By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Island’s congressional delegation slammed the Internal Revenue Service on Monday for giving special scrutiny to conservative groups, but U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse suggested the scandal reflects a broken national campaign-finance system.

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​By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Gov. Lincoln Chafee is praising President Obama’s decision to nominate his former colleague Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel as the next U.S. defense secretary, joining U.S. Sen. Jack Reed and other Democrats in backing the pick.

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Will Massachusetts have six U.S. Senate elections in the space of eight years?

It certainly looks possible after Thursday afternoon’s announcement that Susan Rice is withdrawing from consideration as President Obama’s next secretary of state, opening the door for the president to appoint Mass. U.S. Sen. John Kerry.

If Kerry gets the job, Massachusetts could have a special election as soon as June to fill Kerry’s seat for the reminder of his term, which ends in January 2015. Potential candidates include a long list of Democrats – though not Congressman-elect Joe Kennedy III – and Republicans Scott Brown or Bill Weld.

A special election next year would be the fifth time Massachusetts residents have gone to the polls to choose a U.S. senator since November 2006.

Bay State voters re-elected Ted Kennedy for the final time that year, then re-elected Kerry in 2008, elected Scott Brown to finish Kennedy’s term in 2010, and replaced Brown with Elizabeth Warren last month. And special election or not, they will vote for U.S. senator again in 2014 when Kerry’s current term ends.

​(photo: AP/Gerald Herbert)

Rhode Island’s senior U.S. senator, Jack Reed, is the one who usually gets mentioned as a future presidential cabinet member. But his junior colleague Sheldon Whitehouse is now getting some attention, too.

Whitehouse, who won a resounding re-election victory Tuesday, is the first name on The Wall Street Journal’s list of potential successors to Attorney General Eric Holder now that President Obama has won a second term, based on “names people involved with both campaigns have been kicking around.”

However, the WSJ’s Joe Palazzolo also warned there may be no need for a new AG anytime soon: “Folks we spoke with cautioned against assuming that Mr. Holder is ready to step aside. While he isn’t expected to have a Janet Reno-like run, he may be keen for a bit more time to leave his mark.”

There’s no reason to think Whitehouse wants the job, either, considering how much he seems to enjoy being a senator. Perhaps a different high-profile job is in Whitehouse’s future, though: chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

• Related: Whitehouse dismisses more talk of getting Supreme Court seat (April 9)

By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Island officials say it’s “full speed ahead” for the state in implementing President Obama’s health care law locally after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it as constitutional. More than 50,000 more residents are expected to sign up for Medicaid at a cost of $1.9 billion over five years.

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• Related: Q&A: Lt. Gov. Roberts on what’s next for health reform in RI (June 28)

Ferguson (r) with Costantino and Roberts

“Is this the happiest day of my life? Pretty much!”

That’s what a smiling Christine Ferguson told me at a press conference this morning when I asked how it felt Thursday to see the health policy she developed as a senior aide to the late U.S. Sen. John Chafee upheld as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ferguson, who started working for Chafee’s son on Monday as head of Rhode Island’s new health insurance exchange, said unequivocally that President Obama’s signature accomplishment is what she drafted for Republicans two decades ago. ”It is based on the John Chafee bill of 1993,” she said. “It is pretty much exactly how we envisioned it.” She added: “I think it’s a great day.”

Ferguson was a key architect of the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, introduced by the senior Chafee that year as the Republican alternative to the Clinton administration’s so-called “Hillarycare” proposal. (Oddly enough, Hillary Clinton’s 1993 proposal was crafted in partnership with a Rhode Islander, too – Ira Magaziner of Greenhouse Compact fame.)

(more…)

Rhode Island native and La Salle Academy grad Tom Donilon became President Obama’s national security adviser in December 2010 after a career that included a senior gig at Fannie Mae. Donilon has been called one of Obama’s most influential advisers; he even wrote the formal orders to get Osama bin Laden.

Donilon is now getting some unwelcome publicity, Foreign Policy’s Peter Feaver reports:

Outrage over the recent national security leaks has been slowly building. It has all the signs of having legs, as they say in the business — of being a long-term Big Problem, rather than a short-term distraction. …

And the outrage is beginning to have a focus: on National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. Old Beltway hands see the dots as connecting and pointing to Donilon as the most senior, if not the earliest and certainly not the only, source. The focus may be unfair, or at least based only on circumstantial evidence. Undoubtedly others were leaking sensitive information, perhaps without the knowledge or approval of senior leaders like Donilon, let alone his boss, the president. But when folks like Tom Ricks are starting a death watch the focus is likely to stay riveted on White House advisors, and on Donilon in particular.

Feaver goes on to suggest Donilon may have already tendered his resignation, and the president may soon take him up on it to avoid a major campaign distraction. Here’s more on Donilon’s tenure.

(photo: Pete Souza/The White House)

There’s some irony in Governor Chafee’s appointment on Thursday of Christine Ferguson as director of Rhode Island’s new Health Benefits Exchange, the agency that will run the state’s Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace.

In the 1990s, Ferguson worked for Chafee’s father, Republican U.S. Sen. John Chafee, as a health policy advisor. In that role, she was a key architect of the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, Chafee’s GOP alternative to President Clinton’s health reform legislation.

