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If you’re wondering why there are serial screw-ups in Washington, we have an answer. So, before we get into details of the GOP win in Florida on Tuesday, here is Jim Geraghty on why liberals can’t govern.
Back in late February, a new contract document revealed that the Department of Health and Human Services would be paying $60 million for the computer cloud that supports back-end data sharing for HealthCare.gov and state Obamacare marketplaces, more than five times the amount in the original contract. This week HHS revealed that the contract has been further revised — to roughly $120 million, now more than ten times the original $11 million value of the contract when Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services first awarded it in 2011.
In most professions, when you end up spending ten times what you budgeted, the consequences are swift and severe. Heads roll. Responsibilities are reassigned. Budgetary authority gets yanked. This, of course, is not how things work in the federal government. …
… Over at The Washingtonian, Michael Gaynor offers further details on the culture of the Environmental Protection Agency, where John Beale was the highest-paid official while failing to show up for work months at a time, covering his tracks with strange and implausible tales of secret work for the Central Intelligence Agency.
The lack of accountability throughout the organization is jaw-dropping:
The EPA “research project” that took Beale to Los Angeles five times was really a smoke screen for visiting his parents in Bakersfield, two hours away. Yet his travel vouchers were barely reviewed. Officials didn’t question his expenses — they were approved laterally, by a peer instead of a manager. “Because of where he sat in the organizational structure, there were no questions,” [Office of the Inspector General special agent Mark] Kaminsky says.
Beale’s off-the-charts $206,000 salary, inflated because of the 25-percent retention bonus that never expired, was more than allowed under law. An Inspector General’s report published last year faulted a lack of internal controls at the EPA — there was no automatic stop on the bonuses after the designated allotments were distributed.
In the same report, the IG revealed that these pay issues had been brought to the attention of Beale’s office as early as July 2010. Yet managers believed that the discrepancy was a human-resources matter and tossed it back, causing it to languish for years. . . .Beale and Kaminsky counted up how often he’d used the CIA guise to skip work since 2000. The grand total: approximately 2 1/2 years.
Investigators later put dollar amounts on his crimes: $437,901 in fraudulent retention bonuses, $58,127 for the “D.O. Oversight” absences, $8,000 for the parking spot, and so on. Altogether, he cost taxpayers $886,186.
Beale’s most recent manager at the EPA was Gina McCarthy, then the assistant administrator in the Office of Air and Radiation. She told the inspector general that she had “concerns” about Beale’s claim to be secretly working for the CIA, but there is no evidence she ever acted on those concerns, according to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
The consequence for McCarthy was a promotion; President Obama nominated her to head the EPA in March and she was confirmed in July. …
Josh Kraushaar says a 2014 GOP wave is looking more likely after the Florida election yesterday.
Tuesday night’s special election in Florida should be a serious scare for Democrats who worry that Obamacare will be a major burden for their party in 2014. Despite recruiting favored candidate Alex Sink, outspending Republicans, and utilizing turnout tools to help motivate reliable voters, Democrats still lost to Republican lobbyist David Jolly—and it wasn’t particularly close.
The Republican tool: lots of advertisements hitting Sink over Obamacare, even though she wasn’t even in Congress to vote for it. Sink’s response was from the Democratic playbook: Call for fixes, but hit her opponent for supporting repeal. Sink won 46 percent of the vote, 2 points behind Jolly and 4 points below President Obama’s 2012 total in the district.
Special elections don’t necessarily predict the November elections, but this race in a bellwether Florida district that both parties aggressively contested comes as close as possible to a November test run for both parties. Democrats worked to clear the field for Sink, an unsuccessful 2010 gubernatorial nominee, while Republicans missed out on their leading recruits, settling for Jolly, a lobbyist who once worked for Rep. Bill Young, the late congressman whose 13th District vacancy Jolly will fill. Sink outspent Jolly, but the Republican was able to close the financial gap with the help of outside groups. All told, Democrats held a $5.4 million to $4.5 million spending advantage. …
Byron York reports on the Florida race also.
The widely respected Florida political analyst Adam Smith sees big problems for Democrats in the loss of Alex Sink to Republican David Jolly in the special election to fill the House seat from Florida’s 13th Congressional District. “Democrats had a better-funded, well-known nominee who ran a strong campaign against a little-known, second- or third-tier Republican who ran an often wobbly race in a district Barack Obama won twice,” Smith wrote Tuesday night. “Outside Republican groups — much more so than the under-funded Jolly campaign– hung the Affordable Care Act and President Obama on Sink. It worked.”
Smith noted that both Democrat Sink and Republican Jolly insisted the race to replace the late GOP Rep. Bill Young was mainly about local issues. And indeed, watching the first debate between Sink and Jolly, on February 3, one came away with the sense that issues like flood insurance played a role in the race that some outsiders didn’t appreciate.
