WASHINGTON -- An interim report by House Republicans faults the State Department and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for security deficiencies at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, prior to last September's deadly terrorist attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Senior State Department officials, including Clinton, approved reductions in security at the facilities in Benghazi, according to the report by GOP members of five House committees. The report cites an April 19, 2012, cable bearing Clinton's signature acknowledging a March 28, 2012, request from then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz for more security, yet allowing further reductions. "Senior State Department officials knew that the threat environment in Benghazi was high and that the Benghazi compound was vulnerable and unable to withstand an attack, yet the department continued to systematically withdraw security personnel," the report said. Release of the report comes as dozens of House Republicans separately have pushed for Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to create a select committee to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012, attack. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report Tuesday. The report also is highly critical of President Barack Obama and White House staff. In the days following the attack, White House and senior State Department officials altered what the report said were accurate "talking points" drafted by the U.S. intelligence community in order to protect the State Department. And contrary to what the administration claimed, the alterations were not made to protect classified information. "Concern for classified information is never mentioned in email traffic among senior administration officials," according to the 43-page report. Last December, senior State Department officials acknowledged major weaknesses in security and errors in judgment that had been revealed in a scathing independent report on the deadly assault. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides admitted that serious management and leadership failures left the mission in Benghazi woefully unprepared for the terrorist attack. Clinton, testifying before Congress in the final weeks of her tenure, took responsibility for the department's missteps and failures leading up to the assault. But she insisted that requests for more security at the diplomatic mission in Benghazi didn't reach her desk, and reminded lawmakers that they have a responsibility to fund security-related budget requests. The report from the House committees is the latest broadside in what has been a long-running and acrimonious dispute between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans who have challenged the White House's actions before and after the Benghazi attack. House and Senate Republicans for weeks fought for access to information about the attack and used the nominations of two key Obama administration national security officials – Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and CIA Director John Brennan – as leverage to obtain internal documents about the raid. The Benghazi raid also resonated during the presidential campaign as the Obama administration struggled in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 6 election to tamp down speculation of a cover-up involving the Benghazi attack. Obama, in his role as commander in chief, failed to anticipate the significance that Sept. 11 held as a date and did not provide the Defense Department with the authority for missions beyond self-defense, according to the report. Military assets were properly positioned across the North Africa region, but had no authority to be in an alert posture that would have permitted offensive operations and were given no notice to defend U.S. diplomatic facilities, the report said. U.S. Africa Command, which has responsibility for military operations in the region, has serious deficiencies that hindered the Defense Department's response to the attack, according to the report. The command, which was established in 2008, has no Army or Marine Corps units assigned to it. When the attack occurred, the Pentagon had to order units attached to a separate command in Europe to respond. The report defends U.S. intelligence officials, who are described as being vigilant in gathering information about threats in the region and warning senior U.S. officials of the deteriorating security environment in Benghazi. The independent report by retired Adm. Mike Mullen and Thomas Pickering, a retired ambassador, as well as testimony from Clinton and other senior Obama administration officials have failed to assuage Republicans. Seven months after the attack, more than 100 House Republicans, led by Rep. Frank Wolfe, R-Va., have backed a resolution calling on Boehner to create a special congressional panel to investigate. Outside groups also have pressured Boehner, with Special Operations Speaks, a group of Special Operations veterans, demanding that Congress investigate "Benghazigate" and suggesting that the president is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. The group claims that Americans on the ground in Benghazi were denied military support by high-ranking administration officials even though senior Defense Department officials have explained that they didn't have the intelligence to simply send in fighter planes and were uncertain about the location of the ambassador. Privately, Republicans say the Libya attack and criticism of the Obama administration is an issue that energizes the Republican base, a crucial political calculation ahead of congressional midterm elections in which control of the House and Senate are stake. The GOP-led House Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, Oversight and Government Reform, and Intelligence committees prepared the interim report. Democrats on these committees said they were not asked to participate.