“Christine Ferguson of my staff and Sheila Burke of Senator [Bob] Dole’s staff have been absolutely essential in preparing this legislation,” Chafee said on the Senate floor when he introduced the bill in November 1993. “Without their knowledge and drive and energy, we would not have this bill today.”

At the center of Chafee’s 1993 bill was a provision requiring every American to purchase health insurance by January 2005 – an individual mandate. The same policy has now become anathema to conservatives, who are hopeful the U.S. Supreme Court will rule it unconstitutional before the end of this month.

Ferguson may be one of the few constants in the two-decade health care debate – someone who put forward an individual mandate as a Republican aide in the 1990s and will now run an insurance exchange reliant on the mandate, put into law by a Democratic president and implemented by a center-left independent governor.

• Related: Today marks the first anniversary of – ‘Chafeecare’ (March 23, 2011)

The late John Chafee makes a prominent cameo in this week’s New Yorker, as Ezra Klein writes about how the individual health-insurance mandate went from Republicans’ preferred policy to conservative heresy.

Klein notes the mandate made its first legislative appearance in the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, which Rhode Island’s Republican U.S. Senator proposed in November 1993, during the fight over President Clinton’s health care bill – and it’s been part of the debate ever since:

After the Clinton bill, which called for an employer mandate, failed, Democrats came to recognize the opportunity that the Chafee bill had presented. In “The System,” David Broder and Haynes Johnson’s history of the health-care wars of the nineties, Bill Clinton concedes that it was the best chance he had of reaching a bipartisan compromise. …

Ten years later, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, began picking his way back through the history — he read “The System” four times — and he, too, came to focus on the Chafee bill. …

What is notable about the conservative response to the individual mandate is not only the speed with which a legal argument that was considered fringe in 2010 had become mainstream by 2012; it’s the implication that the Republicans spent two decades pushing legislation that was in clear violation of the nation’s founding document. …

Senator Orrin Hatch, who had been a co-sponsor of the Chafee bill, emerged as one of the mandate’s most implacable opponents in 2010, writing in The Hill that to come to “any other conclusion” than that the mandate is unconstitutional “requires treating the Constitution as the servant, rather than the master, of Congress.”

Now, 19 years after John Chafee first proposed a federal individual mandate for health insurance, the country is waiting to find out whether the U.S. Supreme Court will declare his idea unconstitutional.

• Related: Today marks the first anniversary of – ‘Chafeecare’ (March 23)

Gov. Lincoln Chafee is pretty tough on his former compatriots in the Republican Party these days. But he still has a few things in common with them.

Chafee is the only governor in the United States who signed a voter ID bill into law last year who wasn’t a Republican, The Washington Post reported Tuesday after the Obama administration blocked a new law in Texas that would require voters to show photo identification to cast a ballot.

The U.S. Justice Department does not have the legal authority to block Rhode Island’s law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, but The Post reported federal lawyers could try to do so under a different provision of the 1965 legislation. Democratic governors vetoed voter ID laws in at least five other states last year.

“Having reflected a great deal on the issue, I believe that requiring identification at the polling place is a reasonable request to ensure the accuracy and integrity of our elections,” Chafee said after signing the bill behind closed doors last July, adding that minority lawmakers’ arguments for it were “particularly compelling.”

Chafee left the Republican Party in 2007 and won the governor’s office as an independent three years later.

• Related: New Republic piece puzzles out why RI passed a voter ID law (Feb. 7)

Could the Oracle of Omaha be making a cameo in Woonsocket sometime soon?

Legendary investor Warren Buffett’s Bershire Hathaway sank quite a bit of money into shares of CVS Caremark, Rhode Island’s biggest Fortune 500 company, during the third quarter, Bloomberg reports:

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. took stakes in CVS Caremark Corp., Intel Corp. and Visa Inc. as investment manager Todd Combs builds his portfolio. …

“American companies look very cheap compared to investment alternatives,” Buffett said today in a CNBC interview. …

Berkshire held 5.66 million shares of CVS Caremark Corp., the largest U.S. provider of prescription drugs, valued at $190 million as of Sept. 30.

CVS Caremark has been on an upswing of late. Its stock closed Monday at $38.77, and it’s now regained much of the ground lost after the financial crisis struck in 2008 and then problems in its PBM division sent the shares swooning in 2009.

And that’s not all. CVS has generally favored the health reform law President Obama signed last year, and is lobbying the administration to allow its pharmacists and other employees to help consumers figure out the new health insurance exchanges the states are setting by 2014.

• Related: 1.2 billion prescriptions, and more CVS by the numbers (Feb. 22)

(h/t: Bill Hamilton)

This afternoon, President Obama declared that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year rule is “coming to an end” as rebel forces took control of Tripoli facing only isolated pockets of resistance.

U.S. Sen. Jack Reed is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and one of the Democratic Party’s most trusted voices on foreign affairs. I spoke with him this afternoon by phone about the turmoil in Libya, whether American boots may be needed on the ground there, and what Gadhafi’s ouster could mean for the neighboring regimes in Syria and Iran.

