Lone Star Blues

THE 2012 presidential race in Texas might as well have been in Mexico, so little did the Democrats campaign for the state’s 38 electoral votes.

Yet during a fund-raising swing on a sweltering July day, President Obama let a political secret out of the bag for his rich donors. “You’re not considered one of the battleground states,” he said, “although that’s going to be changing soon.”

Democrats are champing at the bit to turn Texas blue. “People are now looking at Texas and saying: ‘That’s where we need to make our next investment. That’s where the next opportunity lies,’ ” one Democratic state senator told Politico. There’s even optimistic chatter of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s capturing the state in 2016 if she runs for president.

But it’s going to take more than money or a Clinton. The only constant in politics may be change, but turning Texas blue — or even purple — is going to be a lot harder than most folks imagine. It will require hard work, political infrastructure and a vision of Hispanic voters that goes beyond immigration reform.

Texas was reliably Democratic for more than a century, from Reconstruction through the Lyndon B. Johnson years. Johnson ably — albeit cynically and sometimes illegally — harnessed the Hispanic vote to keep his more reactionary opponents off balance in primaries.

But the liberal 1960s drove white conservatives into what was once a minuscule Republican Party. With the help of Rust Belt migrants in the 1970s, Republican strength grew under John G. Tower, Bill Clements and the elder George Bush.

In 1994, Mr. Bush’s son George pushed that indomitable Texas Democrat, Ann W. Richards, from the governor’s office, after which his consigliere, Karl Rove, engineered a generation of Republican domination. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, though strong in southern Texas and in some cities, withered as a statewide organization.

Now, though, Democrats are hopeful that the immovable object — the overwhelmingly male, conservative Republican power structure — is about to meet the unstoppable force: demography. Texas is home to 9.5 million Hispanics, about 38 percent of the population, just seven points behind the non-Hispanic white population. In 2020, Hispanics will begin to surpass the white population and will outright dwarf it in 2030.

But the Hispanic vote is not monolithically Democratic, nationally or in Texas. In 2004, 40 percent of Texas Hispanics backed George W. Bush for re-election. In 2010, Rick Perry got almost 40 percent of the Hispanic vote statewide, and nearly half in South Texas, the purported base for Democratic growth.

Then there is the problem of Democratic infrastructure: there hasn’t been one for years. In 1995, Ron Kirk forged a coalition of Hispanics and African-Americans to become the first black mayor of Dallas, but he could not do the same statewide; he lost a Senate race to John Cornyn in 2002.

That same year, the millionaire oilman Tony Sanchez, a Democrat running for governor, had money, a Mexican heritage and an ability to appeal to Mexican-American voters. For it, he still lost 35 percent of the Hispanic vote to Mr. Perry, who claimed the governor’s mansion.

But the biggest problem is voter participation. Only about half of eligible Hispanic voters show up nationwide; this edged up slightly in 2012 to 53 percent. In Texas, just 4.1 million Hispanics are registered to vote, and only about half of them make it to the voting booth.

Why? There are a variety of explanations, including cultural ones. It’s pretty easy to feel disenfranchised by a political system that talks about you as an “immigrant” or, worse, an “alien.”

The Democrats have a few things working for them. The national Republican Party and its immigrant-bashing tendencies is one, of course. And it has hitched its outreach wagon to two senators — Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas — who are Cuban-American, a difference that may seem minor to non-Hispanics but that significantly diminishes their appeal to Texas’ Latinos, who are primarily of Mexican heritage. (Indeed, the Canadian-born Mr. Cruz actually got fewer Hispanic votes last year than Mr. Cornyn did in 2008.)

It may be that the demographic wave makes all this beside the point, and that increasing turnout among Hispanics just a little might make a big difference.

But that requires ground troops, voter education and turnout efforts over a multicycle campaign. It also requires that Democrats stop assuming they’re going to lose. “If we start treating this as a purple state,” said Matt Glazer of the activist group Progress Texas, “we would be one that much sooner.”

That also assumes that Republicans continue on their present, self-destructive course. If they moderate their anti-immigrant message, they might cut into the gains that optimistic Democrats are taking for granted.

Aside from get-out-the-vote efforts and pro-immigrant posturing, the Democrats need to develop a better understanding of Texas Hispanics as more than just immigrants. Their No. 1 issue: jobs. Polling and focus groups by the University of Texas political scientist Daron Shaw suggest that economic themes — including education and entrepreneurship — may draw Hispanics to vote in greater numbers. But as long as both parties see voters as mere immigrants, he said, “Hispanics are going to look at the candidate as just another politician.”

It has been 36 years since the Democrats last captured Texas in a presidential election. It could well happen again. But to make it happen, they have to look beyond demographics and start focusing on the hard, long road of party building first.

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G.O.P. Is Resisting Obama Pressure on Tax Increase

WASHINGTON — House Republicans, shrugging off rising pressure from President Obama, are resolutely opposing new tax increases to head off $85 billion in across-the-board spending reductions, all but ensuring the cuts will go into force March 1 and probably remain in place for months, if not longer.

Representative Martha Roby, Republican of Alabama, said on Wednesday, "It's unconscionable to use our military men and women in uniform as a bargaining chip to raise our taxes."