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama has never commented publicly on the targeted drone strike that accidentally killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American boy and the son of al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki. But a new book released Tuesday reveals Obama was "surprised and upset and wanted an explanation" when he learned of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki's October 2011 death, which one former White House official calls "a mistake, a bad mistake." The anecdote is one of many new details mentioned in Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill's book chronicling the targeted killing of Abdulrahman's father, Anwar al-Awlaki. The elder al-Awlaki was a U.S. born cleric who took a leadership role in al Qaeda's operations in the Arab Peninsula. Scahill writes that the CIA tried to pay Anwar al-Awlaki's younger brother Ammar a sum of $5 million to turn in his brother. Anwar al-Awlaki was killed on Sept. 30, 2011 in a CIA drone strike in Yemen, the first known time a U.S.-controlled drone strike deliberately targeted and killed an American citizen. The killing prompted praise from Obama, who called it a "major blow to al-Qaeda's most active operational affiliate." But when a separate attack killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki just two weeks later, Scahill writes that the Obama administration found itself scrambling to determine what went wrong. A former senior official in the Obama administration told me that after Abdulrahman’s killing, the president was "surprised and upset and wanted an explanation." The former official, who worked on the targeted killing program, said that according to intelligence and Special Operations officials, the target of the strike was al-Banna, the AQAP propagandist. "We had no idea the kid was there. We were told al-Banna was alone," the former official told me. Once it became clear that the teenager had been killed, he added, military and intelligence officials asserted, "It was a mistake, a bad mistake." However, John Brennan, at the time President Obama’s senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, "suspected that the kid had been killed intentionally and ordered a review. I don’t know what happened with the review." Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, would not answer questions about the former official’s assertions, saying that she “can’t address specific operational matters and won’t go into our internal deliberations,” adding: "We cannot discuss the sensitive details of specific operations." Scahill also interviewed members of the al-Awlaki family, who opposed Anwar al-Awlaki's killing and believed the U.S. government "exaggerated its claims about his involvement with al Qaeda." But while they said they understood the reasons why the United States wanted the elder al-Awlaki dead, Anwar's father Nasser al-Awlaki said teenager Abdulrahman's killing was "brutal." "He was an American citizen. Maybe one day he would have gone to America to study and live there, and they killed him in cold blood," Nasser told the author. Nasser has repeatedly demanded accountability for Abdulrahman's death, which the White House and its allies have struggled to explain. Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary and senior adviser to Obama's reelection campaign, drew criticism for suggesting Abdulrahman would've been alive if he had a more responsible father. "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children," Gibbs told reporters after a 2012 presidential debate. "I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business." Earlier this year, White House press secretary Jay Carney defended Obama's drone policy when pressed on a leaked Justice Department memo detailing the broad rationale the administration uses for its targeted killing program. "I’m not going to talk about individual operations that may or may not have occurred," Carney said when a reporter brought up the killing of Abdulrahman and asked if the teenager was a "senior operational leader" of a terrorist group. Obama has also defended the conduct of his drone program, insisting his administration takes significant steps to avoid civilian casualties. But the president has declined to get into much detail about the al-Awlaki killings, offering instead his explanation of when an American citizen is a fair target. "I think there's no doubt that when an American has made the decision to affiliate himself with al Qaeda and target fellow Americans, that there is a legal justification for us to try and stop them from carrying out plots," Obama told CNN in September. "What is also true though is that as an American citizen, they are subject to the protections of the Constitution and due process." The Senate held its first hearing on the use of drones for targeted killings Tuesday. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) criticized the Sent at 5:03 PM on Tu" target="_hplink">Obama administration for failing to provide witnesses to testify at the hearing. To date, there has been no evidence linking Abdulrahman to any terrorist plot. Anonymous officials initially claimed he was with their actual target, Egyptian al Qaeda operative Ibrahim al-Banna. They also mistakenly stated Abdulrahman's age to be 21, leading the al-Awlaki family to release the boy's birth certificate. "He had been born in Denver, said the certificate from the Colorado health department," The New York Times reported. "In the United States, at the time his government’s missile killed him, the teenager would have just reached driving age."