What’s your take on what’s going on in Libya at the moment?

It appears that the Gadhafi regime is collapsing and that Gadhafi is trying to flee, and that members of his family are being detailed in Tripoli. Now the challenge is to stabilize the situation, to ensure that there is law and order on the streets, and also to help the transitional government develop a legitimate form of government for the Libyan people.

But this, I think, shows the wisdom of the president’s strategy, which was to assist NATO but ultimately allow the Libyans themselves to reject Gadhafi and to establish their own form of government.

You said in March that you thought ground troops from outside Libya might need to be sent in to stabilize the situation. What’s your thinking now on whether forces should be deployed?

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One of the more interesting ideas in Governor Chafee’s first budget was RIDOT’s proposal to add tolls to I-95 – though it wasn’t necessarily a surprise, considering Rhode Island’s long-running struggle to find enough money to pay for transportation costs.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was less than enthusiastic about the idea when we interviewed him last spring. But RIDOT’s Mike Lewis wasn’t dissuaded, saying Rhode Island might be able to get one of a small number of exemptions from the rules that don’t allow states to toll existing federally funded roads.

Now tolls on I-95 are one step closer to becoming a reality in Rhode Island, Tim White and I report in a new WPRI.com story:

The Chafee administration has asked for permission to start charging drivers a toll on Interstate 95 near the Connecticut border, the Target 12 Investigators have learned.

The R.I. Department of Transportation filed an application in June asking the federal government to approve the installation of tollbooths between Exits 1 and 2 on both sides of I-95 in Hopkinton. No tolls are proposed at the Massachusetts border.

“The proposed location is considered the most feasible location to prevent toll avoidance and to gain public acceptance,” RIDOT said in the application, which Target 12 obtained this week. The documents don’t say how much the toll would be.

RIDOT said money is needed to pay for two large projects – replacing the decaying Providence Viaduct bridge that carries I-95 next to Providence Place mall and rebuilding the I-95/Route 4 interchange near Quonset Business Park – as well as ongoing maintenance projects along the 67 miles of I-95 and I-295 in Rhode Island.

Gov. Lincoln Chafee, House Speaker Gordon Fox and Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed all signed a letter on June 15 supporting the proposal to put on toll plazas the state’s main roadway.

Click here for the full article, which has much more, including Governor Chafee’s take and details on the state’s case for allowing tolls. The map at right is part of in the application.

Also, props to national outlets Stateline and The Huffington Post for their informative coverage of the proposal.

(map: R.I. Department of Transportation)

Nesi’s Nightcap will return on Thursday.

Housing is a pet issue for U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, and for months he’s been arguing that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should convert the 250,000 foreclosed homes they own into affordable rental housing. Doing so, he says, would cut down on the number of distressed properties for sale and help hold down the cost of rent.

Reed finally got some traction this week as the Obama administration announced it wants the federal government to partner with private investors to make it happen. Now the proposal is grabbing the attention of influential policy writers including The Washington Post’s Brad Plumer, Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Jared Bernstein (who recently left Vice President Biden’s office).

Time magazine’s Alison Rogers raised a number of questions about how Reed’s proposal would work in practice, but offered nothing but praise for his efforts:

Yet, with too many people in positions of power bewailing the housing crisis without taking steps to correct it, there’s something appealing in the fact that Senator Reed is at least trying to think outside the lockbox. (Sorry, bad real estate joke.) When Sen. Reed says that we all need to be more proactive and creative in healing the housing market, he’s not just talking about the problem. He’s trying to search for some kind of solution. A little more of that creative thinking might give us a nudge in the right direction.

It’s not often that members of Rhode Island’s all-Democratic congressional delegation find themselves on opposing sides of a big issue. But at least in the House, foreign policy is turning out to be an exception.

Last week, Congressman David Cicilline was part of a bipartisan coalition – 87 Republicans and 61 Democrats – that voted in favor of a bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich to end the American military intervention in Libya. Congressman Jim Langevin voted against the resolution, which was defeated by a tally of 148-265.

Cicilline told WPRI.com he saw the broad support for Kucinich’s bill – which extended from liberal Democrats like Cicilline and Jim McGovern to Tea Party Republicans like Michelle Bachmann and Jason Chaffetz – as a sign of growing concern on both sides of the aisle about the sustainability of America’s current military efforts.

“We’re already involved in Afghanistan, we’re already involved in Iraq – now we’ve begun a third operation,” Cicilline said. The country has spent an estimated $550 million on the Libyan intervention so far and is on track to spend $800 million by the end of September, “and we’re borrowing that money, adding to the debt and the deficit,” he said.

In remarks submitted for the record, Langevin urged his colleagues to defeat Kucinich’s resolution and a competing Republican one – which passed – even though he “strongly support[s] Congress’s continued oversight and debate of the mission in Libya” and believes the Obama administration’s coordination with Congress “could have been improved upon.”

“The ongoing NATO operation is intended to preserve the lives of the Libyan people,” Langevin said. “By completely removing ourselves from this effort, we weaken our global standing on human rights, risk damage to our relationship with NATO allies, and threaten our national security by putting the stability of the region in jeopardy.”