Seeking to Avoid the SequesterDespite new calls from the White House on Wednesday to enact a combination of tax increases and cuts to postpone the so-called sequester, the House is moving forward on a legislative agenda that assumes deep and arbitrary cuts to defense and domestic programs — once considered unthinkable — will remain in place through the end of the year.

Congressional Republicans have relented in the most recent fiscal showdowns with the White House. But lawmakers say they have no intention of surrendering in this one even though Mr. Obama has raised the potential of widespread disruptions in government services and even military operations in the weeks ahead. The president’s January fiscal victory, which yielded increases in income, capital gains and dividend tax rates on affluent families, has only bolstered Republican resolve.

“The president says he has to have tax increases to head off the sequester. Well, he already got his tax increase,” Representative Martha Roby, Republican of Alabama, said in an interview Wednesday after visiting the town just outside of the Army’s Fort Rucker, which stands to take a deep hit this spring. “It’s unconscionable to use our military men and women in uniform as a bargaining chip to raise our taxes.”

House Republicans say they believe they have politically inoculated themselves against claims they are responsible for the cuts by approving measures last year that would have substituted reductions in government programs like food stamps for the lower Pentagon spending. Party strategists have advised Republican members to aggressively blame the president for the creation of the automatic cuts and the failure to stop them.

Taking steps to avoid a full government shutdown at the end of March, the House Appropriations Committee as soon as next week will introduce legislation to keep the government financed through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, but do nothing to stop the pending cuts.

The current stopgap spending measure expires March 27, and Republican leaders are eager to avoid an Easter-week shuttering of the government. In recent days, Mr. Obama has sought to force Republicans into negotiations: a Saturday radio address criticizing “the current Republican plan” that “puts the burden of avoiding those cuts mainly on seniors and middle-class families”; a news conference on Tuesday with uniformed first responders whose jobs might be threatened; and on Wednesday, local television interviews broadcast in eight media markets, from Hawaii to South Carolina, urging Republicans to accept his “balanced approach” to unwind the cuts or accept responsibility for their consequences.

But House Republicans say they are feeling invulnerable in the current clash. Not only can they point to last year’s bills to replace the cuts, but redistricting has made most of them immune to political threats and entreaties. For many representing conservative districts where the president holds little sway, an attack by Mr. Obama is a badge of honor, senior Republican House aides say.

In the last showdowns won by the president, inaction was seen as intolerable. Had Republicans done nothing in 2011, a temporary payroll tax would have lapsed without offsetting tax cuts to ease the blow. On Jan. 1, every tax cut of the Bush administration would have expired at once had the Republicans not relented and let some taxes rise. This time, Republicans need not do anything and deep spending cuts they have demanded for years will go into force automatically.

Speaker John A. Boehner wrote in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday: “As the president’s outrage about the sequester grows in coming days, Republicans have a simple response: Mr. President, we agree that your sequester is bad policy. What spending are you willing to cut to replace it?”

And the speaker sought to turn the blame back on the president after Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta on Wednesday fired off a letter, warning that he will have to furlough a large number of Pentagon civilian staff members, “forgo critical objectives” and “do real harm to our national security” because of the cuts.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An earlier version of the article inaccurately identified the military base Representative Martha Roby had toured. It was Fort Rucker, not Maxwell Air Force Base.

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Senate Democrats, Accusing G.O.P. of Obstruction, Try to Force Hagel Vote

Mr. Hagel’s nomination was endorsed by the Senate Armed Services Committee along party lines on Tuesday. But with Republicans demanding more information before allowing a vote on Mr. Hagel by the full Senate, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, took procedural steps to limit floor debate on his nomination and bring the partisan clash to a head by Saturday.

“This is the first time in the history of our country that a presidential nominee for secretary of defense has been filibustered,” Mr. Reid said on the Senate floor. “What a shame. But that’s the way it is.”

Republicans, sensitive to the accusation that they were filibustering Mr. Hagel, tried to draw a distinction between a filibuster and delaying the vote because of unanswered questions.

“There’s nothing unusual about this,” said Senator James M. Inhofe, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who on Tuesday suggested without evidence that Mr. Hagel was “cozy” with Iran, an accusation that caused the committee meeting to erupt with Democratic outrage. “There’s not a filibuster,” he added.

Even if Republicans succeeded in dragging out the vote into the weekend, Democrats said they remained confident that he would be confirmed by Saturday because Republicans did not appear to have the 40 votes necessary to block the nomination. Such a move would be an extraordinary step, and one that Republicans seem wary of taking should they find themselves in the White House four years from now.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, meanwhile, said on Wednesday that he intended to try to block the nomination of John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s choice to be director of the C.I.A., until Mr. Brennan provides answers to questions he had on the scope and legality of the Obama administration’s drone operations. Democrats have also sought to extract more information from the White House about those operations.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the Intelligence Committee chairwoman, said she expected to schedule a committee vote on Mr. Brennan’s nomination when the Senate returned from recess the week after next. She said that Mr. Brennan would make a “strong and capable C.I.A. director.”

According to the Senate’s historian, Donald A. Ritchie, only 5 percent of presidential cabinet nominees have been blocked or rejected by the Senate. Only twice since 1917, when the Senate’s modern filibuster rules were created, has a cabinet-level nominee been subject to a supermajority vote of 60, as Republicans are forcing with Mr. Hagel.

