Commentary: Obama's New Second-Term Swagger

In his first post-re-election news conference, the president is more opinionated and forceful.

By Andre Showell

Posted: 11/16/2012 12:20 PM EST

It’s perhaps one of the most overused words ever to enter the American English vernacular: swagger. And more times than not, the word is used inappropriately. But if you had the chance to see President Obama’s first post-election White House news conference, you were seeing the word “swagger” exemplified.

It had very little to do with the way he walked or talked or his style of dress. The president’s swag during his first second-term presser was a testament to what appears to be a new attitude. He seemed to shrug off his excessively polite, methodical, careful demeanor for a more opinionated, forceful and at times abrupt manner.

No example showed off the president’s swag more than his approach to one question about whether he would deter from nominating U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to the Secretary of State post amid Republican threats to block her nomination because of her handling of the recent attacks in Benghazi

The president was sure-footed and resolute in his defense of Rice saying, “Let me say specifically about Susan Rice, she has done exemplary work. She has represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations with skill and professionalism and toughness and grace.”

Critics had questioned whether a White House with such a reputation for putting only the most drama-free candidates before Congress would stand by Rice now that she finds herself in the hot seat.

But the most swagger-filled moment came shortly after President Obama’s defense of Rice when he gave the following retort: “As I’ve said before, she made an appearance at the request of the White House in which she gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her. If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me. And I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. Ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi, and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received, and to besmirch her reputation is outrageous.”

I, for one, was pretty amazed that the president would stare Congress in the face, gangster-style and dare them to come after him. In so many words, he said he’d take a bullet if he had to so that a trusted appointee would not have to take the fall.

Is this a new President Obama? Without fear of making a re-election snafu, has he found his new stride? And is he emboldened to be more declarative and get a little gangsta now that he has received a new mandate to govern? If his performance in his first press conference is any indication of how he will proceed during the second term, we could be seeing a new side of President Obama, one defined by a new, yet fitting incarnation of the word "swagger."

Justice official says, Register voters automatically

 

 

By PETE YOST | Associated Press – 21 hrs ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — One of the top enforcers of the nation's civil rights laws said Friday government should be responsible for automatically registering citizens to vote by using existing databases to compile lists of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction.

 

The proposal by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division, follows an election with breakdowns that forced voters in many states to wait in line for hours.

 

In remarks at George Washington University law school, Perez said census data shows that of 75 million adult citizens who failed to vote in the 2008 presidential election, 60 million were not registered and therefore ineligible to cast a ballot.

 

Perez says one of the biggest barriers to voting in this country is an antiquated registration system.  President Barack Obama has said the problem must be dealt with and "we in the Justice Department ... have already begun discussing ways to address long lines and other election administration problems, whether through proposed legislation, executive action and other policy measures," Perez said in prepared remarks. He welcomed his audience to contribute suggestions.

 

"For too many people in our democracy, the act of voting has become an endurance contest," said Perez. "I used to run marathons; you should not feel like you have endured a marathon when you vote."

 

Perez said the current registration system is needlessly complex and forces state and local officials to manually process a crush of new registrations, most handwritten, every election season. This leaves "the system riddled with errors, too often, creating chaos at the polls," Perez said. "That's exactly what we saw at a number of polling places on Election Day last week."

 

"Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems - if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21st century," Perez said. "It should be the government's responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling - from databases that already exist - a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction. Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections - and would protect essential privacy rights." He did not say which level of government should be responsible for implementing such changes.

 

Perez said the nation also must address the problem that 1 in 9 Americans moves every year, but voter registration often does not move with people who move.

 

Election officials should work together to establish a program of "permanent, portable registration so that voters who move can vote at their new polling place on Election Day," Perez said. In the meantime, he said states should implement fail-safe procedures to correct voter-roll errors and omissions by allowing every voter to cast a regular, nonprovisional ballot on Election Day.

 

Perez supported allowing voters to register and cast their ballots on the same day. He called same-day registration "a reform we should be considering seriously" because it would promote voter participation.  He said that in the 2008 presidential election, five of the six states with the highest turnout in the country were states with same-day registration. Preliminary turnout estimates for the 2012 election, he said, show that this pattern will likely continue. 

 

Perez also said:

 

—The Justice Department will consider whether national standards for counting provisional ballots for federal elections are needed to ensure that voters are not disenfranchised by appearing in the wrong polling place or by poll worker errors.

