoned.”

Feinstein, apparently dissatisfied, continued: “To what extent is the Afghan government involved in drug trafficking?”
 
“We’re concerned with levels of corruption … but the bottom line is we don’t know what we don’t know,” Harrigan responded.
 
Feinstein pressed Harrigan again: “You’re the head of the whole thing. Do you believe the Afghan government is involved in drug trafficking?”
 
“If the evidence is there, we’ll pursue it to the very end,” Harrigan said.

So while the officials testifying noted that after reaching a peak cultivation level of 193,000 hectares in 2007, Afghan poppy cultivation fell by more than one-third in 2009, they couldn’t offer satisfactory answers about corruption, an issue that may only be magnified as the United States begins its troop drawdown.

“Lack of Afghan political will might undermine international [counter-narcotics] efforts,” Feinstein said.

Six Republican presidential candidates participated in a tea-party sponsored debate on Twitter on Wednesday — and the results showed both the promise and the limits of the social medium.

The format allowed the six, Reps. Michele Bachmann and Thaddeus McCotter, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, ex-Sen. Rick Santorum, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, and businessman Herman Cain, to interact directly with supporters and detractors — and allowed their respective messages to be relayed and retweeted across the ever-expanding platform.

The downside: Each candidate had to compress those messages into 140-character bursts, which meant most could only address issues in a general way, using familiar bullet-style talking points.

Their responses frequently overlapped each other, resembling a virtual dinner party where all the guests shout at the same time.

It took awhile to get going, as well, as each candidate laboriously pounded out an abbreviated opening statement. Thirty-five minutes into the event, not a single question had been asked.

After that, the candidates answered a series of broad questions, largely signaling their similar positions with respect to repealing the Democratic healthcare overhaul, reducing regulatory burdens on business, and cutting government spending.

Most said that the U.S. had no business intervening in the ongoing Libyan conflict, with Bachmann suggesting that the administration, in formally recognizing a rebel group, could be aiding terrorists.

McCotter, a congressman from Michigan who recently entered the race, said that while he disagreed with the White House’ rationale for becoming involved, the U.S. could not simply walk away. Johnson, a libertarian, said he would pull forces out of Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

McCotter’s opening remarks illustrated the curious mix of the apocalyptic and the abbreviated that often marked the event:

“Our American Dream is endangered. America’s dismantling. Abroad, our troops fight terrorists tyrants; Iran goes nuclear,” he tweeted. “communist China claims the 21st Century. At home, R 14 mil unemployed; 30+ mil underemployed; inflation up; real wages down.”

There were few uncomfortable questions asked of the participants and little talk about the debt ceiling crisis in Washington except in general terms. Bachmann again restated her opposition to raising the limit, a sentiment shared by many of the attendees of the event.

And, again, the nature of the circumscribed replies engendered by Twitter allowed candidates to say as little as they wanted. Bachmann was asked about the sizable minority of American individuals and businesses that don’t pay taxes, and replied, “Simple. Fair. Flat. Everyone should pay something.”

The prompted a follow-up question: “Are you talking about Fair Tax or Flat Tax?” that drifted off into the digital ether, unanswered.

The most compelling aspect of the debate may have been the Twitter statistics: Bachmann’s name was mentioned the most often by Twitter participants (1,238), while Cain’s words were retweeted the most often (1,211).

According to the organizers, The Tea Party.net, there were 3,800 mentions of candidates and 4,500 retweets of their comments.

Neither Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty nor Ron Paul participated in the debate, but a new poll Wednesday showed that it may be in the best interests of candidates such as the ones who did attend to start distinguishing themselves from each other.

A poll by Public Policy Polling indicated that an “electability” gap is widening between Romney and the rest of the GOP field, with Romney the only Republican who is showing the potential to compete and perhaps beat President Obama.

Trying for a second day to brush aside questions about whether her migraine headaches would affect her ability to serve as president, Republican candidate Michele Bachmann released a letter from Congress’ attending physician stating that she was “overall in good general health.”

The letter released late Wednesday by Dr. Brian P. Monahan said that the Minnesota congresswoman had a “well-established diagnosis of migraine headaches with aura.” The letter said evaluations by Monahan’s office, as well as by a board-certified consulting neurologist, included brain scans and detailed lab work, which were normal.

“Your migraines occur infrequently and have known trigger factors of which you are aware and know how to avoid,” Monahan wrote in the letter to Bachmann. “When you do have a migraine, you are able to control it well with as-needed sumatriptan and ondansetron,” he said. The first medication is commonly used for treatment of migraines and the second lessens nausea, often a side effect of the headaches.

The physician added that Bachmann had not needed daily medications to manage the condition or medical attention from his office. When asked about the “trigger factors” for the headaches, Bachmann’s spokeswoman said in an email that “the letter speaks for itself.”

Bachmann’s health became a campaign issue this week after the Daily Caller published a story asserting that her migraines were occasionally incapacitating and have required hospitalization in some instances.

Bachmann’s strategy for dealing with media inquiries about her health varied during her campaign events Wednesday. After a “backyard chat” with voters in Norwalk, Iowa, on Wednesday morning, aides circled her as she greeted voters to form a protective barrier between Bachmann and reporters who approached to ask questions.

But after her spokeswoman said the candidate was taking questions only from voters, Bachmann interrupted to say she would address the matter.

“We were voting last night in Washington, D.C.; we got here at about 1 o’clock in the morning — I keep a very rigorous schedule,” she said. “I feel great. So we’ve answered that. What I’m here to talk about is the debt ceiling, and I think it’s been very clear that people in Iowa do not want us to continue government spending and increase the debt ceiling. Everywhere I go this is what people are talking about.”

As reporters tried to follow up, Bachmann aides and supporters surrounded her and rushed her up to the porch and inside her host’s home.

Later at Palmer’s Deli in West Des Moines — where she scratched her request for a spinach salad and instead ordered chili with “lots of onions” as well as a grilled “Hawaiian” sandwich with ham, bacon, cheese, pineapple and banana peppers — she demonstrated steely message discipline during a brief media conference in front of her campaign bus.

Asked whether she would release her medical records and how frequently her headaches occur, she noted that she had released a statement on the issue and immediately pivoted to the debt ceiling.

“The focus that I’ve had, again, is on the fact that as commander in chief I’m going to make sure that we get our fiscal house in order,” she said. “I will not be looking at raising the debt ceiling; that’s not what I’m hearing.”

When asked whether the migraine questions were becoming a distraction, she again turned to spending issues, waved goodbye and boarded her bus.

Presidential candidates have dealt with questions about their health in different manners over the years. After facing questions about his episodes of the skin cancer melanoma, 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain allowed a small group of reporters to review more than 1,200 pages of medical records from the previous eight years.

The campaign of President Obama, who smoked while he was running for president, released a one-page summary of his medical history from his doctor in May 2008.

Some of Bachmann’s admirers have already begun to express annoyance about the questions regarding the candidate’s health. In Norwalk, a man lectured reporters: “We don’t care about the migraines.”

After meeting Bachmann in West Des Moines, Maxine Maggard, 74, and her son Lance Maggard, 51, described the headache reports as just another “political ploy.”

“It would have no effect on how she would govern,” Lance Maggard said.

maeve.reston@latimes.com

As the debt ceiling debate enters its final stages, House Republicans face increasing political isolation in their opposition to sweeping budget reforms that President Obama has pushed for and polls show most Americans now prefer.

Republican resistance to compromise has turned a significant bloc of voters against them, according to several new polls, and has frustrated members of their own leadership as well as establishment GOP figures.

The fear among leading Republicans is that the party may lose an opportunity to lock in budget cuts that go beyond anything Democrats had previously been willing to consider. Five-term Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said he had never seen any spending reductions attached to a debt ceiling vote.

“It’s inconceivable,” Cole said. “Some of the members who haven’t been here don’t appreciate how much John Boehner has gotten for them.”

Boehner, an Ohio Republican and the House speaker, is leading an effort to try to prepare his restive House Republicans for a vote to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate have begun lining up behind a plan, offered by a bipartisan group known as the “Gang of Six,” to reduce the long-term deficit by nearly $4 trillion over the next decade. That plan would include about $1.2 trillion in additional tax revenues over the 10-year period that House Republicans have so far resisted.

The White House indicated for the first time Wednesday that Obama would be willing to accept a short-term stop-gap plan, but only for a few days while Congress worked out the legislative details of a larger fix.

Either way, House Republicans remain the key obstacle to passing a debt ceiling increase and avoiding a possible federal default after Aug. 2. Their strict adherence to a no-new-taxes pledge all but rules out consideration of a larger agreement on deficits and the debt ceiling. Their position is reinforced by the fear that “tea party” groups will mount primary challenges against many Republicans who vote for anything that could be characterized as a tax increase.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and other high-profile conservatives have amplified such worries by harshly denouncing compromise proposals. Bachmann, who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination, began airing a new television ad Wednesday in Iowa that reiterates her opposition to a debt limit increase.

Many House GOP members came into office with expectations that their new movement would quickly succeed in shrinking the government and halting the growth of debt — expectations many GOP leadership figures consider unrealistically high.

Boehner, at the center of negotiations with the White House over a sweeping deficit-reduction deal, has had to spend much of the last several days trying to get his members to lower their expectations and ease their hostility to a compromise.

On Tuesday, he arranged a vote designed to appeal to conservatives by linking a debt ceiling increase to tight spending caps. The vote passed the House but is considered unlikely to advance. Still, Boehner’s move gave conservatives a showcase vote while also nudging them off their rigid opposition to lifting the debt ceiling. That step could make it easier to approve a new measure in the days ahead.

But the task remains difficult among the large group of freshman who came to Washington determined to cut the size and scope of government — to “do something, not be something,” as they often say.

The new class of freshman and their conservative allies in the House are not as responsive to party leadership as earlier generations of lawmakers. They openly profess more allegiance to each other.

“I’m fired up more than I’ve ever been that we truly are going to change the way business is done,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), a rising star of the conservative flank, as the House passed the debt ceiling package he sponsored.

The party’s enthusiasm for budget cuts over compromise may leave Republicans with less than they could have otherwise achieved. Obama had proposed a 3-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, even carving into Medicare and Social Security while drawing opposition from within his own ranks.

Former Rep. Vin Weber, a Minnesota Republican first elected alongside Ronald Reagan, admires the principled approach in the new GOP lawmakers on the Hill. He just doesn’t know if it makes good politics.

“If it’s an all-or-nothing strategy, you’re likely to end up with nothing,” said Weber, now a GOP consultant. “The notion of just standing firm for your principle at the expense of achieving your goal is just wrong.”

A case in point is the back-up plan being crafted to raise the debt ceiling. It is far less ambitious than the Gang of Six plan, providing less than $1.5 trillion in cuts, a level unacceptable to many in the GOP.

It would still represent an unprecedented accomplishment for a GOP House speaker. Nonetheless, rank-and-file House Republicans are unlikely to embrace it.

In the end, it may be a negative reaction in financial markets, rather than political pressure, that spurs action.

Boehner’s “got a big problem,” Weber said. “You’ve got to make the case that the broad conservative principles can be served by this agreement.”

lisa.mascaro@latimes.com

As the debt ceiling debate enters its final stages, House Republicans face increasing political isolation in their opposition to sweeping budget reforms that President Obama has pushed for and polls show most Americans now prefer.

Republican resistance to compromise has turned a significant block of voters against them, according to several new polls, and has frustrated members of their own leadership as well as establishment GOP figures.