In the case of Mr. Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, the opposition is especially striking because senators have traditionally afforded their former colleagues a high level of courtesy. But many Republicans still nurse a grievance against Mr. Hagel for his opposition to the war in Iraq, and others have sought to make an issue of statements he has made on Israel and Iran. Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona want the Obama administration to provide information about the timeline of its actions on the day of the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, an episode that has become a point of conservative ire against the president.

When Mr. Hagel testified before the Armed Services Committee he was pummeled.

As Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, Mr. Brennan has been the chief architect of the administration’s drone policy, and his nomination has focused new attention on it. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said that he planned in the coming months to work with lawmakers to “ensure not only that our targeting, detention and prosecution of terrorists remain consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances, but that our efforts are even more transparent to the American people and to the world.”

White House officials on Wednesday did not give any details about Mr. Obama’s plans for more transparency about the targeted killing program, which has long been shrouded in secrecy.

Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have expressed frustration that the White House has not allowed lawmakers to read the legal memos, written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provide the justification for the targeted killing operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere and that have been expanded during the Obama administration.

The committee said that the Justice Department had written 11 secret legal memorandums related to the targeted killing of terrorism suspects but said the Obama administration had shown the committee only four of them.

Senator Feinstein did, however, provide new details about the extent to which her committee has been briefed by the administration about drone strikes.

“The committee has devoted significant time and attention to targeted killings by drones,” she said in a statement. “The committee receives notifications with key details of each strike shortly after it occurs, and the committee holds regular briefings and hearings on these operations” to review their basis and effectiveness.

She added that Intelligence Committee staff members had held 35 monthly oversight meetings with government officials “to review strike records (including video footage) and question every aspect of the program.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

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In the Rockies, Growing Support for Renewables

State of the Rockies Project, Colorado College A regional poll found significant support for greater investment in wind and solar power.

A new poll tracking the conservation attitudes of residents of the six Rocky Mountain States shows that support is strong for greater protection of public lands and investment in renewable energy. It also offers some clues to why public policy does not dovetail with public opinion in those areas.

In early January, two polling companies questioned 2,400 registered voters across Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Brendan Boepple, program coordinator for Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project, said the results highlighted “the disparity between the reality and the rhetoric among Western voters.”

In a region where fossil fuel extraction has long been an economic linchpin, wind and solar ranked first in most states when voters were asked what two energy sources they wanted to see more money spent on.

In Arizona, for example, greater investment in solar energy was supported by 74 percent of those polled, and wind, by 43 percent. Support for more oil drilling and coal extraction registered at just 8 percent and 6 percent, respectively. (Support for solar power was far lower in Montana and Wyoming, however.)

“Overwhelmingly, they’re pointing to renewables,” said Lori Weigel, a partner with Public Opinion Strategies, which regularly conducts polling for the Republican Party. The other polling firm, Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates, is associated with the Democratic Party.

A majority of respondents said that while some public lands should be drilled, environmentally sensitive places should be off limits forever. Ms. Weigel said the poll indicates that Rocky Mountain residents want a better balance.

“They don’t want to shut the door on development, but it’s pretty clear they want to see more protection,” she said. “They want to make sure that their clean water, clean air, wildlife and places to recreate are protected.”

The poll was released on Thursday, a day after the Obama administration announced the nomination of Sally Jewell as the new secretary of the interior. Ms. Jewell’s blend of oil expertise, enthusiasm for the outdoors and conservation advocacy is viewed by some as emblematic of the evolving land ethic across the Rocky Mountain states.

The survey results also come on the heels of a speech in Washington in which Bruce Babbitt, a former interior secretary, admonished the Obama administration for opening public lands to drilling without making commensurate conservation efforts.

Nine in ten people polled said that national parks, forests, monuments and wildlife preserves are essential to the economy. Three in four said that those lands furnish good jobs, and more than seven in 10 said that no public lands should be sold to private corporations.

Three in five said that drilling should not be allowed in “critical locations” near recreation areas, water sources or wildlife. Only 35 percent said that more public lands should be opened to “responsible energy development.”

To reflect the region’s changing demographics, the poll was also conducted in Spanish. Sixty-four percent of Latino respondents described themselves as pro-conservationist, virtually mirroring the result for the Rocky Mountain states as a whole.

While support for more conservation has remained constant during the three years since the poll began, David Metz, who works for the Democratic-leaning polling company Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates, said he set out this year to understand why western politics and policy depart in some ways from public opinion.

He learned that 54 percent of Rocky Mountain residents are unaware of how their leaders have voted with regard to protecting land, air and water. “People don’t have a clear idea of what their elected officials are doing,” Mr. Metz said.

For example, more than two-thirds of people interviewed either said that no drilling was taking place on public lands or that they didn’t have enough information to answer whether it was or not. In reality, 38 million public acres across the United States, including land in 42 national park units are leased for oil and gas drilling, something that most western lawmakers support.

“There’s a mismatch,” Mr. Metz said. “One of our goals with this poll is to show a common scientific set of data to better connect where public officials are and where the public is.”

The poll suggested that voters would have a “more favorable” impression of any candidate who voiced support for public land protection. But the degree varied depending on the candidate’s party affiliation.

The results suggest that Republican candidates stand to gain the most by championing land conservation; a Republican candidate who took that stance would draw support from more Democratic voters than a Democratic candidate would from Republicans.

Walt Hecox, faculty director for the State of the Rockies Project, argues that politicians should pay close attention to the study. “Westerners see the permanent protection of their public lands as an economic imperative and essential to their quality of life,” he said in a statement. “Decision-makers would do well to take notice.”

