Obama takes tougher line on oil spill

The Arizona law will require local and state law enforcement officers to question people about their immigration status if there's reason to suspect they're in the country illegally, making it a crime for them to lack registration documents.

AUSTIN

The Arizona law will require local and state law enforcement officers to question people about their immigration status if there's reason to suspect they're in the country illegally, making it a crime for them to lack registration documents. The law also makes it a state crime to be in the U.S. illegally.

"I fully recognize and support a state's right and obligation to protect its citizens, but I have concerns with portions of the law passed in Arizona

"For example, some aspects of the law turn law enforcement officers into immigration officials by requiring them to determine immigration status during any lawful contact with a suspected alien, taking them away from their existing law enforcement duties, which are critical to keeping citizens safe."

The Arizona law has been hailed by conservatives as long overdue and two Texas lawmakers have said they'll introduce similar immigration measures when the Texas Legislature meets next.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a U.S. Senate hearing Tuesday that a Justice Department review is under way to determine the Arizona law's constitutionality.

Though Texas is ruled by conservative Republicans, top GOP leaders from former Texas Gov. George W. Bush to Perry have rejected harsh and punitive immigration policies.

Bush continued his moderate approach to immigration once he got to the White House, often to the dismay of his conservative base.

"We need to uphold the great tradition of the melting pot that welcomes and assimilates new arrivals," Bush said in his 2007 State of the Union address. "We need to resolve the status of the immigrants that are already in our country without animosity and without amnesty."

Perry took heat during this year's Republican primary for backing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, saying in a debate that the students are on a path to citizenship.

"Texas has a rich history with Mexico, our largest trading partner, and we share more than 1,200 miles of border, more than any other state," Perry said Thursday. "As the debate on immigration reform intensifies, the focus must remain on border security and the federal government's failure to adequately protect our borders.

"Securing our border is a federal responsibility, but it is a Texas problem, and it must be addressed before comprehensive immigration reform is discussed."

April 14 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said China undervalues the yuan to promote exports, and that a more flexible currency would help the world’s third- largest economy keep inflation under control.

“Most economists agree that their currency is undervalued and has been used to promote a more export-oriented economy,” Bernanke said during testimony today to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. “It would be good for the Chinese to allow more flexibility in their exchange rate. It would give them more autonomy in their monetary policy so they could address inflation and bubbles.”

China has pegged its currency at about 6.83 to the dollar since July 2008, which some members of Congress say gives the world’s fastest growing major economy an unfair trade advantage. Last month 130 lawmakers sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner demanding the administration take actions including higher tariffs on Chinese-made imports.

President Barack Obama yesterday said the U.S. considers China’s yuan to be “undervalued” and that currencies should “roughly” track the market so that no country has an advantage in trade. He said he conveyed the U.S. position that China’s currency should have a more market-based valuation in a meeting April 12 with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Bernanke, responding to questions from Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said Chinese authorities are also subject to pressure from exporters who want to keep the yuan low against the dollar.

“I think that they are -- like we do -- they have political factors such as the influence of exporters, you know, who are interested in maintaining that strong export orientation,” he said.

Bernanke said a more flexible yuan would give China a better balance between domestic and overseas sources of growth.

“They should combine -- it would be in their interests also to combine a more flexible exchange rate with other efforts to increase domestic demand, domestic consumption and achieve a more balanced economy,” he said.

--Editors: Andrew Barden, Michael Dwyer

The trip, kept secret until Obama was on the ground, was his first to the country as president. He meets with Afghan leader Hamid Karzai to discuss government corruption, benchmarks of progress.

President Obama walks past the honor guard with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, left, at the presidential palace in Kabul. (Charles Dharapak / Associated Press)

 Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Washington - President Obama flew into Afghanistan's capital Sunday on an unannounced visit, his first trip as president to a country where tens of thousands of new U.S. troops are being deployed this year.