The fear among leading Republicans is that the party may lose an opportunity to lock in budget cuts that go beyond anything Democrats had previously been willing to consider. Five-term Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said he had never seen any spending reductions attached to a debt ceiling vote.

“It’s inconceivable,” Cole said. “Some of the members who haven’t been here don’t appreciate how much John Boehner has gotten for them.”

Boehner, an Ohio Republican and the House speaker, is leading an effort to try to prepare his restive House Republicans for a vote to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate have begun lining up behind a plan, offered by a bipartisan group known as the “Gang of Six,” to reduce the long-term deficit by nearly $4 trillion over the next decade. That plan would include about $1.2 trillion in additional tax revenues over the 10-year period that House Republicans have so far resisted.

The White House indicated for the first time Wednesday that Obama would be willing to accept a short-term stop-gap plan, but only for a few days while Congress worked out the legislative details of a larger fix.

Either way, House Republicans remain the key obstacle to passing a debt ceiling increase and avoiding a possible federal default after Aug. 2. Their strict adherence to a no-new-taxes pledge all but rules out consideration of a larger agreement on deficits and the debt ceiling. Their position is reinforced by the fear that “tea party” groups will mount primary challenges against many Republicans who vote for anything that could be characterized as a tax increase.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and other high-profile conservatives have amplified such worries by harshly denouncing compromise proposals. Bachmann, who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination, began airing a new television ad Wednesday in Iowa that reiterates her opposition to a debt limit increase.

Many House GOP members came into office with expectations that their new movement would quickly succeed in shrinking the government and halting the growth of debt — expectations many GOP leadership figures consider unrealistically high.

Boehner, at the center of negotiations with the White House over a sweeping deficit-reduction deal, has had to spend much of the last several days trying to get his members to lower their expectations and ease their hostility to a compromise.

On Tuesday, he arranged a vote designed to appeal to conservatives by linking a debt ceiling increase to tight spending caps. The vote passed the House but is considered unlikely to advance. Still, Boehner’s move gave conservatives a showcase vote while also nudging them off their rigid opposition to lifting the debt ceiling. That step could make it easier to approve a new measure in the days ahead.

But the task remains difficult among the large group of freshman who came to Washington determined to cut the size and scope of government — to “do something, not be something,” as they often say.

The new class of freshman and their conservative allies in the House are not as responsive to party leadership as earlier generations of lawmakers. They openly profess more allegiance to each other.

“I’m fired up more than I’ve ever been that we truly are going to change the way business is done,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), a rising star of the conservative flank, as the House passed the debt ceiling package he sponsored.

The party’s enthusiasm for budget cuts over compromise may leave Republicans with less than they could have otherwise achieved. Obama had proposed a 3-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, even carving into Medicare and Social Security while drawing opposition from within his own ranks.

Former Rep. Vin Weber, a Minnesota Republican first elected alongside Ronald Reagan, admires the principled approach in the new GOP lawmakers on the Hill. He just doesn’t know if it makes good politics.

“If it’s an all-or-nothing strategy, you’re likely to end up with nothing,” said Weber, now a GOP consultant. “The notion of just standing firm for your principle at the expense of achieving your goal is just wrong.”

A case in point is the back-up plan being crafted to raise the debt ceiling. It is far less ambitious than the Gang of Six plan, providing less than $1.5 trillion in cuts, a level unacceptable to many in the GOP.

It would still represent an unprecedented accomplishment for a GOP House speaker. Nonetheless, rank-and-file House Republicans are unlikely to embrace it.

In the end, it may be negative a reaction in financial markets, rather than political pressure, that spurs action.

Boehner’s “got a big problem,” Weber said. “You’ve got to make the case that the broad conservative principles can be served by this agreement.”

lisa.mascaro@latimes.com

Even as the House of Representatives was set to vote on the Republican “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan to raise the debt ceiling, House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that discussions continue on alternative proposals, which are coming into shape as the likely basis of a final deal.

The plan being voted on Tuesday afternoon would cut spending by $111 billion in 2012 and cap future outlays to 19.9% of the nation’s gross domestic output. It also would require that Congress send a balanced-budget constitutional amendment to the states for ratification, a lengthy process.

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• 

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Even if passed by the House, it’s likely to fail in the Democratic-controlled Senate. President Obama vowed to veto it even if the Senate did approve it, with aides derisively deeming it “dodge, duck and dismantle.”

Boehner dismissed criticism that the House was wasting time on a symbolic measure to appease the GOP’s conservative base, saying Tuesday that “anything’s possible.”

“I’m not going to give up hope on ‘Cut, Cap and Balance.’ But I do think it’s responsible for us to look at what Plan B would look like,” he said.

The Republican leadership “had a long conversation” Monday about that “Plan B” — a deal being worked out by Senate leaders, based on a legislative strategy devised by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.  

“There are a lot of options available to us. There have been no decisions made as of yet,” Boehner said, noting that no other plan has the required 218 votes to clear the chamber.

In the Senate, meanwhile, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) announced he was rejoining what had been called the “Gang of Six,” a bipartisan group that was developing its own deficit reduction plan, based on the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission created by Obama last year.

The group is proposing immediate cuts of $500 billion with a commitment of up to $4 trillion in cuts over the next decade.

Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

Bill Clinton says if he were president, he would not hesitate to raise the debt-ceiling himself under authority he argues is granted by the U.S. Constitution.

The two-term Democrat, who squared off with Republicans during two government shutdowns, contended in an interview Monday that the 14^th Amendment allows for the president to ensure the nation’s debt is covered. He said he would “force the courts to stop me.”

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“I think the Constitution is clear, and I think this idea that the Congress gets to vote twice on whether to pay for [expenditures] it has appropriated is crazy,” Clinton said in a talk with Joe Conason of the National Memo.

Whether the 14^th Amendment does, indeed, provide the president with the power to unilaterally raise–or ignore–the debt ceiling has been the subject of fierce debate among legal scholars. The language of Section 4 of the amendment states that the “validity of the public debt . . . shall not be questioned,” leading Clinton and some advocates to argue that the executive branch can take steps to ensure that the nation does not default on its obligations.

But others, including liberal scholar Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard Law School who once taught President Obama, contend that the amendment means that Congress, which holds the power of the purse, is under a constitutional obligation to cover its past appropriations by extending the nation’s borrowing authority.

“Nothing in the 14th Amendment or in any other constitutional provision suggests that the president may usurp legislative power to prevent a violation of the Constitution,” Tribe wrote in a recent op-ed in the New York Times.

But that is not a universal opinion. Other scholars argue that the debt ceiling itself is a violation of the 14^th Amendment because it allows Congress to play “political games” with the nation’s credit. And there are some, like Clinton, who believe that Obama could essentially declare a national emergency and raise the debt ceiling under Section 4 of the 14th amendment.

“The president can go on television on July 30 (or whatever the practically last possible moment is) and say that he has been advised by (some of) his lawyers that the Constitution is indeed not a suicide pact and that Section 4 does in fact authorize him to take whatever steps are necessary to leave the national debt ‘unquestioned,’” wrote Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, on the Balkinization legal blog.

The Obama administration has shown little willingness to consider that option, however. The top lawyer for the Treasury Department wrote the New York Times to say “the Constitution explicitly places the borrowing authority with Congress, not the president,” and that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner believes “Congress has an obligation to ensure we are able to honor the obligations of the United States.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney told USA Today on Tuesday that raising the debt ceiling unilaterally is “not an option.”

But that hasn’t stopped some conservatives from being fearful that the president could wind up doing it anyway if Congress fails to strike a deal before Aug. 2. One, Rep. Tim Scott of South Carolina, said at a “tea party” meeting earlier this month that such a move by Obama could be an “impeachable act.”

He said it would result “in the biggest war of all time.”

The prospects for a significant debt-ceiling compromise were revived Tuesday, as President Obama signaled possible support for a plan being offered by the so-called Gang of Six senators that includes both steep spending cuts and an overhaul of the tax code.

Making a surprise appearance in the White House press briefing room, Obama said the package crafted by the bipartisan group is “broadly consistent with the approach I’ve urged,” and called it a “very significant step” in the months-long negotiations over raising the nation’s debt ceiling.

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As the House began debating the GOP’s “cut, cap and balance” plan, Obama also told reporters that time is running out to reach a deal and avert what would be a catastrophic default.

“We don’t have any more time to engage in any more symbolic gestures,” the president said. “We don’t have any more time to posture.”

An executive summary of the Gang of Six plan outlines an immediate $500 billion in spending cuts, with a total of $3.7 trillion in deficit reduction in the next decade.

The proposal is based on recommendations from the bipartisan deficit commission that Obama commissioned last year, which he had initially been cool to.

It includes entitlement reforms — a major concern of Democrats — and “fundamental” tax reform, something that Republicans have been wary of throughout the debt negotiations.

What was significant was the support it received, conceptually, from so many Republicans in the Senate — including Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the third-ranking GOP member of the chamber.

“We now have a bipartisan group of senators who agree with that balanced approach and we’ve got the American people who agree with that balanced approach,” Obama said. “My hope … is that [congressional leaders] tomorrow are prepared to start talking turkey and actually getting down to the hard business of crafting a plan that can move this forward in time for the August 2nd deadline,”

Obama cautioned that he had not yet seen full details of the Gang of Six plan, and Press Secretary Jay Carney later said the White House would study the proposal to ensure it was consistent with the president’s principles.

The president said that following the House vote on its debt-ceiling plan, he would call House Speaker John Boehner to arrange for a new round of talks at the White House this week.

“There’s going to have to be a broader agreement on the part of all the leadership that we’re going to get this done in a serious way, and we’ve got a tight deadline to do it,” Obama said.

Meanwhile, a new poll indicates that Americans increasingly recognize the urgency of raising the debt ceiling. The NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that 55% of respondents said they believe that not raising the ceiling would be problematic, while just 18% say it would not be a real and serious problem.

Janice Hahn was officially sworn in as California’s newest member of Congress on Tuesday, one week after her special election victory in the state’s 36th U.S. House district.

The former Los Angeles councilwoman took the oath of office in the well of the House chamber, administered by Speaker John Boehner.

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“Americans are counting on us now more than ever to solve their problems, and working together with courage and in good faith, I believe we can and we will,” Hahn said in brief remarks to the chamber after being sworn in.

Hahn also noted the death of her mother just one day before her election, saying it was the first accomplishment she would not share with her.

Reps. Pete Stark (D-Fremont) and David Dreier (R-San Dimas), the senior Democrat and chair of the California Republican delegation, respectively, also delivered floor statements welcoming her to the 112th Congress.

Hahn, a Democrat in an area where her party enjoys an 18-point registration edge, defeated Republican Craig Huey, 54.6% to 45.4% on July 12.

She takes office as the debate over the debt ceiling nears a climactic moment. One of her first votes will be on the Republican “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan, which would cut spending by $111 billion in 2012 and cap future outlays to 19.9% of the nation’s gross domestic output.

Hahn replaces Jane Harman, who resigned in February to lead a Washington think tank, the Woodrow Wilson International Center. Harman returned to the House to witness Hahn’s swearing in.

With Hahn now seated, the balance of power in the chamber stands at 240 Republicans and 193 Democrats. There are two vacancies: the Nevada seat vacated by Republican Dean Heller, who resigned after being appointed to the Senate; and the New York seat formerly held by Democrat Anthony Weiner, who resigned over a sexting scandal.