The poll also showed that while 85 percent of Rocky Mountain residents engage in at least one outdoor recreational activity, 83 percent of parents worry that children don’t spend enough time outside.

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Small Shift in Numbers Gives House Democrats a Fresh Shot at Relevance

Joe Straus became the speaker of the Texas House in 2009, when Democrats and Republicans had nearly even numbers in that body.

Every deal had to be brokered. Party lines were soft.

Republicans clobbered the Democrats in the 2010 elections and ran over them in Mr. Straus’s second term as speaker. They had a supermajority, and they acted like it.

As a bloc of votes, the Democrats were broken. Demoralized, they never coalesced behind any particular leader. They had a caucus head in Representative Jessica Farrar of Houston. And they had a brawler, Representative Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio. But the Democrats did not show up as a unified force in 2011.

Now they get to choose between cooperation and resistance, and you can find Texas Democrats in both camps. The trick for their leaders is to figure out where they want to go. In Mr. Straus, they have a speaker who is probably less of what they fear from the right than any of his would-be replacements might be.

If Republicans who don’t like Mr. Straus are right, he is more moderate than the rest of the party. And if that’s the case, how could the Democrats do better? On the other hand, they are Democrats: any Republican successes weigh against them, and some would prefer to oppose Straus and Company no matter what.

Some important things have changed since the last time around.

The 2010 election left Republicans with the idea that they didn’t need to compromise on anything, what with a supermajority and the national mood coming out of those midterm elections. Moderate Republicans mostly stuck with their party even when they didn’t like what was being served, because the alternative was a potentially risky primary in 2012 with a more conservative Republican at home.

Two years ago, the governor was putting together his bona fides for what turned out to be a presidential run. Remember that list of “emergency issues” at the beginning of the session two years ago? Sanctuary cities, photo identification for voters, state-mandated pre-abortion sonograms and eminent domain protection were all tailored to please Republican primary voters.

The formula is different this time. Republicans don’t have a supermajority in either chamber of the Legislature, and the governor hasn’t declared anything worthy of emergency status that must be handled in the first two months of the session.

The Democrats are also in a better place. They have recovered from the spurning of 2010. Their overall numbers still stink, but not as much as before. Republicans suffered some lumps in the presidential race. The party’s urgent designs on Hispanic voters — spurred by the presidential results — has made some Republican lawmakers more interested in dealing with Hispanic lawmakers of either party.

Instead of Republicans pillaging and looting in 2011 in a Texas House that had previously been evenly balanced, this session finds Democrats seeking a way back into power and Republicans trying to woo Latinos and also needing alliances with Democrats on some votes.

The early days of a legislative session are marked with warm and optimistic feelings, so it’s hard to tell how the relationships will go. But even if the parties hated each other, they would have to work together on some things.

It’s a Republican room — 95 members versus 55 — but some things require 100 votes or more. The Republicans can’t get there alone, but members from both parties wonder whether anyone can pull together a regular Democratic voting bloc.

The Democrats started the session by electing Representative Yvonne Davis of Dallas to lead the caucus. She is not known as a great orator. You are unlikely to see her very often on television — she doesn’t particularly like having her picture taken. But she is one of the best in the House at working members and votes on the floor, putting deals together, and she can raise money for the caucus.

And Mr. Martinez Fischer, who heads the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, which includes 37 of the 55 Democratic members, is still around.

Last week, he was part of a bipartisan group working to restore some of the education cuts made last session. Ms. Davis was working the floor on a linked appropriations bill.

Mr. Straus and the others are in there, too, wondering if it will be different this year. Will anyone follow the leaders?

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Senate Democrats Offer a Proposal to Head Off Automatic Cuts

The Democratic proposal would establish a 30-percent minimum tax rate on incomes over $1 million to raise about $54 billion over 10 years. It would raise $1 billion more by subjecting tar sands oil to a tax to pay for oil-spill cleanups and by ending a business tax deduction for the cost of moving equipment overseas.

The remaining $55 billion would come from $27.5 billion in defense cuts from 2015 to 2021 and $27.5 billion in farm-subsidy cuts.

The legislation is more a bargaining position than a solution. Republicans have said they will not accept any new taxes in a deal to head off the so-called sequester — across-the-board cuts to defense and domestic programs of 5 percent to 8 percent and totaling about $1 trillion over 10 years. But Senate Democratic leaders said Thursday that their party must rally support around an alternative to try to move negotiations forward.

“This bill is an important chess piece,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate.

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio on Thursday repeated his demand that the Senate take the first steps to replace the spending cuts before the House considers its move, but no one predicted that the Senate Democrats’ proposal would rally the bipartisan support needed to overcome a near-certain Republican filibuster and reach the House.

“I would hope that we can get to 51 votes, and that majority would rule,” said Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I’m confident we will have the majority — if not the totality — of the Democratic caucus.”

Senate Democrats emerged from a protracted lunch meeting over the plan voicing only grudging support. Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee, said he worried that wringing savings from farm subsidies now instead of in a broad farm bill would make it harder to pass an overhaul of agricultural programs that has been stalled for nearly a year.

Senators Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, and Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, denounced the 50-50 mix of cuts and taxes, after Democrats have swallowed far more spending cuts than tax increases over two years of deficit-reduction efforts.