 

—It is "time to rethink our largely partisan system of state and local election administration. We risk leaving our election processes open to partisan mischief — or to the perception of such mischief. We should have a serious conversation about solutions to this risk, including developing an entirely professionalized and nonpartisan system for administering our elections."

 

—Congress should enact legislation that would deter and punish lawbreakers who conduct misinformation campaigns such as telling people that Election Day has been moved or that only one adult per household can cast a ballot. Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Ben Cardin, D-Md., have introduced the measure.

Why Mitt Romney will regret blaming his loss on Obama's 'gifts' to minorities

By The Week's Editorial Staff | The Week – 9 hrs ago

Related Content

The defeated GOP candidate faces a backlash after he points the finger at young and minority voters in the wake of his landslide defeat

Mitt Romney is taking fire from both the left and the right after telling donors on Wednesday that he lost last week's election because President Obama had showered young voters, minorities, and other key liberal constituencies with "big gifts." "With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest, was a big gift," Romney said on a conference call with his national finance committee. "Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women." He also said that Obama's health care reform was a "huge" gift for Latinos and blacks. Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, among other GOP leaders hoping to reach out to Latinos and other groups that spurned Romney, quickly denounced Romney's comments. "We have got to stop dividing American voters," Jindal. "We're fighting for 100 percent of the vote." 

Here, four reasons why critics say Romney was wrong to place the blame where he did:

1. First, he's simply incorrect
Romney's analysis is somewhere on the spectrum from "incomplete to inaccurate," Mike Allen, Politico "Obama didn't win Janesville, Iowa or New Hampshire because of gifts to minorities." Those places are overwhelmingly white. Indeed, Doug Mataconis, OPutside the Beltway, Obama didn't somehow buy votes by showering Americans with "free stuff." He convinced people "he actually cared about the problems they were dealing with," which "is something that Romney never seemed to be able to do." Still, it's silly to deny that Obama made several major gestures to his liberal base — from imposing a safe harbor for young illegal immigrants to "evolving" on gay marriage — during the campaign, Allah Pundit. So the question "isn't whether O is guilty of 'clientelism'" — "it's whether clientelism was decisive."

2. Romney is hurting the GOP effort to broaden its appeal
It's hardly a surprise that Romney's fellow Republicans, including Jindal and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, are upset, Aaron Blake, Washington Post. They're obviously "ready for the Romney chapter to be over." Romney's White House dreams might have vanished, but theirs haven't. And Romney's sour grapes "won't help the GOP's efforts to win over minority voters," especially given his earlier  remark about how the "47 percent" of Americans who pay no federal income taxes were destined to vote for Obama because they're dependent on the government. "What Jindal says is not political rocket science," Joe Gandelman, THE Moderate Voice. If the GOP "wants to thrive and even survive nationally, it must expand its tent and compete to get more voters inside its tent," not by offering better "gifts," but by offering "policies relevant to their dreams and lives."

3. Republican constituencies get plenty of loot, too
"On the off-chance this nonsense still needs rebutting, let's be very clear: There are plenty of reliable Republicans who get heaping piles of government goodies," Noam Scheiber, New Republic. Seniors get Medicare, veterans get VA benefits, and corporations "gorge on lavish subsidies" — all with a thumbs-up from Romney. "Believe it or not, there are even wealthy financiers out there who don't pay income taxes on their loot and who deduct the mortgage interest on their vacation homes. (Not that I have anyone specific in mind.)" And don't forget, "Romney himself promised an exceedingly large 'gift' to elderly Republican voters: restoring $718 billion worth of savings from Medicare that Obama had achieved through the Affordable Care Act." 

4. This just shines a light on Romney's other failures
"Romney, a famously data-driven decider, has completely missed the boat when it comes to explaining his loss," Peter Cohan, Forbes. The real cause was "a self-inflicted wound — the failure of Romney's online voter turnout system — ORCA." The Romney campaign touted ORCA as an "unrivaled high-tech means of communicating with more than 30,000 field workers who were stationed at polling places on Election Day." It failed miserably, and it was that "lack of tactical execution excellence" that sank the campaign. Plus, "Romney's favorable ratings were among the lowest recorded for a presidential candidate in the modern era," Andrew Kohut, Wall Street Journal It's true that Obama benefited from a big turnout among Latinos, blacks, young people, and other members of his base. But anyone chalking up the GOP's defeat to supposed gifts to these voters is "paying too little attention to how weak a candidate Mitt Romney was, and how much that hurt Republican prospects."