Cicilline, who called for an accelerated end to the Afghan war during his victorious campaign last year, is also among the cosponsors of a bipartisan bill that would force President Obama to deliver Congress an exit plan that includes a timeline and a completion date for operations in that country.

“I think there’s a growing recognition that we’re spending an unsustainable amount of money in Afghanistan,” estimated at $8 billion to $10 billion a month, Cicilline said. “Those cuts are being put on American taxpayers’ credit card. … The time has come to bring our troops home and to begin the transition in a responsible way with the Afghan people to NATO.”

(photo: Cicilline’s office)

When Tim White interviewed U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood last month, President Obama’s transit chief appeared to pour cold water on the Chafee administration’s proposal to put new tolls on I-95 to fund repairs.

“If a state or a governor or DOT wants to add capacity or two lanes on each side, we think that’s a good use of tolls and we have supported that kind of approach,” LaHood told Tim.

But Chafee’s transportation director, Mike Lewis, still sounded optimistic about the potential for tolls on “Newsmakers” last week, because he said adding capacity doesn’t necessarily require adding lanes – you could also change the engineering of on- and off-ramps, for example, on the I-95 bridge next to Providence Place.

Today Stateline’s Daniel Vock followed up on our stories with a closer look at the issue. After declaring that I-95 “is falling apart” in Rhode Island, Vock describes a way the state could get around the general ban on tolling roads paid for with federal tax dollars:

In 1998, Congress created a pilot program under which up to three states can start collecting tolls on existing interstates to fund improvements on those roads. So far, though, no states have used it.

Virginia and Missouri both have federal permission to move ahead with the idea, but neither has the tolls up and running. …

Pennsylvania also applied for the exception, in order to put tolls on Interstate 80 across the northern stretch of the state. The federal government rejected that plan, largely because it would have diverted some of the toll revenue from the highway to support public transit in Philadelphia. …

Rhode Island hopes to qualify for the spot left open when Pennsylvania’s application failed. Lewis, the transportation director, says Rhode Island officials learned from Pennsylvania’s experience. Under the plan they are now developing, tolls collected on I-95 would go only toward improvements to the interstate itself.

Even if everything went the way Lewis wants, Vick reports, the toll booths wouldn’t open for at least another two years. Interesting nonetheless. And thank you to the Nesi’s Notes reader who sent the article along.

(photo: RITBA)

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was never planning to stop in at the Providence Police Department during his visit to Rhode Island next week, according to his top spokesman, contradicting suggestions Holder had backed out of doing so because of this week’s police layoffs.

“The attorney general never had any plans to visit the [Providence] Police Department,” Holder spokesman Matthew Miller told WPRI.com in an e-mail Friday. “He is doing two events: one with a veterans court, and one on youth violence.”

“These were the two events we had always planned to do,” Miller added.

Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven Paré told WPRI on Thursday there had been “very, very tentative” plans for Holder to attend a luncheon at the Public Safety Complex in Providence next week.

Holder is coming to Rhode Island at the invitation of U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. A spokesman for the senator declined to comment on the visit, instead directing questions to Miller.

The schedule for the attorney general’s trip is expected to be released Friday.

Rhode Island’s congressional delegation is lining up behind President Obama in support of a new Medicare payment commission that’s drawing criticism from Republicans and some Democrats.

Each of the state’s four members of Congress told WPRI.com he opposes repealing the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel of 15 experts that will have sweeping powers to cut Medicare spending starting in 2014. It was created as part of last year’s health reform law.

House Speaker John Boehner has lambasted the new group as a “rationing board,” and a handful of Democrats have joined Republicans in pushing to scrap it. But liberal and conservative health wonks argue it may be the most promising attempt to cut medical costs on tap right now.

U.S. Sens. Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse and Congressmen Jim Langevin and David Cicilline all said they opposed efforts to repeal the board. But Whitehouse, Langevin and Cicilline also said they were open to changing it before it’s up and running.

Langevin spokesman Jonathon Dworkin said the 2nd District congressman supports efforts “to address concerns regarding the board’s composition and the process by which Congress approves its recommendations. However, he believes it is premature to repeal the board so early in the implementation process.”

Whitehouse spokesman Seth Larson said the senator “supports efforts to control health care costs and improve quality, and will evaluate any proposed change to the IPAB based on how it will affect those goals and improve care for Rhode Islanders.”

“The IPAB may prove to be the best means for moving from a system that pays providers more the more tests and procedures they order, to one that pays for good health results,” Larson said. “That’s a vital transition that will be good for patients.”

(photo: Ted Nesi/WPRI)

Donilon, left, with Biden, Obama and Clinton in the Oval Office in January

Nesi’s Notes is always on the lookout for tidbits about President Obama’s national security adviser Tom Donilon – LaSalle Academy Class of ’73 – and there’s been a veritable deluge recently, what with him writing the orders to get Osama bin Laden and sitting beside the president in the Situation Room as the raid went down.