BOSTON, April 23 (Reuters) - Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect, bought two large packages of fireworks in February from a store in Seabrook, New Hampshire, the company that runs the store said on Tuesday. The amount of explosive powder in the purchased fireworks would not have been "anywhere near enough" to build the bombs used in the marathon attack as they have been described publicly, William Weimer, vice president at Phantom Fireworks, said. (Reporting by Aaron Pressman; Editing by Gary Hill)

Charles Murray, AEI IdeasI have been examining the inaugural addresses of all the presidents to see how their description of the American project has changed over the years. In the course of this, I ran across an intriguing finding: Presidents don’t talk about their duty nearly as much as they used to. From Washington through McKinley, every single one of the twenty presidents who gave an inaugural address used duty or its plural, referring to it in relation to the duties imposed on him by the office in at least one of them. Among the eighteen presidents who have given inaugural addresses since McKinley,...

Ron Fournier, NJWhite House press secretary Ari Fleischer walked into the media cabin of Air Force One on May 24, 2002, and dropped identical envelopes in the laps of two reporters, myself and Steve Holland of Reuters. Inside each was a manila card – marked by a small presidential seal and, in a simple font, “THE PRESIDENT.”Handwritten in the tight script of President George W. Bush, both notes said essentially the same thing: “Thank you for the respect you showed for the office of the President, and, therefore, the respect you showed for our country.”

Ben Domenech, The TransomThe Democrats have gotten the great Republican hope, Marco Rubio, to sign on to a measure that accomplishes nearly all of their goals on immigration:“The pre-bill marketing campaign — driven by leaks that seemed to come from Republican negotiators — focused on stringent new border-control measures and a long, difficult path to citizenship. The goal was to minimize conservative opposition by creating a first impression of the bill as a tough solution to the country’s illegal immigration problem. But when Democrats got a look at the 844-page measure, they...

Susan Page, USA TodayWASHINGTON -- Four months after the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a USA TODAY Poll finds support for a new gun-control law ebbing as prospects for passage on Capitol Hill seem to fade.Americans are more narrowly divided on the issue than in recent months, and backing for a bill has slipped below 50%, the poll finds. By 49%-45%, those surveyed favor Congress passing a new gun-control law. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in early April, 55% had backed a stricter gun law, which was down from 61% in February.

Coral Davenport, National JournalThe tide is rising fast on Louisiana. A report late last year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that along the Gulf Coast, the sea level is surging three times faster than the global average—and studies have for years singled out New Orleans as the U.S. city most vulnerable to destruction from the effects of climate change. Louisiana’s rapidly rising threat from the sea was even the subject of a 2012 Academy Award-nominated film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, which depicts an impoverished community devastated by rising waters and vicious...

Seth Mandel, CommentaryThose who doubted the wisdom of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apology to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in March had their first “I told you so” moment the very next day. Speaking to Turkish reporters, Erdogan appeared to immediately backtrack on his end of the rapprochement, which included dropping the case against the Israel Defense Forces for defending themselves from the Turkish-supported flotilla activists seeking to violently crash the naval blockade of the terrorist group Hamas.A successful normalization of relations between...

Jeffrey Singer, ReasonI am a general surgeon with more than three decades in private clinical practice. And I am fed up. Since the late 1970s, I have witnessed remarkable technological revolutions in medicine, from CT scans to robot-assisted surgery. But I have also watched as medicine slowly evolved into the domain of technicians, bookkeepers, and clerks. 

WASHINGTON -- Two senators are urging the Obama administration to postpone the furloughing of air traffic controllers, saying the turmoil caused by reduced staffing raises economic and security concerns as well as inconveniencing thousands of travelers. Kansas Republican Jerry Moran says delaying the furloughs that began Sunday would both give the administration a chance to change its mind about the necessity of the unpaid leaves and give Congress a chance to find a remedy. Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal says a postponement of at least 30 days is appropriate at a time when there are heightened security concerns. The two lawmakers were promoting legislation to prevent another aspect of automatic government spending cuts – the closing of 149 Federal Aviation Administration contract control towers.