Republicans dismissed the proposal as a worthless gimmick.

“This is not a solution — even they know it can’t pass; that’s the idea,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. “It’s a political stunt.”

The White House praised the package. Jay Carney, the press secretary, called it a “balanced plan to avoid across-the-board budget cuts that will hurt kids, seniors, and our men and women in uniform.”

“Republicans in Congress face a simple choice,” he added. “Do they protect investments in education, health care and national defense, or do they continue to prioritize and protect tax loopholes that benefit the very few at the expense of middle- and working-class Americans?”

As the cuts approach, warnings of disaster are growing increasingly dire. The Senate Appropriations Committee released a barrage of letters from agencies spelling out how the cuts would be meted out: 600,000 low-income women and children dropped from federal nutrition programs; meat and poultry plants forced to close because of furloughed federal inspectors; deep cuts to the poor school systems that rely most heavily on federal assistance; delayed permits for oil and gas production; and shorter seasons, reduced operating hours and possible park closings in the national park system. Job losses could reach 750,000 this year, said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.

While Republicans and Democrats agree the cuts would be destructive, neither side seems ready to negotiate a solution. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, reached out to Mr. Boehner on Thursday. Mr. Boehner said he told Mr. Reid what he has been saying publicly: The House will look at what the Senate can produce.

“This sequester was the president’s idea,” Mr. Boehner said. “His party needs to follow through on their plans to replace it.”

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Duke Energy Loan for Democrats' Convention Remains Unpaid

When Duke Energy extended a $10 million line of credit to the committee organizing the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C., last summer, it seemed to be a sign that President Obama would not make good on his pledge to keep his party’s nominating festivities free of corporate favor banking.

The money would have to be paid back, organizers said.

Except that so far, it hasn’t been. The Los Angeles Times reports that the loan remains outstanding, with just a couple of weeks left until it is due to be paid back.

Democrats acknowledged over the summer that the president’s pledge had set a very high bar and that without corporate giving, they were having a hard time coming up with enough small-donor financing to fill the void. And the host committee had already begun to break the pledge by setting up a nonprofit corporation to collect corporate dollars for events outside of the convention hall – like a big welcome party for the news media showcasing Charlotte businesses and a Labor Day festival.

But the nonprofit corporation – called New American City and financed by companies including Duke and Bank of America – wound up paying $5 million for the convention hall itself at the Time Warner Cable Arena, as The Charlotte Observer reported last fall.

The newspaper also caught the first warning sign that the committee would default on the line of credit, noting that Duke had listed it as a loss in its third-quarter report.

Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke, said that the loss of $10 million was recorded as an accounting requirement and that the company was still hopeful the committee would repay the full loan before it comes due Feb. 28. “We still hope there’s some chance to recover part or all of that money in some fashion,” he said. But, he acknowledged, a company generally counts a loss on a loan “when you think there’s a real likelihood it may not be repaid.”

With a default, the loan would effectively become a donation — a fairly large one given that the total budget for the convention was roughly $31 million.

The Democratic National Committee had no comment.

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The Tax Deal That Simplified Nothing

For more than a decade, lawmakers in both parties have lamented the complexity of the federal tax code, even as they layered on new deductions, credits and variable tax rates intended to reward some activities and punish others.

The deal struck by the White House and Senate on New Year’s Day to head off the huge tax increases of the so-called fiscal cliff actually made matters worse on the complexity front. The highest marginal tax rate was increased to 39.6 percent from 35 percent for couples earning over $450,000 ($400,000 for individuals). In doing so, however, negotiators increased the total number of tax brackets to seven from six.

Tax rates on capital gains and dividends for families earning less than that $450,000 threshold remain at 15 percent, but those who earn more will have some of their investments taxed at 20 percent. And personal exemption and tax deduction phase-outs, known as PEP and Pease, are coming back starting at incomes as low as $250,000. President George W. Bush banished those in 2001. (PEP stands for personal exemption phaseout, and Pease for former Representative Donald J. Pease, the Ohio Democrat who created the deduction cap.)

The changes may sound like enough to make you ditch your tax-preparation software and run screaming as fast as you can to a professional accountant.

But by the end of the year, efforts in both the House and Senate to overhaul the tax code, simplify it and strip out many bewildering and contradictory tax breaks might bear fruit. That’s because both political parties have an incentive, although not the same incentive, to move forward.

“Tax reform is alive and well,” said Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “There’s such a need to simplify the code, to help the code be more competitive, to address a lot of inequities,” he said, adding that because the New Year’s tax deal did practically nothing to close loopholes and unclutter the tax code, “the road is clear.”

Republicans are being driven by a long-held desire for simplification, pressed hard by the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan. Conservatives in the House have been clamoring to take on tax reform since they swept to power in 2010. And after a year of listening sessions, tutorials and hearings, Mr. Camp and the rest of the House Republican leadership want to move forward.

For Democrats, it’s mainly about the money. The deal to avert the fiscal cliff contained tax rate increases, which President Obama has been demanding since his 2008 run for the White House. But the rate increases were not as inclusive as those he had campaigned for — he wanted tax rates to rise on incomes above $250,000, dividends to be taxed as ordinary income and inherited estates to face considerably higher rates and lower exemptions from taxation than the final deal demanded.