Now we also know a little bit about his relationship with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, thanks to a Vanity Fair article by “The Promise” author Jonathan Alter:

Even so, [Clinton] works hard to keep the hatchet with Obama buried. This requires staying on good terms with his White House. Hillary has known Tom Donilon, the national-security adviser, since 1978, when he was a 23-year-old political operative. They have lunch once a week, where sometimes – as on the details of Af-Pak escalation – they cordially disagree but know the president will decide anyway. Donilon believes you have to go back to George H. W. Bush’s era to find such “alignment” among national-security principals. “She’s a great team player,” he says.

(photo: Pete Souza/The White House)

President Obama has a warehouse in Charlestown he’d like to sell you.

And an office building in Pawtucket. And an acre and a half in North Kingstown.

The United States government has 12,000 buildings and structures designated as excess property, so the Obama administration is trying a modern tack for selling them – an interactive map on WhiteHouse.gov.

“The Federal Government is the biggest property owner in the United States, and billions of taxpayer dollars are wasted each year on government properties that are no longer needed,” the site notes.

The White House says there’s more than 24 million square feet of property available nationwide, including 10,691 right here in Rhode Island.

The largest local property shown on the map is a 6,391-square-foot former Social Security Administration building in Pawtucket. There’s also a 4,100-square-foot building in North Kingstown, described as “Quonset Hut – Building 336.”

(h/t: Ezra Klein)

the Obamas at the reception

While you’re downing margaritas at Tortilla Flats tonight, Angel Taveras will be celebrating Cinco de Mayo with the Leader of the Free World.

The mayor of Providence is at the White House this evening celebrating Mexican-Americans’ heritage with President Obama and the first lady, Michelle Obama, spokesman David Ortiz confirmed.

“What an honor to be with them tonight,” Taveras wrote in a tweet accompanying the photo at right. “Fantastic.”

The mayor received an invitation from Obama to attend the reception in the East Room, and traveled to Washington “at his own expense,” Ortiz said.

The president offered brief remarks before this evening’s reception, praising Latinos’ contributions to American life and calling for immigration reform. Obama also joked: “You do not want to be between Michelle and a tamale.”

Taveras is getting to be a regular in Washington. In January, the mayor attended Obama’s State of the Union address as the guest of Congressman Jim Langevin – and nearly got stranded in Baltimore in a snowstorm on his way home.

(photo: Angel Taveras)

Providence's Federal Building

Jack McConnell will likely take his seat on the federal bench in Providence before the Fourth of July, the clerk of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island said Thursday morning.

After a two-year battle, the U.S. Senate voted 50-44 on Wednesday to confirm President Obama’s nominee to the vacant seat. The final step in Washington will be for the president to make it official by signing McConnell’s judicial commission, David DiMarzio, the district court’s clerk, told WPRI.com.

The commission is a large, engraved document. A White House press aide was not immediately able to say when Obama would sign McConnell’s, but he will likely do so within a matter of days.

Once the president does that, the court’s local staff will work with McConnell to coordinate the timing of his swearing-in ceremony. “Those details are evolving now, because all of this happened so quickly,” DiMarzio said, adding that more information should be released “very shortly.”

The ceremony is likely to take place within the next two months, and possibly much sooner. “I think it’ll be fairly quickly – it’s just a matter of how quickly we can get together the logistics, if you will,” DiMarzio said. The state’s U.S. senators, who are closely involved in the judicial confirmation process, usually attend the event.

It’s also possible there will be two ceremonies – a private swearing-in to make McConnell a judge and let him get to work on the trial court’s backlog of cases, followed by a public one with more pomp and circumstance; that’s what appellate Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson did last year.

McConnell will be able to decide who should administer the oath and where it should take place, but traditionally local appointees have been sworn in by the chief judge – currently Mary M. Lisi – in the ceremonial court room No. 1 of Providence’s historic five-story federal building along Kennedy Plaza.

The U.S. District Court in Rhode Island is the state’s federal trial court and has jurisdiction over both civil and criminal cases.

Once McConnell is sworn in, there will be nine judges assigned to the district court: Chief Judge Lisi and District Judges William Smith and McConnell; Senior Judges Ronald Lagueux and Ernest Torres, the latter of whom is inactive; Magistrate Judges David Martin and Lincoln Almond; and recalled Magistrate Judges Jacob Hagopian and Robert Lovegreen, who fill in when needed.

(photo: U.S. General Services Administration, via Wikipedia)

Rhode Islanders have been tracking the ping-pong of trial lawyer Jack McConnell’s judicial nomination primarily because he’s a prominent figure locally and set to become the new U.S. District Court judge here in Providence.

But Senate Democrats’ success this afternoon in cutting off a GOP filibuster to allow a majority vote on McConnell’s nomination will be noted far beyond the Ocean State, according to Carl Tobias, the Williams Professor at the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia, who’s an authority on the confirmation process.

A total of 11 Republicans voted with Democrats to end debate and move to a vote on McConnell – “a sign, perhaps, that the confirmation wars may be diminishing – but that’s optimistic,” Tobias told me in a phone interview:

It carries significance beyond Rhode Island in the sense that the Rhode Island senators made the point that the president’s nominees who are recommended by home state senators are to at least get votes, and the cloture vote [to end the filibuster] was, I think, critical, because that’s a sign that there are people on the other side of the aisle who are going to vote against the nominee and still believe there shouldn’t be a filibuster. That’s what’s most important today.