Obama last visited the country in 2008 as a presidential candidate. Previous attempts to visit Kabul during his presidency were cancelled because of weather problems, according to White House officials.

Afghanistan, along with neighboring Pakistan, are probably the largest foreign-policy challenges of Obama's presidency, and he has overseen a troop buildup of about 50,000 forces since he took office.

Obama was meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose relations with the West were badly strained last year by his fraud-tainted reelection. Karzai has been told unequivocally by the United States that he must clean up corruption in his government, a message Obama was to reiterate, according to aides.

Security concerns dictated that secrecy surrounded the trip, which was not announced until after the president was on the ground.

After an all-night flight, Obama arrived in Afghanistan on Air Force One shortly after 7 p.m. at Bagram airfield, the sprawling U.S. airbase north of the capital, and was met by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of Western forces in Afghanistan, and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.

Obama was then shuttled by helicopter to a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Helicopters thundered overhead in Kabul's night sky as he was flown directly to the presidential palace for talks with Karzai.

The two men emerged briefly from the presidential palace for a welcoming ceremony. At the parade grounds, the national anthem was played, and Karzai and Obama reviewed Afghan troops.

While en route to Afghanistan, National Security Advisor James Jones told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One that Obama intended to discuss benchmarks of progress with Karzai.

Obama will "engage President Karzai . . . to make him understand that in his second term, there are certain things that have been not paid attention to, almost since Day One," Jones said, according to pool reports.

Jones told reporters that Obama would like to see Karzai step up his efforts to fight corruption, use a merit-based system to appoint key government officials and also do a better job of fighting "narco-traffickers."

Also on the agenda, according to White House officials, were Afghan efforts to reconcile with members of the Taliban. In recent weeks, administration officials, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, have downplayed talk of peace negotiations, arguing that progress must be made on the battlefield before such discussions can make real progress.

Most Afghans were unaware of the nighttime visit, but some said it was long overdue.

"Of course he should have come already," said Afghan lawmaker Shukria Barakzai. "This cold relationship has damaged the whole political process in Afghanistan. Whether or not the White House likes this president, the commitment to Afghanistan should remain the same from one administration to the next."

But she added: "I'm very glad, and I'm not the only one to say so, that Obama came to Afghanistan. I hope this will be a new page for both countries."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) holds a news conference with senior citizen advocates and fellow members of Congress to discuss health-care reform legislation. (Melina Mara/the Washington Post)
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An obscure parliamentary maneuver favored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) suddenly ignited Tuesday as the latest tinder in the year-long partisan strife over reshaping the nation's health-care system, triggering debate over the strategy's legitimacy and political wisdom.

Republicans condemned Pelosi's idea -- in which House members would make a final decision on broad health-care changes without voting directly on the Senate version of the bill -- as an abuse of the legislative process.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) called it "the ultimate in Washington power grabs." Pelosi shot back: "I didn't hear any of that ferocity when the Republicans used this, perhaps, hundreds of times."

Off Capitol Hill, parliamentary experts of both parties said the tactic has been used with increasing frequency in recent years by Democrats and Republicans alike, usually earlier in the legislative process. And political analysts wrangled over whether the use of the "self-executing rule," also known as a "deem and pass," would further antagonize an electorate whose enthusiasm for Democrats has dimmed in the past year.

Legal scholars disagreed about whether it would be a constitutional way to pass the legislation. Yet even critics said they doubt that the procedure would put the measure at risk of being struck down by the courts.

"I feel pretty confident it is unconstitutional," said Michael W. McConnell, director of Stanford Law School's Constitutional Law Center and a former appellate judge appointed by President George W. Bush. "What a court would do about it is a murkier problem."

The debate centers on a parliamentary technique that is a variant on the "rule" that the House adopts for every bill that comes to a floor vote. Rules define the ground rules for the vote, including amendments, length of the debate and other terms. Under a self-executing rule, the House essentially agrees that a vote on one measure is tantamount to, or "deemed" as, deciding on something related.