On the estate tax, Mr. Obama wanted to subject the value of estates over $3.5 million to a 45 percent tax, higher than the 2012 level of 35 percent on estates over $5 million. The final deal did get a higher rate — 40 percent — but kept the exemption at $5 million, or $10 million for married couples, indexed for inflation. With that indexing, the exemption comes in at about $5.1 million for 2012 — double for a couple — a level that exempts all but a tiny number of inheritances.

 By raising taxes on incomes over $400,000, Congress also effectively raised only the top marginal income tax rate, not the top two, as the president and most Democrats had wanted. (It is the “marginal” rate because it applies only to income above a certain threshold.)

Raising tax rates further won’t be simple, said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, who as a leader of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has spent more than a decade examining tax shelters and dodges. The only way to raise more revenue for deficit reduction at this point, he said, lies with a tax code overhaul that curtails or eliminates breaks that favor the affluent and hits corporations that use offshore tax structures to shelter profits.

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Democrats’ Man for Battles Will Lead New Senate Charge

Then his old boss, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, reluctantly took the helm of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, looking at another brutal map for Democrats eager to stay in control of Congress’s upper chamber. He had one demand: Keep Guy Cecil aboard.

“It was critically important that Guy stay in the job,” said Mr. Bennet, now reunited with Mr. Cecil, the former chief of staff who spent the last months of his 2010 campaign sleeping in the senator’s Colorado basement. “He is just excellent at what he does.”

Mr. Cecil’s return as executive director of the committee is notable in a city accustomed to political consultants cashing in for big money “downtown” — at lobbying firms and with influence peddlers off Capitol Hill. In 2010, Mr. Cecil helped engineer Mr. Bennet’s successful defense of his seat, one of the unexpected wins that kept Democrats in control of the Senate even as the party suffered a historic defeat in the House. Most assumed Democrats would lose the Senate as the 2012 season began. With Mr. Cecil directing forces, the party gained two seats.

But do not tell the reigning Democratic political wunderkind that he has a tough job. That only gets him started.

At 23, he was a Southern Baptist minister in Miami. Then he came out as gay, left a conservative church that would not accept him and went to Boston because it seemed diametrically opposite of the world he had fled. His first job was in retail, paying $19,990 a year.

His grandmother had started the family’s hard-knock cycle, running from an abusive marriage in Ohio to Miami, where she raised five children as a waitress for 40 years. His father is a boat mechanic in South Florida. His brother, born with a malignant neuroblastoma, was not supposed to walk, if he survived his first birthday. He is 32 now, with chronic health problems — and two children.

“I really have no need to complain about how hard my job is,” Mr. Cecil, 38, said with a shrug.

Which is a good thing, because he could have a lot to complain about.

After the struggles of 2010 and 2012, the road ahead for Senate Democrats does not look much smoother. Incumbents are likely to face tough races in the red states of Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana and North Carolina. Democratic retirements in Iowa and West Virginia have opened new fronts for Republicans eager to avoid a third strike in their quest to regain Senate control. Both parties are awaiting a decision by Senator Tim Johnson, a Democrat, about whether to run again in South Dakota.

Beyond that, freshman Democrats, swept to power in the Obama wave of 2008, face their first re-election campaigns in the swing states of Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Oregon. Only once in 75 years has the president’s party not lost seats in the midterm election of his second term.

Mr. Cecil’s goal: “To hold the majority, that’s it,” he says.

Rob Jesmer, who in 2012 was Mr. Cecil’s opposite number at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, called him “smart and relentless.”

“I’ve got a lot of respect for him,” he said.

Mr. Cecil’s approach to Senate elections goes back to the vicious 1998 re-election campaign of South Carolina’s Ernest Hollings, the last Democratic Senate victory in that state, and 2000, when he helped former Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri defeat John Ashcroft, a Republican, despite the fact that Mr. Carnahan had died in a plane crash three weeks before Election Day.

Mr. Cecil tries to resist national political winds and tailor each campaign to the particular candidates and the states they are running in. Republican campaigns tend to ride national waves, running on broad national issues like the size and scope of government, the level of taxation and the defense of the homeland. Mr. Cecil had different ideas for different Democratic candidates.

For instance, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota ran on “North Dakota values,” a languishing farm bill and essential air service to rural America. Sherrod Brown, practically buried under an avalanche of Republican advertising, ran as David against Goliath, even if he was the incumbent in Ohio.

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Expanding an already bloated federal government

(PNI) President Barack Obama's State of the Union address illustrated what a dead letter federalism is among Democrats. Not that further illustration was necessary.

Federalism holds that the national government should limit itself to things of truly national scope. Things that are primarily of local concern should be left to state and local governments.

Federalism was a big deal to the founders. They wanted an energetic national government, but one that was confined to enumerated national functions. The founders also envisioned a bright line between the federal and state governments, each sovereign within their own spheres.

We are a long way from that. Today, the Democratic Party sees virtually nothing as outside the purview of the federal government. The Republican Party talks a good game about federalism, but usually ends up undermining the principle when it acquires national power.

Today, the lines between the federal government and state and local governments are hopelessly blurred. The federal government spends over $600 billion a year on grants to state and local governments. Arizona state government receives more in federal funds than it raises in general-fund taxes.

Today, state governments operate principally as service delivery mechanisms for federal social-welfare programs. This means that there is no real political accountability for the programs, which is why they grow and function like a blob.