It may seem like senators are always bickering over judges, but Tobias said McConnell’s nomination was a special case because he was a U.S. District Court nominee, as opposed to a Court of Appeals or Supreme Court pick – and district judges have rarely been blocked in the past.

The next nominee whose fate Tobias will be watching is Edwin Chen, whom Obama wants to put on a U.S. District Court in Northern California. Democrats will likely try to cut off debate on Chen next to see whether Republicans will allow it as they did on Wednesday, he said.

“Hopefully this will make it easier for Obama to move forward with his nominees to send people more promptly, to move them through the committee more quickly, and to get them appointed,” Tobias said.

As for McConnell himself, Tobias shied away from saying whether there was substance to Republican and business opposition to his nomination.

“I think he’s an extraordinarily smart, very fine lawyer, and no one disputes that,” Tobias said. “It is strange that the Chamber felt so strongly … but again, that may partly reflect their composition. It’s just really hard to sort all that out.”

The scale of McConnell’s campaign contributions to Democrats was out of the ordinary, Tobias said, but picking judicial nominees with political ties isn’t. “There’s a standard joke: ‘A district judge is a senator’s best friend,’” he said.

Update: The Senate voted 50-44 to confirm McConnell on Wednesday evening.

The White House has posted some photos on Flickr of President Obama and his national-security team tracking the bin Laden mission from the Situation Room on Sunday.

Here’s Obama with National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, the Rhode Island native who wrote the formal orders to get bin Laden:

And here’s the entire group receiving an update on the mission (Donilon is in the center, standing with his arms crossed):

Both photos were taken by White House photographer Pete Souza.

Reed, left, and other senators at a hearing with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2009

The importance of the American military finally killing Osama bin Laden is “more than symbolic” and could help turn the tide of the country’s efforts in the Middle East, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed said this morning.

“It matters a great deal, but the real sort of test will be not what has been accomplished, but how it’s used in the future,” Reed told me in a phone interview a short time ago. The administration needs to “maintain the momentum” by ensuring a lesson is learned about the U.S. military’s capabilities and the consequences of defying it, he said.

“There’s probably now more people in Pakistan who’ve been sort of on the fence about bin Laden and al-Qaeda who might be convinced, ‘Hey, these guys know what they’re doing and they’re going to do it – I want to be with them rather than be on the fence,’ ” Reed said.

President Obama’s decision Friday morning to order the raid on bin Laden was a closely held secret on Capitol Hill. Reed said he had no advance word of the mission and only learned bin Laden was dead when he woke up early this morning and scanned his e-mails. But although it took more than a decade, Reed said he never doubted the country would eventually track bin Laden down.

Reed said his first thought upon reading the news was admiration for the Navy SEALs and intelligence officers who carried out the mission, as well as for President Obama, who Reed said made “a courageous and tough decision” since he faced “a lot of risk had this not been successful.”

Reed’s thoughts also turned to the families of those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. “You can’t replace the loss of their sons and daughters, husbands and waves, but it’s just a moment where they can sort of take a pause and have a sense of solace,” he said.

Reed heaped praise on Rhode Island native Tom Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser, who wrote the orders for the bin Laden mission on Friday. The first information about bin Laden’s whereabouts came in last summer, but it was “carefully vetted” by Donilon and others – “there was no rush to go in and try to capitalize,” Reed said.

“It’s a very important job,” Reed said of Donilon’s position. “First of all, you have to be selfless to serve the president – and serving him not by doing what he wants, but frankly by making sure he gets all the information, some of it good, some of it bad, so he’s fully aware of the risks and so he understands not only the consequences of success, but in many cases more importantly, of the operations that didn’t succeed.”

Reed also said the success of the bin Laden raid will make it even easier to win confirmation of Obama’s new national security team, which will include CIA Director Leon Panetta moving to the Pentagon as defense secretary and General David Petreaus taking over from Panetta at the CIA.

“This provides very significant vindication to the president in his selection of Leon Panetta,” said Reed, who praised the choices last week. “Leon was one of the key people in this process. … When they come before us, it will be easily recognized that these are sound appointees, and they should be confirmed quickly.”

Here at Nesi’s Notes, I like to keep an eye on the career trajectory of National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, a Rhode Island native and La Salle alum who just last week was described as one of the two “most influential” aides President Obama has when it comes to foreign policy.

No surprise, then: Donilon played a pivotal role on the White House side of the Osama bin Laden saga.

Over the last month and a half, the president held five high-level meetings with his national security team to decide the government’s course of action on bin Laden. Donilon was one of the aides who gathered for the final White House meeting, at 8:20 a.m. Friday in the Diplomatic Room, where Obama gave the order for the raid to go forward.

The national security adviser took it from there, writing the formal authorization from Obama and delivering it to CIA Director Leon Panetta, then convening a 3 p.m. meeting of top officials to complete the planning. (The raid was reportedly moved from Saturday to Sunday due to weather.) Obama and his team met in the Situation Room throughout the afternoon Sunday, and the president was told bin Laden had been tentatively identified at 3:50 p.m.