The Truth-o-Meter says: Mostly True | Rep. Peter King says alleged Boston bombers are fifth terrorists to survive prior U.S. scrutiny Several days after the capture of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing, U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., cited a pattern in which the U.S. government looks into suspicious individuals who later are charged with terrorist acts. According to media reports, the FBI has acknowledged interviewing Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- Dzokhar’s older brother, who died while fleeing the police -- at the request of Russian officials in 2011. "After looking at his phone records, websites he visited and associates, the FBI found he had no ties to terror," ABC News reported. (We ... >> More

Dennis Byrne, Chicago TribuneSeven infants were savagely murdered in Philadelphia by a serial killer, prosecutors say. But no one was there to weep for them, to grieve for the loss of what they might have been or to scream at the brutality.Those innocents were supposed to have been aborted, but when they were born alive, abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell stuck scissors into the back of their necks to cut their spinal cords, at least once making a joke of it, according to a grand jury report.There may have been hundreds of infants that similarly perished at the hands of Gosnell, but the 281-page report said we'd never...

Pat Buchanan, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review"Whatever they thought they could ultimately achieve, they've already failed," says President Obama of the Boston Marathon bombers."They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated. They failed because as Americans we refuse to be terrorized."Bostonians did react splendidly. From first responders to folks who gave blood, from hospital staffs to the FBI, ATF and state troopers, from the Boston and Watertown cops to the hostage rescue team that talked Dzhokhar Tsarnaev out of that boat.But did the Brothers Tsarnaev really fail -- as terrorists?

Robert Nelson, Weekly StandardMuch has been said recently about the deep tensions within the Republican party. Far less has been said about a sharp division arising inside the Democratic party. That latter tension was front and center recently when former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Daily News drawing on his experience overseeing extensive natural gas development in Pennsylvania. “If we choose to embrace natural gas, it will help us get past a number of significant economic and environmental challenges,” Rendell wrote. “On the other hand, if...

Thomas Sowell, Investor's Business DailyDuring decades of watching both collegiate and professional football, I have seen hundreds of touchdowns scored by black players -- but not one extra point kicked by a black player.Is this because blacks are genetically incapable of kicking a football or because racists won't let blacks kick a football?Most of us would consider either of these explanations ridiculous. Yet genes and discrimination were the predominant explanations of black-white differences offered by intellectuals in the 20th century.

The outcome of Wednesday’s dramatic Senate vote on expanding background checks simultaneously demonstrated the difficult geography confronting gun-control advocates in the Senate and the potentially daunting math facing gun-rights proponents in the Electoral College.