Both seats will be filled during special elections on Sept. 13. Democrats have won the previous two special elections, including one for a seat that was previously held by a Republican.

President Obama endorsed a bill Tuesday that would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, a 15-year-old law denying federal benefits for same-sex couples. 

“The president has long called for a legislative repeal of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which continues to have a real impact on the lives of real people – our families, friends and neighbors,” said White House spokesman Shin Inouye.

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DOMA, passed by Congress in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton, defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman.

Inouye said the bill introduced by Sen.Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to repeal it would “uphold the principle that the federal government should not deny gay and lesbian couples the same rights and legal protections as straight couples.”

In the past, Obama has voiced support for civil unions for gay couples, but stopped short of supporting same-sex marriage, and instead has said his views are “evolving.”

Last year, Obama supported the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Earlier this year, the administration announced it would no longer defend DOMA in court, though it would continue to enforce the law unless it is repealed. But Obama supported the use of “discretion” by immigration officials in cases of married same-sex couples in which one spouse is undocumented.

Yet even as Feinstein spoke to a group of reporters about Wednesday’s Senate committee hearing on the repeal, Obama had not officially endorsed it.

Advocates of the repeal were elated upon the announcement.

“It is rare that a White House endorses a bill that has yet to pass first in either the Senate or the House,” said Rick Jacobs, chairman of the gay rights advocacy group Courage Campaign, in a statement. “His support makes clear to all Americans that the Defense of Marriage Act has no place in our society.”

Michele Bachmann says her migraine headaches are “easily controlled” with medication, that the episodes have not slowed her on the campaign trail and that they would not affect her ability to function as president should she be elected.

The presidential candidate read a prepared statement Tuesday afternoon while at a campaign stop in Aiken, S.C., to respond to a report by the Daily Caller that said the Minnesota congresswoman has been victimized by such intense migraines that they would periodically incapacitate her and require her to be hospitalized or seek medical care. The story said that Bachmann relied on medication to keep the migraines at bay.

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“Since entering the campaign, I have maintained a full schedule between my duties as a congresswoman and as a presidential candidate traveling across the nation to meet with voters in the key, early primary and caucus states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina,” Bachmann said. “I have prescription medication that I take whenever symptoms arise and they keep the migraines under control. Let me be abundantly clear: My ability to function effectively has never been impeded by migraines and will not affect my ability to serve as commander in chief.”

Bachmann noted that 30 million Americans suffer from migraines—and “while I appreciate the concern for me and my health, the greater concern should be the debate that is occurring in Washington over whether or not we will increase our debt, spending and taxes.”

Time magazine is reporting that after Bachmann delivered her statement, her aides aggressively prevented ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross from asking follow-up questions about Bachmann’s health.

Actor Martin Sheen, who portrayed a president on television and is the father of admitted drug user Charlie Sheen, testified before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday to ask Congress for continued support of drug courts, an alternative criminal justice program.

A drug court is a special docket that addresses the cases of nonviolent drug offenders. Members participate in substance abuse treatment programs – usually for at least one year – and are subject to random drug testing. There are currently more than 2,500 drug courts across the country, treating more than 120,000 Americans.

Drug court advocates contend that the courts help reduce recidivism, reducing the number of people in prison and returning law-abiding, tax-paying citizens to society. Drug court participants reported 25% less criminal activity and had 16% fewer arrests than comparable offenders not enrolled in drug courts, according to a Justice Department study.

“It’s a deeply personal [issue],” Sheen told reporters after the congressional hearing, adding that “it’s no secret I’ve been through a 12-step program.”
 
Sheen quickly reminded lawmakers that he’s no expert on the subject.
 
“Celebrity, to a greater or lesser degree, is often confused for credibility. For instance, I am not a former president of the United States,” Sheen said in his opening remarks, a reference to his role as President Jed Bartlet on the Emmy award-winning television show “The West Wing.” Sheen is also well-known for his critically acclaimed role in “Apocalypse Now,” a 1979 film about the war in Vietnam.
 
Despite his amateur political status, Sheen noted that he helped create a drug court in Berkeley in 1996. Graduates from that drug court helped establish sober-living houses in the area. Since then, he’s been an advocate for drug courts because “it is an extension of my work with the peace and social justice community,” he said.

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The hearing was called by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee’s crime and terrorism subcommittee.

Earlier Tuesday, Sheen joined fellow actor Matthew Perry and more than a dozen members of Congress to address hundreds of people in a rally in support of drug courts.
 
The advocates, holding up signs that said “Drug Courts $ave Lives,” pressed lawmakers to commit a minimum of $88.7 million in the 2012 budget toward drug courts, noting that the courts offer a significant return on investment. Every dollar spent on drug courts yields an average of $2 in savings for the criminal justice system.

Beyond the dollars and cents, drug courts have helped reclaim the lives of many who had succumbed to drug addiction.
 
“You have no idea how … far that money really does go,” one drug court graduate said at the rally.

Others charge that with a soaring national debt, drug courts should be funded by states.
 
“With out-of-control spending and surging public debt threatening our nation’s stability, increased federal funding of state and local courts should not be a priority,” David Muhlhausen, research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said before the subcommittee.

Adding some fire to his rivalry with his home-state colleague, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Tuesday that Michele Bachmann did not have the requisite executive experience to be elected president in 2012.

Though he has campaigned intensively here for many months, Pawlenty has been overshadowed recently by the Minnesota congresswoman, who has shot up in the polls. But Pawlenty warned against putting too much stock in Bachmann’s surge.

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“You can’t measure these things in one moment in time,” said Pawlenty, who served as Minnesota’s governor from 2002 until January. “It unfolds over a long period of time and many months. . . . The sentiment almost always shifts and the early sentiment is almost always wrong.”

After taking questions from Iowa voters in Marshalltown on Tuesday, Pawlenty directly questioned Bachmann’s credentials — stating that experience running “a large enterprise under difficult and challenging circumstances with a public component to it and driving it to results” was “a necessary prerequisite” to being president of the United States.

“She doesn’t have it,” Pawlenty said of that experience, speaking to reporters at the Marshalltown Public Library in the midst of his “Road to Results” RV tour through Iowa. 

The former governor predicted Bachmann would have difficulty getting elected: “I don’t think the country’s going to do that again. They learned the lesson of big speeches and no experience with Barack Obama and it didn’t work.”     

Amid questions about whether he would be able to raise money to support his campaign in the event of a weak finish in next month’s Ames Straw Poll, Pawlenty refuted the notion that this is a “make-or-break” moment for his campaign. He came in sixth of eight candidates in a recent Des Moines Register Iowa Poll, with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Bachmann leading the pack.

“Our goal between now and Ames, which is less than 30 days away, is to move from back of the pack to at least towards the front of the pack,” he said.

“We don’t have to win it, but we have to show good progress and I’m confident that we will.” At the same time, he said, if his campaign is “in last place or close to last place, then we’ll have think about it some more. But our goal in 30 days is to show significant progress.”

President Obama has endorsed a new bill by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California to repeal the federal Defense of Marriage Act, another step in what the president has termed his “evolving” views on same-sex marriage.

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“The president has long called for a legislative repeal of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which continues to have a real impact on the lives of real people — our families, friends and neighbors,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday. “He is proud to support the Respect for Marriage Act.”

Opponents of same-sex marriage said they were disappointed, but not surprised. The Defense of Marriage Act, passed by Congress in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton, defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman, denies federal benefits to same-sex married couples and allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted in other states.

“There is zero chance that Congress is going to repeal [the law] anytime soon, so this is primarily political theatrics on President Obama’s part,” said Maggie Gallagher, chairwoman of the National Organization for Marriage, an advocacy group that opposes gay marriage.

The announcement is one of the president’s bolder moves regarding gay marriage. In the past, he has voiced support for civil unions for gay couples, but stopped short of supporting same-sex marriage.

Last year, Obama supported the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Earlier this year, the administration announced it would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court, though the administration said it would continue to enforce the law unless it was repealed. But Obama subsequently supported the use of discretion by immigration officials in cases of married same-sex couples in which one spouse is undocumented.

Advocates of the repeal were elated at the news.

“It is rare that a White House endorses a bill that has yet to pass first in either the Senate or the House,” Rick Jacobs, chairman of the gay rights advocacy group Courage Campaign, said in a statement. “His support makes clear to all Americans that the Defense of Marriage Act has no place in our society.”

Despite Obama’s support, the bill faces long odds. With 27 co-sponsors, Feinstein has just fewer than half the votes for a filibuster-proof majority. And in the Republican-controlled House, Speaker John A. Boehner has taken on the responsibility of defending the act in court since the administration bowed out.

Feinstein plans to make the case that the law should be repealed because the issue should be left up to the states.

“Family law has traditionally been the preserve of state law. The single exception is the Defense of Marriage Act,” she said, speaking to reporters before Obama’s announcement.

“This is not a cause which we are going to drop,” Feinstein said. “We are not faint hearts about this.”

Supporters of the Defense of Marriage Act disagreed with her argument.

“The federal government doesn’t get to tell the states what their laws will be,” Gallagher said. “And the states don’t get to decide for Congress what Congress’ laws should be.”

christine.maiduc@latimes.com

The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a Republican-backed plan to extend the nation’s borrowing capacity in return for a cap on future government spending and a balanced budget amendment.

The vote on the so-called “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan was largely symbolic, called to give voice to the conservative majority that has refused to compromise with the White House on raising the debt ceiling. It passed 234-190, with Democrats largely united in opposition.

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The proposal would cut spending by $111 billion in 2012 and cap future outlays to 19.9% of the nation’s gross domestic output. It also would require that Congress send a balanced-budget constitutional amendment to the states for ratification, a lengthy process.

Some Republicans who voted no did so because they oppose any increase in the debt ceiling, even with spending cuts.

The plan is all but certain to stall in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and Obama has threatened to veto it should it reach his desk. But it now clears the way for a final round of negotiations aimed at settling on a consensus plan that could move through both chambers.

Earlier Tuesday, President Obama said he planned to call Speaker of the House John A Boehner (R-Ohio) after the vote to invite the parties back to the White House.

As the House debated its plan, the so-called Gang of Six senators outlined the framework of a new proposal that appeared to revive the chances of a “grand bargain” that would achieve significant deficit reduction through both spending cuts, entitlement reform and new revenues.

Obama signaled he could embrace such a plan, saying it matched his call for a “balanced approach.” Boehner countered that it resembled proposals that had been rejected during previous White House negotiations.

But Eric Cantor, the House majority leader who had pulled out of early White House negotiations in opposition to tax increases, said it “does seem to include some constructive ideas.”

Members of Congress are likely to remain in Washington through the weekend, with the clock ticking for legislation to raise the debt ceiling to be introduced so that it could pass by the Aug. 2 deadline issued by the Treasury Department.

A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that all parties would share in the blame if the debt ceiling is not raised and the government defaults — 39% say they’d blame Republicans in Congress, while 35% would blame Obama and Democrats in Congress, and another 17% said each side equally.

President Obama has threatened to veto GOP legislation the House will vote on Tuesday that would require Congress to pass a balanced budget amendment in exchange for raising the nation’s borrowing limit.

Just about two weeks remain before an Aug. 2 deadline to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit, and this week could largely be consumed by the GOP’s attempt to pass “cut, cap and balance” legislation that is being pushed by the party’s right flank, particularly the dozens of freshmen backed by the Tea Party.