On Sunday evening, Donilon called members of Congress to let them know bin laden was dead. As you can see in the photo above, he was seated in the East Room of the White House last night for the president’s dramatic speech, alongside National Intelligence Director James Clapper, CIA Director Leon Panetta, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Biden.

The ubiquitous Beltway wiseman David Gergen offered this analysis of what the mission means for the 55-year-old lawyer and veteran Democratic staffer:

For [Obama's] national security team, Sunday night was hugely good news, too. … National Security Council adviser Tom Donilon will also see his stature grow: He shepherded the bin Laden planning through the government. It was one of his first big trials and by all appearances, he passed with flying colors — and no leaks.

By coincidence, The Los Angeles Times profiled Donilon last week; here’s an excerpt that gives a sense of just how powerful he has become:

[W]orking a few paces from the Oval Office, Donilon was doing what he does whenever emergencies arise: setting up a system for his boss to make choices. On time. And in a way that ensures presidential orders get carried out.

With changes taking place atop the CIA, the Pentagon and in key overseas posts, Donilon, who has held the national security advisor’s post for six months after two years as No. 2, is expected to see his sway over U.S. foreign policymaking grow. But his influence differs from that of many of his predecessors.

Where some past national security advisors — Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example — were grand strategists, Donilon is a master of process, enforcing order and structure for a president who deeply values both. …

Donilon’s rise to one of the most powerful posts in the U.S. government reflects Obama’s wish to maintain personal control over foreign strategy. …

Apart from the first family, there may be no one in the White House who spends more time in Obama’s company than the 55-year-old Donilon. He has walk-in privileges to the Oval Office and a guaranteed spot on the president’s calendar as the advisor who chairs the morning national security briefing.

Update: U.S. Sen. Jack Reed tells me the raid was “very carefully orchestrated but carefully protected,” which is “tribute to Tom Donilon.” Read my full interview with Reed here.

(photo: White House, via Politico)

As I mentioned yesterday, Jack Reed won’t be President Obama’s next secretary of defense – the job is going to CIA Director Leon Panetta. Over at the CIA, Panetta will be replaced by General David Petraeus, who carried out President Bush’s surge in Iraq and is currently in charge of the military campaign in Afghanistan.

Thanks to his defense-policy cred, though, Reed has popped up a few times today in stories out of Washington reporting on the changes inside Obama’s national security team (which also includes Rhode Island native Tom Donilon).

The most interesting quote is probably the one Reed gave to The New York Times for its story describing the choices of Panetta and Petreaus as another sign of how the roles of soldiers and spies have become blurred over the past decade:

A succession of wars has strained the ranks of both the Pentagon and the C.I.A., and the United States has come to believe that many of its current enemies are best fought with timely intelligence rather than overwhelming military firepower.

These factors have pushed military and intelligence operatives more closely together in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“In the field, there is a blurring of the mission,” said Senator Jack Reed, a senior Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who served as an officer in the 82nd Airborne Division. “Military operations can buy time to build up local security forces, but intelligence is the key to operations and for anticipating your adversary.”

(The Times’ Caucus blog ran an old picture of Reed with Petreaus, too.)

Then in The Washington Post, Reed offered a favorable comparison between Panetta and outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates – who stayed on when Obama succeeded Bush due in no small part to Reed’s efforts:

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also likened Panetta to Gates. “They’re both thoughtful, serious individuals who are committed to public service and who ask the right questions,” Reed said in a telephone interview.

Reed said the Senate would confirm Panetta quickly, despite his limited familiarity with military programs. “The one thing that he has, based on his experience and history, is good judgment,” the senator said. “He doesn’t have to be a master military technologist.”

Reed told The Providence Journal’s reporter in Washington, John Mulligan, that both personnel picks were good ones, because of Panetta’s expertise on intelligence and budgets and Petreaus’ knowledge of the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan:

As CIA chief, “Leon has operational knowledge of intelligence worldwide that is very critical at this juncture,” Reed said, referring to such military commitments as the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the completion of operations in Iraq and the U.S.-European involvement in the Libyan conflict.

Rhode Island Democrat Reed added that Panetta’s experience as former President Bill Clinton’s budget chief will be valuable “at a time when one of his main challenges as secretary of defense” will be to curb military spending. …

Reed, a former Army officer who is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Petraeus “a superb professional with a great intellect and great character” who already has a deep understanding of intelligence issues from his experience as U.S. commander in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reed also pointed out to Mulligan that he was “always accurate” when he said he had no personal interest in taking the helm at the Pentagon.

The last quote isn’t from Reed but rather about him, and it ran in Politico:

Members of Congress, even prominent Republicans, hailed Panetta’s nomination, but some defense experts think his ability to persuade GOP lawmakers to accept painful cuts could be exaggerated. “If you want to cut the defense budget, the technical accounting side is in some ways simpler than the political side,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think Panetta buys you that much by way of the politics of cutting the defense budget. … There are a lot of people I can think of — Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman … Jack Reed — who would have more credibility on assuring hawks that cuts are being done carefully.”

Rhode Island native and La Salle Academy grad Tom Donilon became President Obama’s national security adviser last December – just in time to play a key role in formulating the administration’s response to the crises in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Arab world.