Socialite's climb halted by unfolding scandal

By ALLEN G. BREED, DONNA CASSATA and TAMARA LUSH | Associated Press – 10 hrs ago

    

• Jill Kelley leaves her home Tuesday, …

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Jill Kelley's climb to the top of Tampa's social ladder may be as spectacular as her fall from it.

Accounts of lavish parties at her bay front mansion with politicians and military generals have been replaced by reports of her family's financial woes and other dirty laundry, and claims she used her close friendship with David Petraeus to try to further lucrative business dealings. Now, even her "Friends of MacDill" Air Force base access pass has been unceremoniously revoked.

The tangled web enveloping the daughter of Lebanese refugees, her twin sister, former CIA chief Petraeus, and Marine Gen. John Allen, who succeeded Petraeus as the top American commander in Afghanistan, has spread to include questions about a cancer charity Kelley and her doctor-husband, Scott, founded.

Although Petraeus' affair with his biographer, Army Reserve officer Paula Broadwell, was the immediate cause of his downfall, Kelley and her relations with the Tampa base and the U.S. Central Command have surfaced as a sort of connective tissue for the growing scandal.

On Wednesday, a New York businessman said Kelley was introduced to him at the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August as someone whose friendship with Petraeus would help facilitate a no-bid deal with South Korea on a coal-gasification project. She would supposedly be in a position to help broker the billion-dollar deal directly with the Korean president, and expected a 2 percent commission, said Adam Victor, president and chief executive officer of TransGas Development Systems.

Kelley is an honorary consul for South Korea, a ceremonial position, and got diplomatic plates for her car. But after flying Kelley to New York to discuss how she could help, Victor says he concluded she had little to offer in the way of deal-making expertise or connections with Korean leaders.

The AP also learned Wednesday that Kelley attended an FBI "Citizens' Academy" last year. It was Kelley's complaints to an FBI agent about alleged threats from Broadwell that led to the general's resignation last week and has sidelined Allen's nomination to become the next commander of U.S. European Command and the commander of NATO forces in Europe.

The agent was Frederick W. Humphries, 47, a veteran counterterrorism investigator in the Tampa office, and he was among the FBI employees Kelley met during the academy, which lasted from Sept. 13 to Nov. 30, 2011, the AP learned.

Both Petreaus and Allen have been guests at the Kelleys' 5,000-square-foot home on Bayshore Boulevard, which records show they purchased in 2004 for about $1.5 million. Jill Kelley's twin sister, Natalie Khawam, also lives there.

The five-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath brick Colonial with its stately white columns is on the main parade route for the Gasparilla Pirate Festival, Tampa's answer to Mardi Gras. And the couple soon gained a reputation for their sumptuous and well-attended affairs.  Jill Kelley, 37, and her husband — a cancer surgeon — are members of the Tampa Yacht and Country Club.

The relationship between the Kelleys and Petraeus began in late 2008, when he came to MacDill to assume command of CENTCOM. The couple threw a welcome party for him, and he reportedly watched his first Gasparilla pirate parade from the Kelleys' lawn.

Kelley's overtures to the military brass are, in and of themselves, nothing extraordinary. In fact, most of these civilian-military relationships begin innocently enough.  For instance, the connection of another local couple, John and Leslie Osterweil, with MacDill and CentCom started more than two decades ago, when a teacher at their son's exclusive prep school asked him to take a general's boy "under his wing." That boy's father was then CentCom commander in chief, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf. Since then, John Osterweil has become a regular presence on the base. He counts Allen and Petraeus as close friends, and each has visited the other's home.

"You know, a lot of people are enamored by people who are high-ranking generals and admirals," he says. "I mean, a lot of people look at them in some type of a different light. I look at them as nice people that are my friends."

But Petraeus aides say Jill Kelley took it to another level, winning the title of "honorary ambassador" for her extensive entertaining at her home on behalf of the command, throwing parties that raised her social status in Tampa through the reflected glow of the four-star general in attendance.

Petraeus honored the couple with an award, given to them in a special ceremony at the Pentagon just before he departed the military for his post at the CIA, an aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the matter publicly.

Aaron Fodiman, who's been publisher of Tampa Bay Magazine for 27 years, said people like Petraeus and Allen usually don't know anyone when they arrive, and that people like Kelley act as "the welcome wagon." But while he described the hostess as "outgoing and effervescent," he said her parties "were like everybody else's parties."

"Nothing different or special," who has attended several events at the Kelley home. "Standard procedure. Have a caterer. Feed people. Give them something to drink. And let them mix." 