The GOP bill requires two-thirds approval by both chambers. It is not likely to pass the Senate, where Democrats rule the majority.

The bill underscores the gaping divide between the two parties on how to resolve the debt ceiling debate, with Republicans resisting any effort to raise taxes and Democrats refusing to go forward with a plan that doesn’t include them.

In addition to requiring passage of a balanced budget amendment, the cut, cap and balance proposal would make $111 billion in cuts in fiscal 2012 and place caps on future spending.

Democrats say the bill would require drastic cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and they argue there is no need for a balanced budget amendment to get the federal government’s spending under control.

But the biggest divide is over taxes.

“Any deal of significant size has to be balanced because there are not enough spending cuts to make,” White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer told reporters in a conference call Monday afternoon. “There would need to be revenues, too.”

While debate on the balanced budget legislation takes place on the House floor, the two parties are working on a solution behind the scenes in a frantic effort to reach a deal to raise the debt ceiling before the Aug. 2 deadline.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., met with Obama on Sunday to try to hammer out a deal, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are working on their own plan to give Obama the authority to raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion.

That plan could include up to $1.5 trillion in cuts and would set up a commission that would come up with proposals to reduce the debt that the House and Senate would vote on later.

Reid announced Monday he plans to keep the Senate in session every single day, including weekends, until an agreement is reached.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has warned of dire economic consequences if the debt ceiling is not raised by the deadline. On Monday financial markets reflected growing panic that a deal is unreachable.

“Default would be a plague that would haunt our nation for years to come,” Reid said on the Senate floor. “Our credit rating would take years to rebuild. The country would never be the same.”

But even as the two sides try to scramble to put a compromise together, some in the GOP are seeking a path to deficit reduction that would make the kind of massive cuts Republicans pledged to make during the 2010 midterm elections.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., on Monday produced a 600-page plan that would cut the deficit by $9 trillion by slashing spending across the board and reforming entitlement spending. Coburn’s plan would also raise $1 trillion by getting rid of certain tax breaks, including those for the ethanol industry.

sferrechio@washingtonexaminer.com

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann signed a pledge Monday opposing any increase in the U.S. debt limit, after adding her own stipulation on health care.

The GOP presidential hopeful signed the “cut, cap and balance” pledge in Columbia after adding that Congress must cut off funding and repeal the health care overhaul passed last year.

“Obama added to our spending problem by adding trillions of dollars to our debt. Without the repeal of Obamacare, we can’t hope to have real economic reform,” she said. “I pledge to you as president of the United States of America, I will not rest until we repeal Obamacare. I have the resolve and titanium spine to do just that.”

Bachmann had avoided signing the pledge for several weeks, saying as late as last week that it didn’t go far enough.

The pledge signed by eight other Republican candidates says the federal government should not borrow more unless there are immediate spending cuts, enforceable spending caps, and Congress passes a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget.

Bachmann became the ninth GOP presidential candidate to sign. Five Republican governors have signed it, including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said last week that he won’t sign because he opposes such pledges in general.

The U.S. House is expected to vote on the tea party-backed “cut, cap and balance” plan on Tuesday, though it’s sure to stall in the Senate. Even if it manages to pass, Obama said he would veto it.

Under the measure, if all the conditions are met, the debt ceiling would be raised.

Bachmann said she signed the pledge to support U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint’s plan to fundamentally transform the way Washington spends. However, she said emphatically she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling even if the conditions were met.

“Even if we pass this bill, that doesn’t necessarily follow that we must increase the debt ceiling. I continue to stand strong and will vote no on increasing the debt ceiling,” she said. “We should never continue to spend and borrow money we don’t have.”

Bachmann’s spokeswoman said later Monday she was unsure whether Bachmann’s insistence she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling means she’d vote against the bill.

Bachmann hopes to make the vote. But she has several events in South Carolina on Tuesday. The last public event, a rally in Aiken, is scheduled to conclude about 2 p.m.

Earlier this month, DeMint said on CNN that he was disappointed in Bachmann for not signing. DeMint has turned the pledge into a threshold test for 2012 presidential hopefuls seeking his support. However, Bachmann said she felt “absolutely no pressure to sign.”

She attributed her delay in signing to needing to think it over thoroughly.

“I’ve always stood firm on these principles,” she said, adding she talked with DeMint as he drafted the plan. “I was in the midst of launching my announcement for presidency of the United States. I believe in actually reading the bills before we sign them. I read the bill. I talked this over. I thought about it quite a bit, and I believe that Jim is exactly right. We need a fundamental restructuring in the way Washington spends our money.”

Bachmann was set to talk later Monday with religious leaders gathering at a Renewal Project event. The group tries to keeps a low profile with meetings that are closed to the media.

“They want to be able to communicate, probably, in an unvarnished way,” said Oran Smith, who runs the Palmetto Family Council in Columbia.

Bachmann won’t be alone among Republicans addressing the group in Columbia. Freshman Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is speaking Monday night and presidential hopeful and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich will speak Tuesday.

The group held a similar gathering in Iowa in March attended by Bachmann, Gingrich and then-hopefuls Alabama Gov. Haley Barbour and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

___

Associated Press Writer Jim Davenport contributed to this article.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann signed a pledge Monday opposing any increase in the U.S. debt limit, after adding her own stipulation on health care.

The GOP presidential hopeful signed the “cut, cap and balance” pledge in Columbia after adding that Congress must cut off funding and repeal the health care overhaul passed last year.

“Obama added to our spending problem by adding trillions of dollars to our debt. Without the repeal of Obamacare, we can’t hope to have real economic reform,” she said. “I pledge to you as president of the United States of America, I will not rest until we repeal Obamacare. I have the resolve and titanium spine to do just that.”

Bachmann had avoided signing the pledge for several weeks, saying as late as last week that it didn’t go far enough.

The pledge signed by eight other Republican candidates says the federal government should not borrow more unless there are immediate spending cuts, enforceable spending caps, and Congress passes a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget.

Bachmann became the ninth GOP presidential candidate to sign. Five Republican governors have signed it, including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said last week that he won’t sign because he opposes such pledges in general.

The U.S. House is expected to vote on the tea party-backed “cut, cap and balance” plan on Tuesday, though it’s sure to stall in the Senate. Even if it manages to pass, Obama said he would veto it.

Under the measure, if all the conditions are met, the debt ceiling would be raised.

Bachmann said she signed the pledge to support U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint’s plan to fundamentally transform the way Washington spends. However, she said emphatically she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling even if the conditions were met.

“Even if we pass this bill, that doesn’t necessarily follow that we must increase the debt ceiling. I continue to stand strong and will vote no on increasing the debt ceiling,” she said. “We should never continue to spend and borrow money we don’t have.”

Bachmann’s spokeswoman said later Monday she was unsure whether Bachmann’s insistence she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling means she’d vote against the bill.

Bachmann hopes to make the vote. But she has several events in South Carolina on Tuesday. The last public event, a rally in Aiken, is scheduled to conclude about 2 p.m.

Earlier this month, DeMint said on CNN that he was disappointed in Bachmann for not signing. DeMint has turned the pledge into a threshold test for 2012 presidential hopefuls seeking his support. However, Bachmann said she felt “absolutely no pressure to sign.”

She attributed her delay in signing to needing to think it over thoroughly.

“I’ve always stood firm on these principles,” she said, adding she talked with DeMint as he drafted the plan. “I was in the midst of launching my announcement for presidency of the United States. I believe in actually reading the bills before we sign them. I read the bill. I talked this over. I thought about it quite a bit, and I believe that Jim is exactly right. We need a fundamental restructuring in the way Washington spends our money.”

Bachmann was set to talk later Monday with religious leaders gathering at a Renewal Project event. The group tries to keeps a low profile with meetings that are closed to the media.

“They want to be able to communicate, probably, in an unvarnished way,” said Oran Smith, who runs the Palmetto Family Council in Columbia.

Bachmann won’t be alone among Republicans addressing the group in Columbia. Freshman Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is speaking Monday night and presidential hopeful and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich will speak Tuesday.

The group held a similar gathering in Iowa in March attended by Bachmann, Gingrich and then-hopefuls Alabama Gov. Haley Barbour and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

___

Associated Press Writer Jim Davenport contributed to this article.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann signed a pledge Monday opposing any increase in the U.S. debt limit, after adding her own stipulation on health care.

The GOP presidential hopeful signed the “cut, cap and balance” pledge in Columbia after adding that Congress must cut off funding and repeal the health care overhaul passed last year.

“Obama added to our spending problem by adding trillions of dollars to our debt. Without the repeal of Obamacare, we can’t hope to have real economic reform,” she said. “I pledge to you as president of the United States of America, I will not rest until we repeal Obamacare. I have the resolve and titanium spine to do just that.”

Bachmann had avoided signing the pledge for several weeks, saying as late as last week that it didn’t go far enough.

The pledge signed by eight other Republican candidates says the federal government should not borrow more unless there are immediate spending cuts, enforceable spending caps, and Congress passes a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget.

Bachmann became the ninth GOP presidential candidate to sign. Five Republican governors have signed it, including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said last week that he won’t sign because he opposes such pledges in general.

The U.S. House is expected to vote on the tea party-backed “cut, cap and balance” plan on Tuesday, though it’s sure to stall in the Senate. Even if it manages to pass, Obama said he would veto it.

Under the measure, if all the conditions are met, the debt ceiling would be raised.

Bachmann said she signed the pledge to support U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint’s plan to fundamentally transform the way Washington spends. However, she said emphatically she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling even if the conditions were met.

“Even if we pass this bill, that doesn’t necessarily follow that we must increase the debt ceiling. I continue to stand strong and will vote no on increasing the debt ceiling,” she said. “We should never continue to spend and borrow money we don’t have.”

Bachmann’s spokeswoman said later Monday she was unsure whether Bachmann’s insistence she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling means she’d vote against the bill.

Bachmann hopes to make the vote. But she has several events in South Carolina on Tuesday. The last public event, a rally in Aiken, is scheduled to conclude about 2 p.m.

Earlier this month, DeMint said on CNN that he was disappointed in Bachmann for not signing. DeMint has turned the pledge into a threshold test for 2012 presidential hopefuls seeking his support. However, Bachmann said she felt “absolutely no pressure to sign.”

She attributed her delay in signing to needing to think it over thoroughly.

“I’ve always stood firm on these principles,” she said, adding she talked with DeMint as he drafted the plan. “I was in the midst of launching my announcement for presidency of the United States. I believe in actually reading the bills before we sign them. I read the bill. I talked this over. I thought about it quite a bit, and I believe that Jim is exactly right. We need a fundamental restructuring in the way Washington spends our money.”

Bachmann was set to talk later Monday with religious leaders gathering at a Renewal Project event. The group tries to keeps a low profile with meetings that are closed to the media.

“They want to be able to communicate, probably, in an unvarnished way,” said Oran Smith, who runs the Palmetto Family Council in Columbia.

Bachmann won’t be alone among Republicans addressing the group in Columbia. Freshman Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is speaking Monday night and presidential hopeful and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich will speak Tuesday.

The group held a similar gathering in Iowa in March attended by Bachmann, Gingrich and then-hopefuls Alabama Gov. Haley Barbour and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

___

Associated Press Writer Jim Davenport contributed to this article.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann signed a pledge Monday opposing any increase in the U.S. debt limit, after adding her own stipulation on health care.