But even before he was elevated to Condi Rice’s old job, Donilon had already emerged as one of the president’s most trusted advisers on foreign affairs, The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza reports:

After the Inauguration, the realists began to win that debate [between them and the idealists] within the Administration. The two most influential foreign-policy advisers in the White House are Thomas Donilon, the national-security adviser, and Denis McDonough, a deputy national-security adviser. Donilon, who is 55, is a longtime Washington lawyer, lobbyist, and Democratic Party strategist. …

The National Security Council is a bureaucracy that helps the President streamline decision-making, and Donilon seems to have thought extensively about how that system works. Like the President, he values staff discretion. His rule for hiring at the N.S.C. is to find people who are, in his words, “high value, low maintenance.” Obama’s N.S.C. adopted the model of the first Bush Administration. …

One of Donilon’s overriding beliefs, which Obama adopted as his own, was that America needed to rebuild its reputation, extricate itself from the Middle East and Afghanistan, and turn its attention toward Asia and China’s unchecked influence in the region. America was “overweighted” in the former and “underweighted” in the latter, Donilon told me.

Lizza’s lengthy piece is well worth a read for its up-close view of the sometimes chaotic way Obama’s foreign policy has evolved, particularly for its insights into the role Hillary Clinton played, the process that led to Mubarak’s ouster, and the way we backed into military action in Libya.

(photo: Pete Souza/The White House)

Will the Supreme Court side with Barack Obama or Rhode Island? That’s the question before the court today, as the justices hear oral arguments in American Electric Power v. Connecticut.

Rhode Island is one of the states that joined Connecticut in accusing the EPA of failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and suing to force five major power companies to cut emissions. Republican governors in New Jersey and Wisconsin pulled their states out of the suit after they took office.

The Obama administration has sided with EPA and the power plants, not the states, and the seven-year-old dispute will go before the high court today, The Associated Press reports:

The [Obama] administration is siding with American Electric Power Co. and three other companies in urging the high court to throw out the lawsuit on grounds the Environmental Protection Agency, not a federal court, is the proper authority to make rules about climate change. The justices will hear arguments in the case Tuesday.

The court is taking up a climate change case for the second time in four years. In 2007, the court declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. By a 5-4 vote, the justices said the EPA has the authority to regulate those emissions from new cars and trucks under that landmark law. The same reasoning applies to power plants.

The administration says one reason to end the current suit is that the EPA is considering rules that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. But the administration also acknowledges that it is not certain that limits will be imposed. …

When the suit was filed in 2004, it looked like the only way to force action on global warming. The Bush administration and the Republicans in charge of Congress doubted the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases. …

Federal courts long have been active in disputes over pollution. But those cases typically have involved a power plant or sewage treatment plant that was causing some identifiable harm to people, and property downwind or downstream of the polluting plant.

Global warming, by its very name, suggests a more complex problem. The power companies argue that any solution must be comprehensive. No court-ordered change alone would have any effect on climate change, the companies say.

(photo: Steve Petteway/Supreme Court, via Wikipedia)

A year ago today, President Obama signed the late U.S. Sen. John Chafee’s health care reform plan into law.

Sure, most people know the legislation as the Affordable Care Act – or, in less supportive circles, “Obamacare.” But when you get away from all the partisan bickering over the law, its actual nuts and bolts bare a striking similarity to the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, which the Rhode Island Republican proposed during the heat of President Clinton’s fight over health policy.

Don’t believe me? Check out this Kaiser Health News chart comparing John Chafee bill’s with competing Republican and Democratic proposals from 2009. As Kaiser’s Maggie Mertens pointed out in a February 2010 interview with one of Chafee’s co-sponsors, former Sen. Dave Durenberger of Minnesota:

In fact, the key provisions in the Chafee bill may seem familiar, as they bear a strong resemblance to those in the current Democratic Senate bill, and now in President Barack Obama’s proposal. A mandate that individuals buy insurance, subsidies for the poor to buy insurance and the requirement that insurers offer a standard benefits package and refrain from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions were all in the 1993 GOP bill.

Durenberger says the reason many of these ideas have been shunned by today’s Republicans, even called unconstitutional by some, is that political times have changed. “The main thing that’s changed is the definition of a Republican,” he said.

The bill Chafee crafted wound up being Democrats’ last, best hope for passing something comprehensive by the summer of 1994. “I trust John Chafee,” Sen. Ted Kennedy told fellow Democrats even as the legislation’s prospects dimmed. In the end, though, his bill died along with every other effort to pass major health legislation during that Congress.

Chafee’s ideas didn’t die, though – his top health policy aide, Laurie Rubiner, went on to work for Hillary Clinton, helping shape the health plan that Clinton unveiled during her presidential campaign – which also influenced Obama’s.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein, an authority on all things congressional, emphasized the link between Chafee’s proposal and Obama’s amid the long legislative battle of 2009-10. “It is basically a marriage between Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts-care, and even more the John Chafee-David Durenberger-Chuck Grassley-Bob Dole alternative of 1993-’94 built around managed competition,” he told PBS’s Charlie Rose. (Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar were also Chafee co-sponsors, at least initially.)

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