Whisper it quietly, but I quite like big government. These days, it's unfashionable to say so. From New Labour to Blue Labour, from compassionate conservatives to neoconservatives, the consensus is that big government is bad government: slow, inefficient, intrusive, bureaucratic, overbearing, anti-democratic and anti-growth. "The era of big government is over," President Bill Clinton (Democrat) declared in January 1996. Conservatives rejoiced. But guess what? By September 2008, big government was back. "We just act now," announced President George W Bush (Republican), as he unveiled his $700bn bank bailout plan. This champion of free markets went on to bail out the auto industry and, in effect, nationalise the mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Here in the UK, as the former chancellor Alistair Darling revealed in his memoir, it was big government that prevented cash machines from being switched off and cheques being torn up. Banks were nationalised; multibillion-pound loans and guarantees were offered. So, why this disconnect between rhetoric and reality? Why this constant railing against the positive power of collective action? The public doesn't like big government, say fans of ... small government. Yet how else to explain our ongoing love affair with the (scandal-ridden) National Health Service, which in its structure and funding is big government pure and simple? Why else are so many of the people whom voters tell pollsters they admire most - doctors, nurses, teachers, soldiers, the police - usually employees of big government? Not yet convinced? Polls also show significant public backing for the renationalisation of the railways. And not just the railways: a 2009 poll found two out of three voters supported taking the electricity, gas, water and telecommunications industries back into public ownership. (Come back, Michael Foot - all is forgiven.) Small-government supporters claim that countries with high levels of public spending grow more slowly. Yet, as the Columbia University economist Xavier X Sala-i-Martin concluded in his 1997 study 'I Just Ran Four Million Regressions', "no measure of government spending ... appears to affect growth in a significant way". In his 2004 book Growing Public, the University of California economist Peter Lindert agrees - countries with high levels of government spending don't perform any worse than countries with low levels of government spending. But doesn't big government crowd out the private sector? Stifle free enterprise and innovation? Not necessarily. Consider the arguments of Mariana Mazzucato, the Sussex University economist and author of The Entrepreneurial State. "Where would Google be today without the state-funded investments in the internet, and without the US National Science Foundation grant that funded the discovery of its own algorithm?" she wrote in the Guardian in April 2012. "Would the iPad be so successful without the state-funded innovations in communication technologies, GPS and touch-screen display? "Where would GSK and Pfizer be without the $600bn the US National Institutes of Health has put into research that has led to 75 per cent of the most innovative new drugs in the last decade?" Critics of big government say it crushes community spirit and civic engagement. Again, the empirical evidence suggests otherwise. "Among the advanced western democracies, social trust and group membership are, if anything, positively correlated with the size of government," the Harvard academic Robert Putnam observed in his acclaimed book Bowling Alone (1995). "[S]ocial capital appears to be highest of all in the big-spending welfare states of Scandinavia," he wrote. Ah yes, Scandinavia. Despite having, I accept, much smaller and more cohesive societies than the US or the UK, the high-spending, high-growth Nordic nations continue to baffle and frustrate Anglo-Saxon small-staters. Take the UN's first ever World Happiness league table in 2012: Denmark, where government spending accounts for 58 per cent of national income, topped the list, followed by Finland (54 per cent) and Norway (44 per cent). Here in the UK, public spending may have peaked at 50.8 per cent of GDP in 2009, in the wake of the bank bailouts, but since 2010 the austerians of the Conservative-led coalition have been cutting spending year on year. Using the latest IMF figures, Peter Taylor-Gooby, a professor of social policy at the University of Kent, has calculated that by 2017 government spending, as a proportion of GDP, will be lower in the UK than in the United States - 39.1 per cent to 39.3 per cent - for the first time since records began. "I was astounded," Taylor-Gooby tells me. "Even after the First World War, and the round of cuts then, we didn't go this far". Meanwhile, those who pine for a leaner, meaner, smaller state cannot answer the simplest question: how would small government have paid for the bailout of RBS, Lloyds and the rest? The Treasury has coughed up roughly £850bn to prop up the UK's financial sector, according to the National Audit Office. Can small government tackle the threat of runaway climate change and the rising costs of adaptation and mitigation? It is forecast that the global warming bill will run into trillions of pounds. It may be fashionable to want to roll back the state, but ask yourself this: where would you rather live, 'big-government' Sweden or 'small-government' Somalia? l Mehdi Hasan is the political director of the Huffington Post UK and a contributing writer for the New Statesman. This column is crossposted here.