The GOP presidential hopeful signed the “cut, cap and balance” pledge in Columbia after adding that Congress must cut off funding and repeal the health care overhaul passed last year.

“Obama added to our spending problem by adding trillions of dollars to our debt. Without the repeal of Obamacare, we can’t hope to have real economic reform,” she said. “I pledge to you as president of the United States of America, I will not rest until we repeal Obamacare. I have the resolve and titanium spine to do just that.”

Bachmann had avoided signing the pledge for several weeks, saying as late as last week that it didn’t go far enough.

The pledge signed by eight other Republican candidates says the federal government should not borrow more unless there are immediate spending cuts, enforceable spending caps, and Congress passes a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget.

Bachmann became the ninth GOP presidential candidate to sign. Five Republican governors have signed it, including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said last week that he won’t sign because he opposes such pledges in general.

The U.S. House is expected to vote on the tea party-backed “cut, cap and balance” plan on Tuesday, though it’s sure to stall in the Senate. Even if it manages to pass, Obama said he would veto it.

Under the measure, if all the conditions are met, the debt ceiling would be raised.

Bachmann said she signed the pledge to support U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint’s plan to fundamentally transform the way Washington spends. However, she said emphatically she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling even if the conditions were met.

“Even if we pass this bill, that doesn’t necessarily follow that we must increase the debt ceiling. I continue to stand strong and will vote no on increasing the debt ceiling,” she said. “We should never continue to spend and borrow money we don’t have.”

Bachmann’s spokeswoman said later Monday she was unsure whether Bachmann’s insistence she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling means she’d vote against the bill.

Bachmann hopes to make the vote. But she has several events in South Carolina on Tuesday. The last public event, a rally in Aiken, is scheduled to conclude about 2 p.m.

Earlier this month, DeMint said on CNN that he was disappointed in Bachmann for not signing. DeMint has turned the pledge into a threshold test for 2012 presidential hopefuls seeking his support. However, Bachmann said she felt “absolutely no pressure to sign.”

She attributed her delay in signing to needing to think it over thoroughly.

“I’ve always stood firm on these principles,” she said, adding she talked with DeMint as he drafted the plan. “I was in the midst of launching my announcement for presidency of the United States. I believe in actually reading the bills before we sign them. I read the bill. I talked this over. I thought about it quite a bit, and I believe that Jim is exactly right. We need a fundamental restructuring in the way Washington spends our money.”

Bachmann was set to talk later Monday with religious leaders gathering at a Renewal Project event. The group tries to keeps a low profile with meetings that are closed to the media.

“They want to be able to communicate, probably, in an unvarnished way,” said Oran Smith, who runs the Palmetto Family Council in Columbia.

Bachmann won’t be alone among Republicans addressing the group in Columbia. Freshman Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is speaking Monday night and presidential hopeful and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich will speak Tuesday.

The group held a similar gathering in Iowa in March attended by Bachmann, Gingrich and then-hopefuls Alabama Gov. Haley Barbour and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

___

Associated Press Writer Jim Davenport contributed to this article.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann signed a pledge Monday opposing any increase in the U.S. debt limit, after adding her own stipulation on health care.

The GOP presidential hopeful signed the “cut, cap and balance” pledge in Columbia after adding that Congress must cut off funding and repeal the health care overhaul passed last year.

“Obama added to our spending problem by adding trillions of dollars to our debt. Without the repeal of Obamacare, we can’t hope to have real economic reform,” she said. “I pledge to you as president of the United States of America, I will not rest until we repeal Obamacare. I have the resolve and titanium spine to do just that.”

Bachmann had avoided signing the pledge for several weeks, saying as late as last week that it didn’t go far enough.

The pledge signed by eight other Republican candidates says the federal government should not borrow more unless there are immediate spending cuts, enforceable spending caps, and Congress passes a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget.

Bachmann became the ninth GOP presidential candidate to sign. Five Republican governors have signed it, including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said last week that he won’t sign because he opposes such pledges in general.

The U.S. House is expected to vote on the tea party-backed “cut, cap and balance” plan on Tuesday, though it’s sure to stall in the Senate. Even if it manages to pass, Obama said he would veto it.

Under the measure, if all the conditions are met, the debt ceiling would be raised.

Bachmann said she signed the pledge to support U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint’s plan to fundamentally transform the way Washington spends. However, she said emphatically she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling even if the conditions were met.

“Even if we pass this bill, that doesn’t necessarily follow that we must increase the debt ceiling. I continue to stand strong and will vote no on increasing the debt ceiling,” she said. “We should never continue to spend and borrow money we don’t have.”

Bachmann’s spokeswoman said later Monday she was unsure whether Bachmann’s insistence she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling means she’d vote against the bill.

Bachmann hopes to make the vote. But she has several events in South Carolina on Tuesday. The last public event, a rally in Aiken, is scheduled to conclude about 2 p.m.

Earlier this month, DeMint said on CNN that he was disappointed in Bachmann for not signing. DeMint has turned the pledge into a threshold test for 2012 presidential hopefuls seeking his support. However, Bachmann said she felt “absolutely no pressure to sign.”

She attributed her delay in signing to needing to think it over thoroughly.

“I’ve always stood firm on these principles,” she said, adding she talked with DeMint as he drafted the plan. “I was in the midst of launching my announcement for presidency of the United States. I believe in actually reading the bills before we sign them. I read the bill. I talked this over. I thought about it quite a bit, and I believe that Jim is exactly right. We need a fundamental restructuring in the way Washington spends our money.”

Bachmann was set to talk later Monday with religious leaders gathering at a Renewal Project event. The group tries to keeps a low profile with meetings that are closed to the media.

“They want to be able to communicate, probably, in an unvarnished way,” said Oran Smith, who runs the Palmetto Family Council in Columbia.

Bachmann won’t be alone among Republicans addressing the group in Columbia. Freshman Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is speaking Monday night and presidential hopeful and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich will speak Tuesday.

The group held a similar gathering in Iowa in March attended by Bachmann, Gingrich and then-hopefuls Alabama Gov. Haley Barbour and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

___

Associated Press Writer Jim Davenport contributed to this article.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann signed a pledge Monday opposing any increase in the U.S. debt limit, after adding her own stipulation on health care.

The GOP presidential hopeful signed the “cut, cap and balance” pledge in Columbia after adding that Congress must cut off funding and repeal the health care overhaul passed last year.

“Obama added to our spending problem by adding trillions of dollars to our debt. Without the repeal of Obamacare, we can’t hope to have real economic reform,” she said. “I pledge to you as president of the United States of America, I will not rest until we repeal Obamacare. I have the resolve and titanium spine to do just that.”

Bachmann had avoided signing the pledge for several weeks, saying as late as last week that it didn’t go far enough.

The pledge signed by eight other Republican candidates says the federal government should not borrow more unless there are immediate spending cuts, enforceable spending caps, and Congress passes a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget.

Bachmann became the ninth GOP presidential candidate to sign. Five Republican governors have signed it, including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said last week that he won’t sign because he opposes such pledges in general.

The U.S. House is expected to vote on the tea party-backed “cut, cap and balance” plan on Tuesday, though it’s sure to stall in the Senate. Even if it manages to pass, Obama said he would veto it.

Under the measure, if all the conditions are met, the debt ceiling would be raised.

Bachmann said she signed the pledge to support U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint’s plan to fundamentally transform the way Washington spends. However, she said emphatically she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling even if the conditions were met.

“Even if we pass this bill, that doesn’t necessarily follow that we must increase the debt ceiling. I continue to stand strong and will vote no on increasing the debt ceiling,” she said. “We should never continue to spend and borrow money we don’t have.”

Bachmann’s spokeswoman said later Monday she was unsure whether Bachmann’s insistence she wouldn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling means she’d vote against the bill.

Bachmann hopes to make the vote. But she has several events in South Carolina on Tuesday. The last public event, a rally in Aiken, is scheduled to conclude about 2 p.m.

Earlier this month, DeMint said on CNN that he was disappointed in Bachmann for not signing. DeMint has turned the pledge into a threshold test for 2012 presidential hopefuls seeking his support. However, Bachmann said she felt “absolutely no pressure to sign.”

She attributed her delay in signing to needing to think it over thoroughly.

“I’ve always stood firm on these principles,” she said, adding she talked with DeMint as he drafted the plan. “I was in the midst of launching my announcement for presidency of the United States. I believe in actually reading the bills before we sign them. I read the bill. I talked this over. I thought about it quite a bit, and I believe that Jim is exactly right. We need a fundamental restructuring in the way Washington spends our money.”

Bachmann was set to talk later Monday with religious leaders gathering at a Renewal Project event. The group tries to keeps a low profile with meetings that are closed to the media.

“They want to be able to communicate, probably, in an unvarnished way,” said Oran Smith, who runs the Palmetto Family Council in Columbia.

Bachmann won’t be alone among Republicans addressing the group in Columbia. Freshman Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is speaking Monday night and presidential hopeful and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich will speak Tuesday.

The group held a similar gathering in Iowa in March attended by Bachmann, Gingrich and then-hopefuls Alabama Gov. Haley Barbour and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

___

Associated Press Writer Jim Davenport contributed to this article.

With the deadline swiftly approaching for a deal to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis, the volume on Capitol Hill is about to be cranked up to “11.”

House Republicans are pushing ahead with votes this week on a proposal backed by chamber conservatives that would raise the debt ceiling the required $2.4 trillion but would ultimately cap government spending at 18% of the nation’s gross domestic product, require Congress to pass a balanced budget each year, and slash more than $110 billion from the 2012 fiscal year budget.

The measure, which may pass the House by a majority vote but is expected to go nowhere after that, is either a final, defiant — albeit symbolic — stand by House Republicans before acceding to a compromise on the debt ceiling or a formal show of intransigence that illustrates how difficult it will be for the House to sign off on any deal that includes President Obama’s signature.

The White House Monday wasted no time twisting the dial, with the president threatening to veto the House bill, even though there’s little chance it can pass the Senate.

At any rate, it appears that with the Aug. 2 deadline for a debt-limit increase looming, things will slow down for a bit before they speed up. Republican leaders in the House and Senate have indicated that they want to fold in time for a floor debate in order to mollify conservatives on both ends of the Capitol, who are certain to squawk long and hard about any final deal that does not include the kind of significant spending cuts they seek.

That doesn’t mean both sides have stopped talking. Senate leaders are working on a budget proposal that would cut $1.5 trillion, while other reports have House Speaker John Boehner and the White House still working on some version of the “grand bargain” that could wipe out $4 trillion or more from the budget over the next decade but would also likely include some elements of entitlement-program reform as well as a some accord on modifying the tax code.

Then there is the in-case-of-emergency-break-glass option that was floated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last week, which involves a dose of procedural flim-flammery that would provide the White House with a debt-ceiling increase to stave off economic calamity while handing the GOP some political cover by voting on the record against the increases.

But the attention, at least for the next couple of days, will fall on the House. The proposal being offered would force federal spending to fall below 20% of GDP by 2021, which would require massive spending cuts, likely including the Pentagon or entitlement programs or both. (Federal spending currently accounts for about one-quarter of GDP.)