If Medicaid costs are spinning out of control, who's to blame and who should do something about it? The federal government that provides most of the funding and sets up the basic rules, or the state governments that actually administer the program? The food stamp program has grown astronomically of late. Purely a function of a bad economy, or is there something else going on? Whose job is it to figure that out?

President Ronald Reagan wanted to sort out the blob with his new federalism initiative, clearly making some functions, such as Medicaid, fully federal, while making other functions, including most welfare programs, fully state and local. There were some Democratic governors at the time, including Arizona's Bruce Babbitt, who were also interested in a sorting out of responsibilities.

But agreement was never reached, nothing of significance happened. So, the blob endured and grew.

Obama proposes to feed it even more. The federal government should establish manufacturing innovation institutes in economically distressed areas and provide incentive grants to states to increase the energy efficiency of homes and businesses.

The federal government should fix 70,000 bridges and create a federal fund to modernize ports and pipelines. The federal government should have a new grant program to get high-school graduates better ready for high-tech jobs. And, according to Obama, the federal government should make sure that every kid has access to high-quality preschool.

The federal government, however, does not have a greater interest in the recovery of economically distressed areas than the states in which they are located, or greater insight into how to turn them around. Every bridge in America is located in a state and local community that has a greater interest in its condition than the federal government.

Every port and pipeline in the United States is located in a state and local community. If there are gains to be had from modernizing them, local governments have a greater incentive to get it done and done right than the federal government.

Every kid in America lives in a state and local community that is more interested in his education and workplace preparedness than the federal government. What do we really have to show for the increased federal involvement in education, under George W. Bush or Obama?

The federal government is broke, and broke in a way that threatens the American economy. Proposals that it do even more are surreal, even if they are supposedly paid for. If there's loose change to be had, the federal government should use it to reduce the deficit, not further expand its reach.

It's nowhere on the horizon, but a revival of Reagan's new federalism discussion is badly needed.

Reach Robb at robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Win or lose, immigration risk for GOP

As comprehensive immigration reform continues to gain momentum, many Republicans are hopeful that passing a bill that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants will draw more Hispanics into the party.

Younger voters offer potential gains for gop

According to a June poll by Latino Decisions, 31percent of Latinos said they would be willing to vote Republican if Republicans took a lead role in passing reforms that include a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

The Republican Party also has the potential to make gains with younger Latino voters, said Gary Segura, a political-science professor at Stanford University and a principal at the polling firm.

Younger voters are less likely to have party affiliations and more likely to be open to efforts to reach out to them than older voters, he said.

About 50,000 Latino citizens in the U.S. reach voting age every month, Segura said.

But it's a big gamble for Republicans, who took a beating in November, when President Barack Obama won re-election with more than 70percent of the Latino vote and congressional candidates saw similar results.

If the effort fails, Latinos will likely blame Republicans, many of whom -- especially in the House -- remain opposed to any sort of legalization program for illegal immigrants. That result would further tarnish the party's image among Latino voters, pushing them in even greater numbers to the Democratic Party, analysts say.

If the effort succeeds, some Republicans fear it could eventually have the same effect. The reforms being debated propose giving undocumented immigrants a chance to eventually legalize their status and citizenship, which could create millions of new Democratic voters, because Latinos tend to vote Democratic.

There are an estimated 11million illegal immigrants in the U.S.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, as of March 2010, Mexicans made up about 58percent of the unauthorized immigrant population, with an estimated 6.5million people. Other nations in Latin America accounted for 23percent of unauthorized immigrants, or 2.6million people. Asia accounted for 11percent, or about 1.3million people, and Europe and Canada accounted for 4 percent, or 500,000 people. African countries and other nations represented about 3percent, or 400,000 people.

Analysts and Republican backers of reform are urging skeptics to take the long view, saying that passing immigration reform is necessary for the Republican Party to have any hope of attracting more support from the fast-growing Latino electorate, which made up 10percent of the voters in November's presidential election and includes huge numbers of young U.S.-born Latinos who are turning 18 -- voting age -- every day.

They say it is unlikely that the Republican Party will split the Latino vote with Democrats any time soon.

But passing an immigration-reform bill that includes a pathway to citizenship could help burnish the party's brand with Latinos turned off by the tough stance some Republicans have taken on immigration, helping draw at least a larger share of the Latino vote.

"I am under no illusion -- and I don't think any of my colleagues are on the Republican side -- that when we pass this, even if we are out front leading the parade, that we are going to get 50percent of the Hispanic vote next time," said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. Flake, a longtime supporter of immigration reform, is among the so-called Gang of Eight senators leading the way on reform.

Passing an immigration bill would help Republicans move beyond the immigration issue, Flake and other Republican leaders say, allowing the party to begin reaching out to Latinos on other issues, such as jobs and the economy. Those are issues Republicans believe resonate with Latino voters but have been drowned out by angry rhetoric on immigration from some members of the party.

"It's tough to talk to them about those issues when they don't think you like them," Flake said during a recent meeting with The Arizona Republic and 12 News. "And rightly or wrongly, fair or unfair, I think that's been the case over the past couple of cycles. They have a view that we don't like them very much, and I do think that has to change."

It's not just Latinos who have been put off by the Republicans embrace of tough immigration policies, Flake said.