In this instance, the self-executing rule would say that the Senate's version of health-care legislation would be deemed approved if House members adopt a set of changes to that bill. The Senate then would have to approve the changes, but the original bill could go directly to President Obama to be signed into law.

Pelosi has said the process would make it easier to secure the votes needed to push health-care changes across the legislative finish line. At a time when relations within Congress are frayed, it would enable House Democrats not to be on record directly as supporting the Senate measure. House Republicans are unified against the bill.

Although the speaker has embraced the idea, a decision on whether to use a self-executing rule will not be made until the House Rules Committee convenes later this week, probably on Thursday.

Republicans sought to block Democrats' path. Rep. Parker Griffith (R-Ala.), who switched political parties in December, plans to introduce a resolution that would compel the Democrats to conduct a regular vote. Outside the Capitol, hundreds of conservative activists affiliated with the "tea party" movement gathered to protest the health-care legislation. They seized on the parliamentary method, with demonstrators shouting "treason."

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs sidestepped the question of whether Obama supports the "deeming" approach. The president called on Congress last week to move forward with an "up-or-down vote" to redesign the health-care system. Gibbs told reporters Tuesday: "You're going to know where people are on health-care reform, and where they are on the president's proposal on health-care reform."

Close watchers of the debate were divided about whether the parliamentary strategy would influence public sentiment about the legislation -- or its Democratic supporters.

Robert L. Laszewski, a consultant who follows the politics of health care, predicted that the effect would be negligible, because Americans' views on the subject have solidified. Democrats "are pushing through Obamacare," he said. "You either like it or not. . . . There's not a lot of subtlety. Either people really want this to happen, or they think it's incredible arrogance. I don't think there's anybody in the middle on this."

On the other hand, Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan political analyst, said the current stage of the debate is a rare instance in which the public is focused on the process of legislating. "Voters are aware it's been pulling teeth," he said, adding that some Americans think Congress's Democratic leaders had "to give away the store to get even Democrats to pass it" and, more recently, resorted to a "reconciliation" procedure that requires fewer Senate votes to pass.

"From there, we've leapt to a totally different planet with this deeming," Rothenberg said. "I feel like I've fallen through the rabbit hole: 'Oh, they are going to not pass the bill and just pretend they passed the bill.' "

Parliamentary specialists said there is ample precedent for self-executing rules. Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution said congressional leaders of both parties are using the procedure more frequently, with 36 instances under the last Republican-led House, in 2005-06, and 49 during the immediate past session, when Democrats were in control.

Donald Wolfensberger, a former Republican staff director of the House Rules Committee who now directs the Congress Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, said this use of such a rule would be unusual, though not unprecedented, because it would send part of what the House would be voting on -- the bill already approved by the Senate -- directly to the president.

Wolfensberger said self-executing rules often have been employed at an earlier stage, rather than for final passage of a bill. He said he knows of four instances when a measure that was deemed to have been passed went directly to the White House. The first, in 1933 during the Great Depression, involved Senate amendments to legislation pertaining to the United States' creditworthiness. The tactic was employed twice in the 1990s, by Democrats on a bill involving the Family Medical Leave Act, and by Republicans on a measure involving a line-item veto. Most recently, it was used a few weeks ago, when the House voted on both an increase in the debt ceiling and a pay-as-you-go budget provision.

Stanford's McConnell said that such a procedure would be unconstitutional in this case because, in passing both the Senate legislation and the changes in the reconciliation package in a single stroke, "no one bill will then have been passed by both the House and the Senate" because the Senate still would have to approve the changes added by the House.

Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor who is a former Democratic House counsel and has written extensively about House procedure, disagreed, saying: "This is so familiar a House procedure. . . . I don't know anything in the Constitution that prevents the House from holding one vote for two bills. . . . Why would it make a difference?"