But one thing was clear from that debate, and it was that Sink didn’t have much to say about Obamacare.
As usual, informed analysis from Michael Barone.
… I score it as an uninspiring victory for national Republicans and a disappointment for national Democrats. Jolly got the same percentage of the vote, 49 percent, as Mitt Romney won in the district; Sink’s 47 percent was below Obama’s 50 percent in 2012. Turnout was 55 percent of November 2012 turnout, not an unusual decline for a special election; Jolly’s total was 53 percent of Romney’s and Sink’s 50 percent of Obama’s. Jolly naturally campaigned against Obamacare, and a Democratic loss in an Obama district confirms the unpopularity of that legislation. Sink tried campaigning on Social Security and Medicare, Democratic staples which once had a great resonance with St. Petersburg’s elderly population. But the district’s 65-plus population percentage, 22 percent, is significantly lower than that of several others in Florida, though above the national average. In any case, it doesn’t look like Social Security is trumping Obamacare with the elderly.
If this race is an indicator of the November results, it suggests that Democrats will not get the 49-percent to 48-percent edge they got nationwide in the popular vote for the House, and it suggests that they will win somewhat fewer than the 201 House seats they won then. If that’s true, it will be the first time we have had three House elections in a row with similar results, since the string from 1996 to 2004 in which Republicans narrowly won the popular vote and won majorities of seats, but in each case fewer than the 234 they won in 2012.
John Hinderaker says don’t forget about the trouble Alex Sink had with the immigration issue.
A postscript on David Jolly’s big special election over Alex Sink in Florida’s 13th Congressional District: Obamacare was the biggest issue in the race, and deservedly has gotten most of the post-election commentary. But, as Daniel Horowitz notes at RedState, let’s not forget that immigration was also an issue, and may have played an important role.
Sink was pro-amnesty and “comprehensive reform,” while Jolly flatly opposed amnesty and emphasized stronger borders. And Sink made an appalling gaffe–in the sense of saying what liberals really think about expanded low-skill immigration–that made the issue, in this race, an inflammatory one. Explaining her support for immigration reform, Sink said, “We have a lot of employers over on the beaches that rely upon workers and especially in this high-growth environment, where are you going to get people to work to clean our hotel rooms or do our landscaping?” It doesn’t come across any better when you hear her say it”
Sink’s comments reminded voters that the Democratic Party doesn’t care that 100 million working-age Americans don’t have jobs, but is deeply concerned about where they are going to get cheap landscaping services.
Chris Stirewalt of Fox has more.
.. Whatever they say in public, Democrats know that the defeat of their candidate, Alex Sink, in Tuesday’s special election in Pinellas County, Fla. is a very bad omen. If they cannot win in districts like these – won twice by President Obama – and with well-funded, well known candidates like Sink, there’s little reason to believe much of the palaver about Democratic strategies for blunting Republican advances this fall. Outspent, hampered by a Libertarian candidate and with some nagging party divisions lingering on Election Day, David Jolly carried the special election to replace the late Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla. The race provided a revealing snapshot of voter attitudes about ObamaCare and the motivation of the Republican base. There’s a long time to go until November and Democrats have just begun to spend their massive war chest, but the shape of things looks bad for the blue team’s chances to hold the Senate. …
Opportunities provided by increased production of oil and gas are so obvious, a non-political publication like Scientific American can see the value.
Ukraine is on its own, not least when it comes to energy—and that crimps the country’s ability to respond to Russia’s land grab in the Crimean peninsula. Ukraine relies on Russia for roughly two thirds of its natural gas supplies, suggesting that the current geopolitical impasse will likely continue to fall in Russia’s favor. Even with a few months of natural gas in storage, “they’re in a tough spot if those supplies are cut off,” notes Jason Bordoff, one-time Obama administration policy advisor and now director of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, who was a speaker on a panel of experts at Columbia University’s School of International and Political Affairs (SIPA) on March 10.
Russia has the leverage to use its energy supplies as a political cudgel in Ukraine or the rest of Europe—the European Union imports one third of its gas from the eastern giant—and has not hesitated to use it in the past, most recently in 2009. Western Europe’s gas purchases from Russia (then the Soviet Union) started in the early 1970s, mostly as symbolic trade—part of the policies of Cold War détente and Ostpolitik (the latter, West Germany’s unilateral attempt to normalize relations with the U.S.S.R.). The resulting energy trade with Germany expanded to other Western European countries in the ensuing decades, and grew to become what some critics of détente had always feared: dependence on Russia by Western Europe for essential energy supplies.
This vulnerability may not persist indefinitely, however. In fact, this could conceivably be the last time Moscow will be able to use gas as a weapon. The world’s fracking-enabled natural gas boom may, over time, upset this status quo, if not as soon as U.S. politicians would like because fracked gas cannot serve as a bargaining chip in the current crisis. …