The horror of Boston should be a reminder that the choice of weaponry can be in itself an act of evil. "Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim" is the way The New York Times defined the hideousness of the weapons used, and President Obama made clear that "anytime bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror." But are we as a society prepared to be judged by that standard? The president's deployment of drones that all too often treat innocent civilians as collateral damage comes quickly to mind. It should also be pointed out that the U.S. still maintains a nuclear arsenal and, as our killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese demonstrated, those weapons are inherently, by the president's definition, weapons of terror. But it is America's role in the deployment of antipersonnel land mines, and our country's refusal to sign off on a ban on cluster munitions agreed to by most of the world's nations, that offers the most glaring analogy with the carnage of Boston. To this day, antipersonnel weapons--the technologically refined version of the primitive pressure cooker fragmentation bombs exploded in Boston--maim and kill farmers and their children in the Southeast Asian killing fields left over from our country's past experiment in genocide. An experiment that as a sideshow to our obsession with replacing French colonialism in Vietnam involved dropping 277 million cluster bomblets on Laos between 1964 and 1973. The whole point of a cluster weapon is to target an area the size of several football fields with the same bits of maiming steel that did so much damage in Boston. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been active in attempting to clear land of remaining bomblets, estimates 10,000 Lao civilian casualties to date from such weapons. As many as twenty-seven million unexploded bomblets remain in the country, according to the committee. Back in 1964 at the start of that bombing campaign, I reported from Laos, an economically primitive land where a pencil was a prize gift to students. It is staggering to me that the death we visited upon a people, then largely ignorant of life in America, still should be ongoing. The technology to manufacture the cluster bombs and the deadly bomblets they contain has since expanded to most of the world, and they have been used by at least 15 nations. As a recent Congressional Research Service report noted: "Cluster munitions were used by the Soviets in Afghanistan, by the British in the Falklands, by the Coalition in the Gulf War, and by the warring factions in Yugoslavia. In Kosovo and Yugoslavia in 1999, NATO forces dropped 1,765 cluster bombs containing approximately 295,000 submunitions. From 2001 through 2002, the United States dropped 1,228 cluster bombs containing 248,056 submunitions in Afghanistan, and U.S. and British forces used almost 13,000 cluster munitions containing an estimated 1.8 million to 2 million submunitions during the first three weeks of combat in Iraq in 2003." Israel is said to have dropped almost 1 million unexploded bomblets in Lebanon in the 2006 war against Hezbollah, which fired 113 cluster bombs filled with thousands of bomblets at targets in northern Israel. I list all those dreary statistics to drive home the point that the horror of two pressure cooker bombs in Boston that has so traumatized us should help us grasp the significance of the 1.8 million bomblets dropped in Iraq over a three-week period. Obama was right to blast the use of weapons that targeted civilians in Boston as inherent acts of terrorism, but by what standard do such weapons change their nature when they are deployed by governments against civilians? On Aug. 1, 2010, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, banning such weapons, became a matter of international law for the 111 nations, including 18 NATO members, that signed the agreement. The U.S. was not one of them. Current American policy, according to the Congressional Research Service report, is that "cluster munitions are available for use by every combat aircraft in the U.S. inventory; they are integral to every Army or Marine maneuver element and in some cases constitute up to 50 percent of tactical indirect fire support." However, there is new legislation pending in Congress that would require the president to certify that cluster munitions would "only be used against clearly defined military targets" and not deployed "where civilians are known to be present or in areas normally inhabited by civilians." Lots of luck with that.

Shear & Baker, NYTWASHINGTON — Senator Mark Begich, Democrat of Alaska, asked President Obama’s administration for a little favor last month. Send your new interior secretary this spring to discuss a long-simmering dispute over construction of a road through a wildlife refuge, Mr. Begich asked in a letter. The administration said yes.

Eugene Robinson, Washington PostWASHINGTON -- The nation demonstrated again last week how resolute it can be when threatened by murderous terrorists -- and how helpless when ordered to heel by smug lobbyists for the gun industry.Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's deadly rampage through the Boston area provoked not fear but defiance. Even before one brother was killed and the other captured, the city was impatient to get back to normal -- eager to show the world that unspeakable violence might shock, sadden and enrage, but would never intimidate. "Sweet Caroline," the perennial eighth-inning singalong at Fenway...