It would also require Congress to pass a budget matching revenues with outlays. Because that would require altering the Constitution, that proposal would need the vote of two-thirds of both chambers. Those votes don’t exist in the Senate. Republicans came within one vote of a balanced-budget amendment in 1995. Such a constitutional amendment would then would require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Although the vote will serve as an attempt to assuage House conservatives (and perhaps show them the limits of the support on the Hill for their proposals), Democratic groups are eager to use it to reinforce their running claims that the GOP is out to radically alter Medicare, a message many feared was growing muddled as Obama last week showed some willingness to also consider changes to the popular program.

“Let’s let the American people decide,” Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the head of the Republican Study Committee, a House GOP policy arm, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Do they want something common sense as cutting spending, capping the growth in government and requiring a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution?”

The American people, however, seem to be registering their disapproval with the GOP, according to a new CBS poll that showed just 21% of those surveyed approved of Republicans’ handling of the debt-limit crisis, compared with 43% approving of Obama’s stance.

Eric Cantor, the House majority leader and a key figure in the debt talks, made clear in an Op-Ed article Monday in his hometown paper in Richmond, Va., that he’s solidly behind the plan, which has support from “tea party”-backed freshmen legislators.

It remains uncertain what kind of ultimate compromise on the debt-ceiling Cantor would support. But observers hoping that this week would bring some relief from the histrionics of last week are likely to be disappointed.

Rick Perry’s flirtation with a presidential run may be nearing an end.

The Texas governor told the Des Moines Register — the largest newspaper in the leadoff nominating state — that he’s two to three weeks away from making a decision.

That timeframe puts him on track for an announcement in the first weeks of August, a time when the announced Republican contenders will be barnstorming Iowa ahead of the Ames Straw Poll, one of the nominating race’s major cattle calls.

It also promises to draw even more attention to an Aug. 6 prayer gathering that Perry is hosting at Houston’s Reliant Stadium, called: “The Response: a call to prayer for a nation in crisis.”

“As an elected leader, I’m all too aware of government’s limitations when it comes to fixing things that are spiritual in nature. That’s where prayer comes in, and we need it more than ever,” Perry says in a video posted to the event’s website.

In the Des Moines Register interview, Perry claims that running for president “is what I’ve been called to do,” and “what America needs.”

Perry’s entrance would undeniably scramble the GOP race. Rep. Michele Bachmann has emerged in the past month as the most prominent challenger to Mitt Romney’s status as national front-runner, owing to her connection with “tea party” activists and social conservatives.

Perry’s appeal is with just that faction of the GOP base, and unlike Bachmann — or any of the candidates, for that matter — he has a 10-year record in an executive office and the launching pad of one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing states.

“If anybody tries to argue the fact that we have not created an economic juggernaut in the state of Texas, then they’re either naive, they have a political agenda, or they’re just not paying attention,” Perry told the Register, hinting at what would be the foundation of his campaign’s message.

In jumping into the campaign pool, only Sarah Palin could make a bigger splash. Perry arguably has as close a political connection to Palin as anyone short of John McCain, who led the ticket when they ran for the White House in 2008. One of her first campaign events after the 2008 election was on Perry’s behalf, as he faced a primary challenge in his reelection bid from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Palin hasn’t offered the same kind of guidance as to when she might make a decision on running, however. By most accounts, she has not been taking the kind of preparatory steps that Perry is. Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad told the Register he has spoken with Perry, and expects him to visit the state soon. Key figures in New Hampshire, the first primary state, have also said Perry has reached out to them.

With less than a month to go before the Iowa straw poll, it has become make-or-break time for Tim Pawlenty. And he is quickening his pace accordingly.

Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor who has seen his months-long presidential bid gain little traction with Republican voters, has the most aggressive schedule this week of any GOP contender—and all of it will take place in Iowa, the state that has become his proving ground.

The straw poll, an Iowa tradition that is more of a test of candidate’s viability than a coronation, takes place in Ames on Aug. 13. A debate will be held in Ames two days earlier.

While other candidates will fan out beyond Iowa this week, the man they call T-Paw is scheduled for no fewer than 12 events across the Hawkeye State, mostly in the central region not far from the site of the poll.

He’s facing two formidable pressures: time and money. While Pawlenty has resisted saying that he needs to win the straw poll to establish his bona fides going forward, he has to show Iowans (and donors and the media) that he has at least a decent chance to win next February. Anything less than that and the vultures start locking in.

Pawlenty raised $4.3 million last quarter and has about $1.4 million to spend in advance of Ames. But he must be able to cover his traveling expenses, pay his staff (which ran up a $600,000 tab last quarter), and stay on the air with ads in the hope that a strong showing in the poll can propel him forward.

Time is running out in another way, as well. Each day brings the possibility that either Texas Gov. Rick Perry or Sarah Palin could enter the race, potentially draining conservative support—and money—away from the affable Minnesotan. Either Perry or Palin would immediately become a strong contender to win the Iowa caucuses.

Pawlenty’s plan all along has been to present himself as the experienced conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, but that strategy has been upended by the attention generated in Iowa by Rep. Michele Bachmann’s candidacy.

Pawlenty’s campaign may be counting on voters to move in his direction as Bachmann’s record falls under increasing scrutiny. And unlike Bachmann, who holds a day job in the House of Representatives, Pawlenty can dedicate himself full-time to campaigning.

The Republican National Committee is charging President Obama with “an apparent crime” in connection with a contest conducted by his campaign, a sensational claim that the White House argues is completely without merit.

If this were Clue, the GOP’s argument is this: Obama did it in the Map Room with the video camera.

Last month, the Obama campaign released a video (see below) featuring the president inviting his supporters to enter a raffle for a chance to have dinner with him and Vice President Joe Biden.

The video, the White House confirms, was filmed in the Map Room of the White House, and all related costs were paid by the Democratic National Committee.

RNC chairman Reince Priebus claims that the production runs afoul of a criminal statute that makes it “unlawful for an individual who is an officer or employee of the federal government … to solicit or receive a donation of money … while in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties.”

In a letter to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., Priebus asks the Department of Justice “to investigate this possible criminal act by the president of the United States.”

The White House says the Map Room, located on the ground level of the presidential mansion, is part of the “residence,” and points to a 1979 finding by the Office of Legal Council saying that “areas within the discrete private residence area … may therefore reasonably be seen to fall outside the reach of the statute.”

The RNC counters that the room “has been used for a myriad of official functions,” the first of which under Obama was the administration of a re-do of his oath of office one day after his public inauguration, when he and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. garbled the wording.

But most importantly, the White House also points out that Obama never in the video solicits a single penny in contributions. The contest, which has since ended, suggested supporters give $5 to enter, but a disclaimer noted that “no purchase, payment or contribution [is] necessary to win.”

“This is a disgraceful, desperate and politically-motivated attempt at getting headlines by a Republican Party awash in special interest cash which is fighting to preserve tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires at the expense of seniors,” DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse said in a statement.

A White House spokesman also provided links to paid campaign ads from past presidents filmed on the White House grounds.

The RNC’s request is the latest attempt by Republicans to kick up dust over presidential fundraising. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) has asked the White House and DNC to turn over documents to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee by next week in connection to the same video.

The Justice Department is trying to protect its political appointees from the Fast and Furious scandal by concealing an internal “smoking gun” report and other documents that acknowledge the role top officials played in the program that allowed firearms to flow illegally into Mexico, according to the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Kenneth E. Melson, the ATF’s acting director, also told congressional investigators this month that the affidavits prepared to obtain wiretaps used in the ill-fated operation were inconsistent with Justice Department officials’ public statements about the program. Justice Department officials advised him not to raise his concerns with Congress about “institutional problems” with the Fast and Furious operation, Melson said.

“It was very frustrating to all of us,” Melson told congressional investigators in a private meeting over the Fourth of July holiday, “and it appears thoroughly to us that the department is really trying to figure out a way to push the information away from their political appointees at the department.”

Not only was the department slow to react, Melson said, but Justice Department officials indicated they did not want him to cooperate with Congress.

A transcript of his comments was released Monday by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Melson said he wasn’t attempting to shield his agency from its share of the blame. He acknowledged an instance in which his agents failed to intercept high-powered weapons when they could have.

“The deputy attorney general’s office wasn’t very happy with us” at the ATF, Melson said, “because they thought this was an admission that there were mistakes made. Well, there were some mistakes made.”

Justice Department officials denied they were stonewalling the congressional investigation. They said they were cooperating and had been providing thousands of pages of documents and other material to investigators.

“Any notion that the department has failed to cooperate with the investigation is simply not based in fact,” said Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman. She added that the department’s inspector general’s office was reviewing the Fast and Furious operation.

“The department, like the committee, is interested in determining whether Operation Fast and Furious was appropriately handled,” Schmaler said.

The intent of Fast and Furious was to allow illegal straw purchasers to buy guns so ATF agents could follow the weapons and ferret out gun-smuggling routes into Mexico. But many of the approximately 1,700 weapons eluded tracing — some even before they were shipped over the border.

Nearly 200 of the weapons were later found at crime scenes in Mexico, and two were recovered at the scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent’s slaying in Arizona in December.

Melson said the Justice Department repeatedly thwarted his attempts to tell investigators about the failures of Fast and Furious, which was run out of the ATF’s Phoenix field office. When the ATF reassigned managers in Phoenix, he said, “the department resisted” his offer to tell Congress about the changes. Melson said he was told not to issue any news releases about Fast and Furious and was instructed not to brief rank-and-file ATF agents about the growing scandal.

When Grassley sought to meet with Melson this year, the Justice Department blocked that interview too, Melson said. “This is really just poking [Grassley] in the eye,” Melson said he told Justice Department officials. “He’s going to get it through the back door anyway, so why are we aggravating this situation?”

Melson said he felt “very torn” when he learned after the operation went awry that some of the Mexican drug cartel leaders targeted in the program were paid informants for the FBI.

“Let me say that I am frustrated and disappointed in the way the whole thing has been handled, unfortunately,” he said.

richard.serrano@latimes.com

Sarah Palin’s documentary was defeated this weekend — by a kid wizard in glasses.

In fairness to Palin and the hagiographical film titled “The Undefeated,” it was an uphill climb for any movie this weekend, as the final chapter of the Harry Potter saga smashed all comers on its way to a weekend box office record. (Winnie the Pooh had the honey-glazed stuffing beaten out of him, for example.)

The Palin film, which chronicles her political rise in Alaska, opened in 10 markets this weekend (including a screening in Orange County that was attended by empty seats) and took in estimates say between $65,000 and $70,000.

By contrast, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” raked in $168.6 million, almost enough to cover the proposed increase in the federal debt ceiling.

That’s not a fair comparison, of course. Potter opened in 4,375 theaters, and according to Box Office Mojo, that amounted to more than $38,000 per theater. “The Undefeated” averaged $6,700 per cinema.

The Times’ “24 Frames” blog calls that a “small number for a limited-release movie.” The Hollywood Reporter termed the showing “so-so.”

The Atlantic, which brought in its own box office expert, labeled the film “a bust” and compared it unfavorably to other politically charged movies such as “Fahrenheit 9/11″ and “The Passion of the Christ.”

The film’s per-theater tally tracks very closely to that of “Atlas Shrugged,” an adaptation of the Ayn Rand novel that was marketed in similar conservative circles earlier this year. Does that mean that, like Palin herself, “The Undefeated” may hold strong appeal to the base, but little beyond it?

The film’s director, Stephen Bannon, called the opening a success and said the movie is relying on social media and word-of-mouth to generate buzz. He also said the movie played in small and large theaters, skewing its numbers downward.