"I don't see this just as a Hispanic problem," Flake said. "There are a lot of Republicans who have left the party or don't vote for the Republican on the ticket because they think, 'Can't we have a party or somebody running for office that has a realistic view on some things?' And I think on immigration we have not had a realistic view. I don't think self-deportation was a realistic view. So, it goes beyond the Hispanic vote."

During last year's presidential campaign, Mitt Romney said during a GOP debate in Tampa that he favored "self-deportation" over providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Obama played up the comment on the campaign trail, and it prompted Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist who worked on Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, to say on Twitter on Election Night: "Mitt Romney self-deported himself from the White House."

Principles for reform

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first immigration hearing in the chamber since a bipartisan group of senators released a blueprint for overhauling the nation's immigration system. The principles call for creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants once the nation's borders have been deemed secured, among other reforms.

In addition to Flake, the group includes three key Republicans -- Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida -- all of whom will play key roles in persuading other Republicans to reach a compromise with Democrats over the highly contentious issue.

The Democrats in the group are Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Charles Schumer of New York and Michael Bennet of Colorado.

Over the weekend, USA Today obtained a draft of a White House immigration proposal that would allow illegal immigrants to become legal permanent residents within eight years.

The plan also would provide for more security funding and require business owners to check the immigration status of new hires.

In addition, illegal immigrants could apply for a newly created "Lawful Prospective Immigrant" visa.

White House spokesman Clark Stevens told USA Today that the administration supports bipartisan efforts on immigration reform in Congress, but some read the leaked legislation as intended to pressure lawmakers into moving more quickly.

Rubio was critical of the administration's draft proposal, saying it repeats the failures of past legislation and would be "dead on arrival" in Congress.

Mark Garces, a Florida lawyer who is a spokesman for the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, a group that works to increase the number of Hispanic Republicans, said passing a bill would help prevent Latino voters from flocking to the Democratic Party.

In the past, he said, Democrats have successfully used immigration as a political "wedge issue" to divide the Republican Party and draw Latino voters away from the GOP, he said. That would be harder to do if Republicans helped pass a compromise bill with Democrats, he said.

Garces said he favors the approach proposed by the Gang of Eight, which calls for giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship as long as the border has been deemed secured, they pay fines and other penalties, and they don't receive permanent residency before others who have been waiting for years to come to the U.S. legally.

Latinos a political force

Latino voters are a powerful political force.

They made up 10percent of the electorate in the November presidential election.

And the number of eligible Latino voters is projected to skyrocket from 23.7million in 2012 to more than 40million in 2030, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Latino voters come from diverse backgrounds, but they tend to vote largely Democratic, said Joe Garcia, director of Arizona State University's Morrison Institute Latino Public Policy Center.

Even so, there are several issues important to Latino voters that "line up well" with Republicans, Garcia said.

Those issues include "family, faith, patriotism and small-business entrepreneurship," in addition to the economy and jobs, he said.

"When you get the harsh immigration-hardliner issue off the table, the GOP thinks it matches very nicely with some other key elements of what Latino voters are looking for," Garcia said. "They don't need to get all the Latino votes, they just need to get a larger chunk in order to make a difference in the elections."

The 27percent of the Latino vote that Romney received was the lowest for a Republican presidential candidate since Bob Dole received 21percent in 1996 against President Bill Clinton, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Yet while some Republican leaders have begun calling for immigration reforms, others continue to advocate for harsh immigration policies that Latino voters interpret as being anti-Hispanic, said Gary Segura, a political-science professor at Stanford University and a principal at Latino Decisions, a polling firm.

Mixed feelings

Rudy Peña, 60, a plumber who lives in Tolleson, is on the board of directors of the Arizona Republican Latino Association.

Although Peña is a "lifelong" Democrat, he usually votes Republican and voted for Romney in November.

He is adamantly opposed to Republicans supporting immigration reform for the sake of drawing more Latino voters to the Republican Party. "What it amounts to is pandering, and Latinos recognize that is pandering," Peña said.

Peña would rather see the Republican Party push for border security first as well as greater enforcement of existing immigration laws while reaching out to Latino voters on other issues such as jobs and the economy.

He has mixed feelings about giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship.

On one hand, working in the construction industry, he said he has seen firsthand "how hard they work," Peña said. On the other, he believes giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship would reward people who entered unlawfully and would be unfair to others who have tried to come to the U.S. legally.

"It really does shortchange the 5million or so who are going through the process the right way," he said. "It can't just be a question of the 11million (undocumented immigrants) who are here. What happens to the 5million who are waiting?"

Attracting more Latino voters to the Republican Party won't be easy, Segura said.

The Republican Party's image already has been badly damaged with Latino voters because of the tough stances some Republicans have taken on immigration.

"I don't hear a GOP message on immigration. I hear some senators who have reached a less-hostile position," Segura said. "But the noise coming out of the House of Representatives today and throughout the entire period has not been encouraging by any stretch. So, I don't think there is a unified Republican message on this by any measure."

In the past, Latinos tended to join the Republican Party as they gained affluence, Segura said.

But that support has been eroded because immigration tends to be a deeply personal issue for Latino voters. In a June poll by Latino Decisions, 60percent of Latino voters surveyed said they have a relative who is undocumented or know someone who is undocumented.

"The issue for the Republicans is not whether doing immigration reform is going to save them," Segura said. "It's whether not doing immigration reform is going to doom them forever."

USA Today contributed to this article.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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