Chertoff & Lawrence, WSJ

What are the chances comprehensive immigration reform is actually going to happen this year? Your guess is really as good as mine, since we're only at the beginning of a very long path -- one that leads to Obama's desk, but one that also has a lot of dead-ends and side branchings off to legislative doom. Whether a bill can make it through the Senate and (especially) the Republican-controlled House is a very open question, even without the complications of the Boston Marathon bombers. I'm not going to directly address the impact the Boston terrorism will have on the immigration debate today, because immigration reform foes will always have plenty of other issues they can bring up in an effort to halt the bill in its tracks. So I don't think the political calculus changes all that much due to Boston, to tell the truth. I could always be wrong about that, but then I could be wrong about any of this stuff. The first battles over immigration reform will happen in Pat Leahy's Senate committee. The second round of battles will happen on the floor of the Senate. In both cases, there will be attempts to push the bill so far in one direction or another that it becomes impossible to pass with bipartisan support. Bipartisan support will indeed be necessary for any bill to pass, especially after it gets through the Senate. The "Gang of Eight" bill has already come farther than some skeptics ever thought it would (myself among them, at times, as full disclosure). Democrats have already won an enormous battle both in the legislation and in the world of political messaging, through their insistence on a "path to citizenship." This was a huge concession for Republicans to agree to, and it is now permanently framed as the minimum any bill must achieve. That's a big victory, right at the start, and people should realize how significant a victory it truly is. This victory was made possible by the 2012 election, of course. Republicans knew they pretty much had to have an immigration bill to support, and so they have already agreed to the path to citizenship before the debate even really starts. Some Republicans, that is. Others will be looking to ways to make that path to citizenship as long and as hard as possible, and they will do this in various ways. Look for increasingly impossible "triggers" to be proposed that have to be met before anyone even starts the process of becoming a citizen. Most of these will likely be voted down in committee, due to the Democrats' edge in the Senate. But there will be some fierce battles on the Senate floor, where pretty much everything is going to require 60 votes to move forward. Assuming the four Republicans responsible for drafting the bill with Democrats continue to support their own work, and also assuming Democrats hold their votes together, this really means only convincing one more Republican to support the Democrats' position. Also assuming Democrats hang tough, any Republican amendment that doesn't actually improve the bill (rather than attempting to doom it) will likely not pass muster. These are all very large assumptions, I realize. But I'm feeling optimistic, at least about the Senate. I think that not only will the core legislation remain intact, but that nothing too odious will be attached to it before the final vote. And I'm going to go way out on a limb and predict that the bill won't just pass, it'll pass rather overwhelmingly on that final vote. Many Republicans will fight hard for poison-pill amendments, lose, and then oh-so-reluctantly decide to support the final bill in the end. Remember, all it will take is one additional Republican to support it, and we're already at 60 votes (maybe they should have formed a "Gang of Ten," to avoid this problem?). When the rest of the Republicans realize that the bill's going to pass no matter what, then they're going to have to ask themselves what the whole point of this exercise is for their party in the first place. After getting shellacked among Latino and Asian voters, they're supposed to be painting a happier face on their party's brand, after all. So, given the excuse of "it would've passed anyway," I foresee a whole bunch of Republicans getting on board at the last minute, eager to be perceived as being on the right side of history. The final vote tally will be at least 70 or 75 in favor, and I could even see it higher than 80. Hey, I warned you I was going out on a limb. This will put an immense amount of pressure on the House Republicans, and John Boehner in particular. He will not be able to use the stock GOP line "Senate Democrats are trying to ram this down our throats," because with that kind of bipartisan support, he'd look like a fool if he tried to do so. This is where I get more pessimistic. The House will be forced to act, but they're going to drag their feet as much as possible. My guess as to how this will play out is that at some point in the debate (perhaps when a bill reaches the Senate floor) there will be a "House Republican alternative" bill proposed. This will not achieve anywhere near the goals set out in the Senate, and may not even include a path to citizenship at all. If such a path is actually included, look for the triggers, hurdles, and conditions before it happens to make it all but an impossibility in real life. The House will move forward with this shell-game bill, but even such a watered-down approach is still going to cause a ferocious intra-party fight. There are many Republicans in the House who would vote right now for "self-deportation" to become official government policy, to put this another way. There are probably even a handful of House Republicans who would stand up and vote for a "send them all home next week" bill, at least until they were presented with a cost estimate for doing so, that is. Such Republican hardliners are not particularly concerned with the party's overall image, and they are not concerned in the slightest over their prospects for re-election back home in their safely-gerrymandered districts. So look for them to rant and rave no matter what immigration reform bill is proposed. The real question is what Boehner and the House Republican leadership will do in the face of this opposition. Will they denounce the more extremist language that is sure to be uttered? Will they try to convince the hardliners that Republicans will be committing electoral suicide if nothing passes? Will they actively reach out to (gasp!) Nancy Pelosi and try to pass a bill with just enough Republican support to counter the hardliners? My guess at this point is in the realm of cautious optimism. House Republicans will put together a package that is as "tough" as they can make it without losing all Democratic support whatsoever. This will be seen as a necessity for Boehner, because if he can't move a House bill, he will be under enormous pressure to just introduce the Senate-passed bill intact, on the House floor. He will be under pressure to do so anyway, which he can use to strongarm a few of his fellow Republicans into passing a separate House bill, which he can sell to them as "better than the Senate version." Although it will cause a deep divide in his own party, I'm betting that Boehner actually pulls off this trick and passes some sort of House bill. Because, by doing so, Boehner's House Republicans will wind up with a lot better bargaining position and a lot more political leverage. If a House bill passes and a Senate bill passes and they don't match, then both pieces of legislation will move to a conference committee. This is the stage I reserve my deepest pessimism for. Because this is the point where actually passing a bill becomes less important to the politicians (read: Republicans) who are more concerned with "sending a political message" than in "actually fixing a problem." If the House manages to pass a bill, then Boehner can appoint some hardliners to the conference committee, which will all but guarantee that no workable compromise with the Senate can ever be reached. Republicans, at this point, may figure that it won't matter much politically if the reform effort winds up dying in such a committee. They'll figure that they have inoculated themselves on the issue, and will be able to campaign on "We passed comprehensive immigration reform, but the Democrats killed it!" and it'll do just as much good among Latinos as if Obama actually signs a bill into law. I am extremely optimistic that a comprehensive immigration bill can pass the Senate, and with overwhelming support. I am a lot less optimistic that any immigration bill whatsoever can pass the House, but I think the chances for passing their own bill (rather than the Senate's) are greater. But I have no idea that, should I be right about those first two steps, any bill will emerge from conference committee. The longer they take to try to hash out some sort of compromise, the closer Congress will get to the 2014 election season. If Republicans think that "we tried our hardest" is going to work for them out on the campaign trail, then I could (sadly) see the whole thing fall apart at the end. I do hope I'm wrong about that last part, I truly do. But, at this juncture, I honestly do see it as a strong possibility.   Chris Weigant blogs at: Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigantBecome a fan of Chris on The Huffington Post  