“This is a documentary opening against ‘Harry Potter’ on the toughest weekend of the year. We had small numbers but only in small theaters. In bigger markets, like Orange County, we’ll do $12,000 per screen,” Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter.

“We are extremely pleased with the audience reaction, which has been over-the-top enthusiastic and very passionate, including standing ovations at most screenings,” said Trevor Drinkwater, the chief executive officer of ARC Entertainment, the film’s distributor, in a statement. “We expect word-of-mouth to keep ticket sales strong and we will definitely expand the film to a wider national audience. With merely three weeks of preparation and a virtually non-existent traditional advertising spend, the film did exceptionally well.”

ARC said details of a wider release would be announced soon. The initial run included cities located in states with large swaths of conservative residents such as Indianapolis, Houston, Oklahoma City, Orlando and Phoenix. But the film is likely to run up against the mystical Potter steamroller every step of the way.

Of course the real test of any movie is not its gross, but how much money its producers make. Those figures aren’t likely to be available. To that end, the movie’s backers suggest that “The Undefeated” is already a hit because of its low production cost and small marketing budget. A social media campaign saved the film’s promoters “millions” in promotion and advertising, Bannon said.

“This film will find its audience because of its appeal and our savvy distribution partners,” he said.

That could be the real box office magic.

Relying overwhelmingly on people making the maximum allowable contributions, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney amassed an $18 million haul that dwarfs other Republican presidential candidates, second-quarter financial disclosures released Friday show.

Yet two firebrands mounted last-minute campaigns that seemed to effortlessly raise funds in small increments in weeks while requiring little spending, leaving significant amounts stored away as candidates prepare for the Iowa straw poll next month.

Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Republican from Texas, raised $4.5 million and has $3 million on hand. Rep. Michele Bachmann, his third-term colleague in Congress,  from Minnesota, focusing all resources on a newly created presidential campaign rather than her House seat, was in a similar position.

Though former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s haul of $4.5 million beat that of Mrs. Bachmann, he seemed to use up most of the take as soon as it reached his bank account, leaving him with less money heading into the third quarter.

Early financial measures of support for other official Republican candidates also were not bright.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum had a poor showing of $580,000 raised and $230,000 in the bank. He focused much of his spending on Iowa. Wealthy businessman Herman Cain raised $2 million, but spent nearly all of it, and loaned his campaign half a million dollars in personal funds to have cash on hand.

The flailing campaign of onetime House speaker Newt Gingrich raised $2 million, but spent nearly all of it, and closes the quarter heavily in debt. In the past three months, the Gingrich campaign, which endured an exodus of key staffers last month, racked up unpaid debts of $100,000 in legal fees and $90,000 in communications services.

And in the final days of the quarter, donations slowed to a trickle, with Mr. Gingrich receiving fewer donations per week than in the early spring. The campaign lists $47,000 owed to the candidate himself to compensate or reimburse him for “direct mail list/travel.”

Jon Huntsman Jr., former Utah governor and former ambassador to China, did not file a financial report Friday because of his late entry into the presidential race. As with Mr. Romney, money raised is more a sign of voter enthusiasm than a necessity, as both men have their own means to fund their campaigns.

With the primaries still months away, the nomination race is open, and federal rules allow politicians to raise and spend money through other accounts to “test the waters” without declaring a candidacy.

A fund controlled by one such undeclared politician, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was highly active, spending nearly all of the $1.6 million it raised, overwhelmingly from small donors. Though most could not be transferred to a campaign, it closes the period with more than $1 million dollars in the bank.

The committee set up by Rudolph W. Giuliani for his 2008 presidential run saw activity last quarter, spending $60,000 on administrative costs. The former New York City mayor did not close the account by paying down any outstanding debts, including a $350,000 phone bill, $275,000 for airfare, $215,000 in rent and utilities, and a $141,000 debt to Giuliani Security Safety, a division of the consulting firm he oversees. Earlier this year, he donated about $1 million to the account, taking it closer to being in the black, and loaned it $300,000.

Such activity is not a sure sign that a politician will run for office, however. The old presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, now secretary of state under President Obama, has been actively raising money in the past three months, forms filed Friday show, long after it went into debt in a protracted competition against Mr. Obama in 2008.

Despite a $127,000 haul between April and June, the Clinton campaign applied less than a third to paying down a $330,000 debt to pollster Mark Penn.

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

BEIJING (AP) — China on Sunday slammed President Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama as an act that has “grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs” and damaged Chinese-American relations.

The strident statement from China’s Foreign Ministry came hours after Mr. Obama met with the Tibetan spiritual leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who was in Washington for an 11-day Buddhist ritual.

China earlier called on the United States to stop Saturday’s meeting, warning it could hurt relations between the two countries.

After the 45-minute private session at the White House, China said the Foreign Ministry and the Chinese Embassy had lodged objections with U.S. representatives in Beijing and Washington.

“Such an act has grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs, hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and damaged Sino-American relations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in the statement.

“We demand the U.S. side seriously consider China’s stance, immediately adopt measures to wipe out the baneful impact, stop interfering in China’s internal affairs and cease to connive and support anti-China separatist forces that seek ‘Tibetan independence,’” Mr. Ma said.

China considers the Dalai Lama a separatist intent on ending Chinese rule over Tibet. The Nobel laureate says he seeks only a high level of autonomy for Tibet.

The meeting came less than 10 days before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is due to visit the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and meet with Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo, Beijing’s top foreign policy official.

“It’s difficult to say at the moment whether this meeting will be affected,” said Jin Canrong, an international affairs expert at Renmin University. “But this meeting is quite important, and whether it takes place or is canceled will give us an indication of what the follow-up impact will be.”

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. also is scheduled to visit China this summer, followed by a trip to Washington by his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

China Central Television showed Mr. Xi visiting Tibet on Sunday to attend festivities marking the 60th anniversary of communist rule, which occurred in May.

Mr. Obama last met with the Dalai Lama in February 2010, infuriating Beijing during a tension-filled year in which China and the U.S. also feuded over online censorship and arms sales for Taiwan. Relations were considered back on track in January when President Hu Jintao visited Washington.

“I think after this meeting Sino-U.S. relations will be rather cold over the next few months,” Mr. Jin said. “It may lead to the suspension of high-level official exchanges and therefore impact on the strategic mutual trust and cooperation between China and the U.S. in some fields, including military ties.”

The White House said that during Saturday’s meeting Mr. Obama “underscored the importance of the protection of human rights of Tibetans in China.” Mr. Obama restated U.S. policy that it does not support Tibetan independence.

Tibet has been a source of controversy for decades, since Beijing sent troops to occupy the country following the 1949 Communist revolution. It insists the region has been part of Chinese territory for centuries, a claim disputed by many Tibetans, who say their Himalayan region has a long history of autonomous rule led by a series of Buddhist leaders.

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The campaign fundraising efforts of President Obama raised $86 million in the past three months from 500,000 people — but at least $35 million of it can be traced to just 244 well-connected supporters who collected contributions from wealthy friends.

Just 634 donations from people giving $30,000 or more to the Obama Victory Fund comprise $23 million, while the 1,335 donations the fund received from those giving $250 add up to about $336,000, a Washington Times analysis shows.

The campaign has branded itself as a new type of political operation and touted its reliance on a grassroots network of everyday people writing reasonably sized checks.

“Ninety-eight percent of all donations that came in were $250 or less, and our average donation was about $69,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a video to supporters.

And the dramatic reach is, in part, a testament to the power of personal relationships, among the moneyed elite as with the population at large: The mathematics of the ranges collected by the bundlers and the number of large donations given suggest that nearly every maximum donation came after personal contact with one of the 244 emissaries who received credit for shepherding it.

But the list, which was voluntarily disclosed by Mr. Obama and includes 27 people who brought in more than half a million dollars each — at least $13.5 million between them — is made up of many of the same people who have had outsized influence on American politics for years.

While the figures released by Mr. Obama include only names and locations, a Times analysis found 25 that likely bundled contributions for John Kerry in 2004. At least 90 worked as bundlers for Mr. Obama when he was a freshman senator mounting a bid for the presidency in 2008, but others were betting on his opponents: Ten were raising money for Hillary Rodham Clinton and seven bundled for John Edwards.

Federal donor histories of the half of the 244 that could be traced by The Times show that that segment alone, with their immediate families, has personally donated $21 million to U.S. elections in more than 7,800 checks between 2007 and 2010.

Fred Eychaner of media company Newsweb Corp., for example, made 73 federal-level political donations totaling $700,000 during the 2008 and 2010 elections before joining the ranks of Mr. Obama’s lowest tier of bundlers, those raising between $50,000 and $100,000. Mr. Obama appointed Mr. Eychaner a Kennedy Center trustee in September.

Azita Raji, meanwhile, a retired investment banker from Belvedere, Calif., raised more than half a million dollars for Mr. Obama from associates. Mr. Raji and family members personally gave $70,000 in the last two election cycles.

And Robert Wolf of UBS Americas, who in 2008 bundled $100,000 for Mr. Kerry, raised between $200,000 and $500,000 for Mr. Obama this cycle. He and family members have given 115 donations totaling some $185,000 in the last two cycles.

The money has made up significant chunks of the wider Democratic machine, with $6.3 million of the personal donations by bundlers identified by The Times going to the Democratic National Committee, $2.4 million to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and $1.9 million to its House counterpart.

Spread their wealth

The business leaders often spread their wealth freely, as if hedging their bets to maintain favor with whoever may be in power. In that figure are 118 donations to Republicans totaling $210,000, including $100,000 to the Republican National Committee.

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The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate on Sunday called for a congressional investigation into the phone-hacking scandal that has rocked Rupert Murdoch’s media behemoth News Corp.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,”Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, said Congress should join an FBI investigation into whether News Corp. — the parent company of Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal — engaged in illegal activity.

“What’s going on in England is startling. We need to follow through” with a congressional inquiry, Mr. Durbin said.

His comments came only hours after Rebekah Brooks, Mr. Murdoch’s former British CEO, was arrested in London. Ms. Brooks, 43, is being questioned on suspicion of phone hacking and suspicion of corruption, the Associated Press reported. She is the former editor of Mr. Murdoch’s News of the World, which published its final edition July 10, just days after it was revealed journalists working for the tabloid hacked into hundreds of voicemail accounts of celebrities, politicians and the victims of crimes.

The FBI investigation was launched to find out if 9/11 victims or their families were also the targets of News Corp. journalists.

There have also been allegations that high-level law enforcement officials received bribes from journalists and other News Corp. employees. London Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson resigned Sunday over those claims, according to the AP.

Last week, Les Hinton, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones, also resigned, becoming the first significant casualty of the episode on this side of the Atlantic.

Beyond Mr. Hinton’s resignation, Mr. Murdoch’s American outlets have not yet been tied directly to the scandal.

“They’ve not been touched by it, they’ve told me,” said Ohio Gov. John Kasich, referring to Fox News, for which Mr. Kasich, a Republican, worked as a host and commentator before returning to politics.

Mr. Durbin said the congressional investigation, if opened, would focus on whether Mr. Murdoch or other News Corp. employees violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits payments to foreign officials designed to influence their actions.

Republicans appear less interested in an investigation. Also speaking on “Meet the Press,” Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, said Congress should simply “let law enforcement work here” and not get involved, instead focusing on more pressing matters like the national debt.

Regardless of whether the scandal touches American companies, Mr. Kasich said it’s a “terrible thing” that will “change journalism” throughout the world, not just in the U.K.

The affair has already cost Mr. Murdoch dearly by sinking his bid to take over British Sky Broadcasting. Along with Ms. Brooks and his son, James, Mr. Murdoch is set to answer questions before a parliamentary committee on Tuesday, though Ms. Brooks may be able to avoid answering questions directly related to her arrest and the ongoing police investigation.

As the spotlight grows hotter, Mr. Murdoch is trying to stop the bleeding and restore faith in his company. He ran full-page ads in his U.K. papers on Saturday that began by saying, “We are sorry.”

“It may take some time for us to rebuild trust and confidence but we are determined to live up to the expectations of our readers, colleagues and partners,” the ad continued.

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

As Washington stares at rising national debt and projected deficits for years to come, many states are faced with the opposite problem: whether to spend their budget surpluses and, if so, on what.

At least a dozen states ended fiscal 2011 with surpluses. Indiana reported one of the largest, with an extra $1.2 billion in its accounts. Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, on Friday authorized bonus payments of up to $1,000 for state employees. An employee who “meets expectations” will get $500, those who “exceed expectations” will receive $750 and “outstanding workers” will see an extra $1,000 in their August paychecks.

“No state anywhere comes close to Indiana’s record of spending tax dollars carefully, with total savings over the last six years in the billions. Your spending efficiency has enabled us to stay in the black even as revenues plummeted,” said Mr. Daniels, who recently flirted with a run for the White House but ultimately stayed out of the race.

While Indiana decided to reward its employees, other states are redirecting surplus funds into cash-strapped areas such as education. Idaho ended the year with an $85 million surplus, the majority of which will be funneled to public schools and colleges, Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter, a Republican, said in a statement last week.

Other states are bulking up their savings accounts. Maine finished the year with a surplus of nearly $50 million. About half will go to the state’s reserve, the Bangor Daily News reported. Iowa closed its books with $480 million left over, on top of an already healthy “rainy day fund.”

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican, on Sunday touted the fact that since taking office in January, he has helped the Buckeye State turn its deficit into a surplus.

“In my state, where we faced an $8 billion deficit, we wiped it out. We eliminated it,” he said on “Meet the Press.”

“We’ve been able to cut taxes, improve [and] reform government. And you know why? We looked [the fiscal problems] square in the eye. … That is what they’re not doing here in D.C. right now.”

Arkansas, South Carolina and other states also ended their fiscal terms firmly in the black. During the depths of the Great Depression a few years ago, states emptied reserve accounts or raised taxes to make ends meet. Unlike Washington, nearly all states are required by law to balance their budgets each year. Only Vermont lacks such a requirement, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The biggest drivers of surpluses are higher-than-expected tax collections. Thirteen states have reported revenue higher than anticipated, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. Only two states reported less tax revenue than expected, and another 31 states were on target. Four states have not finished the 2011 budget cycle.

Last year, 46 states reported revenue at lower-than-expected rates, and the tax turnaround is, to some, an indication that the economy has begun to turn around.

“But the thing we’re stressing is … they’re still not back to the levels they were before the recession,” said Brian Sigritz, director of state fiscal studies at the budget officers association.

Spending reductions also played a big role. Many states made major cuts to education and other parts of their budgets. Even with better-than-expected tax revenue, those cuts were still necessary, partly because federal stimulus dollars, which propped up many state budgets over the past two years, have been fully expended.

Despite ending the fiscal year on a high note, governors are aware of how quickly the rosy financial picture can change. They are cautioning taxpayers and lawmakers that a little extra cash doesn’t mean the state should embark on a spending spree.

“I’m grateful for the revenue growth. But I still think that we’re a long way from out of the woods,” Mr. Otter of Idaho said in his statement “You need to remember that this is about half a billion dollars less than we had in my first year as governor. So we’re going to keep working hard.”

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Some pundits and Republican naysayers contend that former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. is too moderate to win the GOP presidential nomination.

And that’s a claim he denies with vigor and a hint of anger.

During a recent interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Huntsman checked off his accomplishments as Utah governor from 2005 to 2009: making record tax cuts, signing into law the first school voucher program and overseeing the rise of his state’s economy to first-in-the-nation status.

He is confident that the race won’t turn on his religion and downplays whispers from evangelical Protestants who vow not to support a Mormon.

“These presidential nomination contests aren’t about religion; they’re about leadership,” Mr. Huntsman told The Times in the kitchen of his home in Washington’s tony Kalorama neighborhood.

Mr. Huntsman, 51, is proud of his leadership, which he predicts conservatives will respect despite his tenure as President Obama’s ambassador to China and his positive comments about what Republican voters see as an overly liberal president.

“All people have to do is look at the record. Sometimes they don’t, and they just rely on tags,” he said.

“When you look at what we did on record tax cuts, being pro-life and pro-Second Amendment, passing the largest tax cuts in the history of our state. We went to the No. 1 position economically,” he said. “Education reform, the first governor to sign a voucher program, we did it around special education.”

He noted that the Pew Research Center named Utah the “best managed state in America.”

Mr. Huntsman said he won’t stand a chance if voters allow the 2012 Republican presidential nomination to revolve around religion.

“If it’s about religion, I’ll always come up short anyway,” said Mr. Huntsman, a Mormon who until April 30 was Mr. Obama’s hand-picked ambassador to China.

Mr. Huntsman steers conversation away from one of his obvious advantages. If elected, he would be the only U.S. president with an intimate, firsthand knowledge of the culture, language and economy of China, the one country capable of eventually challenging U.S. economic and military supremacy.

He speaks fluent Mandarin and has spent much of his adult life on the communist mainland and in non-communist Taiwan, making a President Huntsman less likely to miss cultural nuances during critical trade and security talks.

But he and chief campaign strategist John Weaver know that few voters choose the nation’s chief executive on the basis of China planks, or foreign policy generally. Instead, he said, he will run on what former governors normally do — his record as a manager of a state — at a time when the nation is in dire need of successful management.

Mr. Huntsman declined to reveal his money-raising target for the end of this year, though he did say, “If the money comes in, it will be because we have a message of leadership people want. If we don’t raise the money, then we’re not on a winning trajectory.”

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The campaign fundraising efforts of President Obama raised $86 million in the last three months from 500,000 people — but at least $35 million of it can be traced to just 244 well-connected supporters who collected contributions from wealthy friends.

And just 634 donations from people giving $30,000 or more to the Obama Victory Fund comprise $23 million, while the 1,335 donations the fund received from those giving $250 add up to about $336,000, a Washington Times analysis shows.

The campaign has branded itself as a new type of political operation and touted its reliance on a grassroots network of everyday people writing reasonably-sized checks.

“Ninety-eight percent of all donations that came in were $250 or less, and our average donation was about $69,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a video to supporters.

And the dramatic reach is, in part, a testament to the power of personal relationships, among the moneyed elite as with the population at large: The mathematics of the ranges collected by the bundlers and the number of large donations given suggest that nearly every maximum donation came after personal contact with one of the 244 emissaries who received credit for shepherding it.

But the list, which was voluntarily disclosed by Mr. Obama and includes 27 people who brought in more than half a million dollars each — at least $13.5 million between them — is made up of many of the same people who have had outsize influence on American politics for years.

While the figures released by Mr. Obama include only names and locations, a Times analysis found 33 that likely bundled contributions for John Kerry in 2004. At least 90 worked as bundlers for Mr. Obama when he was a freshman senator mounting a bid for the presidency in 2008, but others were betting on his opponents: Roughly 13 were raising money for Hillary Rodham Clinton and about six bundled for John Edwards.

Federal donor histories of the half of the 244 who could be fingerprinted by The Times show that that segment alone, with their immediate families, has personally donated $21 million to U.S. elections in more than 7,800 checks between 2007 and 2010.

Fred Eychaner of media company Newsweb Corp., for example, made 73 federal-level political donations totaling $700,000 during the 2008 and 2010 elections before joining the ranks of Mr. Obama’s lowest tier of bundlers, those raising between $50,000 and $100,000. Mr. Obama appointed Mr. Eychaner a Kennedy Center trustee in September.

Azita Raji, meanwhile, a retired investment banker from Belvedere, Calif., raised more than half a million dollars for Mr. Obama from associates. Mr. Raji and family members personally gave $70,000 in the last two election cycles.

And Robert Wolf of UBS Americas, who in 2008 bundled $100,000 for Mr. Kerry, raised between $200,000 and $500,000 for Mr. Obama this cycle. He and family members have given 115 donations totaling some $185,000 in the last two cycles.

The money has made up significant chunks of the wider Democratic machine, with $6.3 million of the personal donations by bundlers identified by The Times going to the Democratic National Committee, $2.4 million to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and $1.9 million to its House counterpart.

Spread their wealth

And the business leaders often spread their wealth freely, as if hedging their bets to maintain favor with whoever may be in power. In that figure are 118 donations to Republicans totaling $210,000, including $100,000 to the Republican National Committee.

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AUSTIN, Texas — Should Rick Perry conclude that voter discontent has left an opening for him to enter the presidential race, the longtime Texas governor would be among the GOP field’s most conservative candidates.

Primary voters would get a skilled politician with TV anchorman looks, a Southern preacher’s oratory and a cowboy’s swagger, matched by a disarming candor and sense of humor. The former cotton farmer from the village of Paint Creek in West Texas has never lost an election in nearly three decades as a politician.

What they wouldn’t get is a candidate whose politics are positioned to unite a Republican electorate that stretches from moderate pro-business fiscal conservatives to evangelical social conservatives, with the tea party falling somewhere along the spectrum.

“Texans, God love them, have that bigger-than-life persona about politics and that doesn’t necessarily play everywhere,” said Christopher Nicholas, a Republican political consultant who has worked extensively in the Northeast and Midwest. “I haven’t heard a lot of Republicans call Social Security a disease.”

Mr. Perry has. He branded Social Security and other New Deal programs “the second big step in the march of socialism,” according to a book published last year. The “first step” was a national income tax, which he has said stands alongside the direct election of U.S. senators as a major mistake among the amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Mr. Perry has said he likely will decide in two or three weeks whether he’ll run for president.

Mr. Perry told the Des Moines Register that he’s “getting more and more comfortable every day that this is what I’ve been called to do. This is what America needs.”

In the just-completed Texas legislative session, Mr. Perry’s “emergency items” included laws that require a photo ID in order to vote, a sonogram before a woman has an abortion and enforcement of federal immigration laws by local police.

He rejects the idea of climate change and the theory of evolution, arguing for natural climate variations and intelligent design of the universe.

In fact, he said last year when promoting his book, “Fed Up: Our Fight to Save America From Washington,” which was a state’s rights treatise that railed against the federal government, that he’s too conservative to run for national office.

“The best concrete evidence that I’m really not running for president is this book, because when you read this book, you’re going to see me talking about issues that for someone running for public office, it’s kind of been the third rail if you will,” Mr. Perry told the Associated Press shortly after winning re-election in 2010.

In the few polls that have included Mr. Perry, he ranks high among Republican primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Gov. Terry Branstad, Iowa Republican, told the AP on Saturday that he thinks it’s very likely that Mr. Perry will jump into the race and reshape the state’s caucuses.

“I get the definite impression he’s very likely to run,” Mr. Branstad said, basing his opinion on a conversation the governors had Friday.

“I think he becomes a significant factor if he becomes a candidate,” Mr. Branstad said. “It could change the whole complexion of the Iowa caucus race.”

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Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.