The right wing would have us believe that the secret to success is less government intervention and less help for the common man. Recently they've taken aim at minimum wage. An op-ed published on Yahoo! Finance by Robert Weinstein is the latest effort by conservatives to discredit the social safety net. Citing higher prices and American Samoa, Weinstein argues that minimum wage does more harm than good. Once again I will answer the question of whether there is any validity to such claims. Weinstein asserts that American Samoa is the perfect testing ground for minimum wage legislation. "The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 was to increase the minimum wage of American Samoa's workers 50 cents per year until the minimum wage was equal to the rest of United States," he claims. "As a result, some American Samoa's workers received an increase in 2009; however, shortly after, workers were laid off and unemployment increased to around 20%." Unfortunately, Mr. Weinstein did not cite where he came up with these figures, and I have been unable to verify them, because the most current data from a reliable source that I could find is from 2005. However, what I can say for certain is that whether or not Weinstein is correct about the 20-percent figure, American Samoa's unemployment rate was higher in 2005, when it was at 29.8 percent. Having said that, a jump in unemployment would not be entirely unexpected in 2009, given the economic collapse that resulted from the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. The U.S., the UK, Spain, France, Denmark, Costa Rica and even China experienced increases in their unemployment rates in 2009. Mr. Weinstein's claim that consumer goods prices rise thanks to minimum wage is a canard. A quick look at U.S. history tells a very different story. After minimum wage was enacted in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standard Act, GDP shot up, as did average household income and disposable personal money income. Americans actually spent more money than they did before. Also worth noting is the fact that prices didn't drastically increase. The percent change in consumer price index on all items after the law was enacted was relatively constant for a decade. The price of food also essentially held constant, while its percentage of disposable personal income declined. Thanks to minimum wage, people had more money in their pockets and were able to spend more on luxury goods, which helped create the middle class. But hey, don't take my word for it. Let's see what experts have to say about minimum wage. A letter to Congress and President Obama from a list of prominent economists, including Robert Frank (H. J. Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell University), Lawrence Katz (Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University), Richard Freeman (Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University), Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel laureate and Professor of Economics at Columbia University) and Laura Tyson (Professor of Global Management at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley), explains: In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market. In spite of Weinstein's claims that all the arguments for minimum wage are "emotional," the truth seems more to the contrary with such a prestigious list of economists contradicting him. The New Deal is commonly credited with creating America's modern middle class, and the efficacy of its programs has been a thorn in the side of those who believe in laissez-faire. The idea that if we make companies treat their workers better, we won't get our low prices is akin to saying, "My standard of living doesn't matter as long as I can get $20 off the cost of my iPhone." Aside from being completely degrading, arguments like these are simply an effort to dismantle the New Deal, whose legacy has been the corner stone of Democratic and progressive electoral strategy for decades.