But behind the scenes, this veneer of upward mobility was showing signs of cracking.
Hundreds of pages of court files in numerous cases portray the occupants of 1005 Bayshore Boulevard as both litigious and financially strained.

The Kelleys' investment in a Tampa office building went sour when a $28,000-a-month tenant balked at payment because of problems with the air conditioning system. The couple later defaulted on the mortgage and the property went into foreclosure.

An attorney who represented the Kelleys in that case, Barry Cohen, ultimately became the target of a lawsuit over his legal fees. Chase Bank sued Scott Kelley over a $25,880.56 unpaid credit card bill.

Meanwhile, Khawam, Kelley's twin, has had legal troubles of her own.  She sued Cohen's firm, where she was an attorney, claiming sexual harassment by the chief financial officer.

In court responses, Cohen said Khawam "has a judicially documented recent history and continuing propensity for the commission of perjury." He cited a court filing in the District of Columbia that described Khawam as having a "willingness to say anything, even under oath, to advance her own personal interests at the expense of ... others."

Khawam, who earned $270,822 in 2010, according to a court filing, has filed for bankruptcy. During a news conference Wednesday, Cohen said both sisters had been heard dropping Petraeus' name often, though he never heard Allen's name invoked. He said both subscribed to the idea that you should "join these clubs and have these parties and drop these names."  Referring to Jill Kelley, he said: "She does what she thinks is necessary to be perceived as being important."

Her apparent importance and connections were described to Victor, when the New York businessman was introduced to her.

"We went down to the convention to spread our message about coal gasification and I met someone who seemed to be very well connected in Tampa" — and was described as a friend of Petraeus and someone who could deal with the president of South Korea.

In an interview, Victor continued: "It was Jill Kelley. She was a very vivacious woman. She seemed eager to assist us in our project and she confirmed that she was very close to Gen. Petraeus ..."
Victor said she talked about helping with a non-competitive bid. "And so that if the (South Korean) president liked it, as a favor to Gen. Petraeus, there would be one no-bid contract. Every developer likes a no-bid contract, or sole source. This certainly seemed worthwhile pursuing."

Victor said his company flew Kelley to New York, first class, for meetings, and then she flew to Hawaii, allegedly for meetings on the deal.  They discussed her compensation, Victor said. "I said, 'what do you think a fair fee would be?'" And she emailed me back, 2 percent of the deal," which he said could have amounted to tens of millions of dollars.

The company decided to work through others on the deal. "We decided that she simply was not a skilled negotiator in these large projects, she's never been in these large projects and I sort of felt that I wasted my time," Victor said.

In 2005, the Kelleys established Doctor Kelley Cancer Foundation Inc., with themselves and Khawam as its sole directors, according to the Florida Department of State. Its mission statement says the organization, which was based out of the Kelley home, was created to "conduct research studies into efforts to discover ways to improve the quality of life of terminally-ill adult cancer patients."

In 2007, the last year for which it filed paperwork, the foundation reported revenues of $157,284 to the Internal Revenue Service, all from direct donations, according to its tax filing. The document lists expenses totaling precisely the same amount, including $43,317 for meals and entertainment, $38,610 for travel, $25,013 in legal fees, $8,067 for supplies and $5,082 in phone bills.

The filing claims $58,417 of its expenses went toward program services, but it's unclear what those services entailed.

Christopher Pietruszkiewicz, dean of the Stetson University Law School and expert on nonprofits and taxation, said the foundation's filing "raises a lot more questions than it does provide answers."

"I'm not sure that we can come up with any conclusions about how the money was spent by the organizers of the charitable organization, but it does give us a sense about how $157,000 was spent," he said. "And I do think it raises some issues that either the Internal Revenue Service or the State of Florida may be interested in looking at."

The Tampa Bay Times reported Wednesday that as late as February 2010, Jill Kelley was soliciting contributions in the foundation's name to fund a dinner for the homeless. The paper cited an email in which she asked prospective donors for "in kind' donations (i.e. more food, drinks, banners, decorations)" and noted that the charity was a "tax write-off."

As the Pentagon looks into up to 30,000 pages of emails and other documents — some characterized as "inappropriate communications" — between Jill Kelley and Allen, MacDill's commander on Tuesday revoked her access pass.

Kelley was issued the pass, one of about 800 handed out under a program to promote interaction with the civilian population, in November 2010, according to a military source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to comment on the situation. It was renewed this past February.

Several months ago, Jill Kelley was appointed an honorary local consul for South Korea, said Kristen Smith, executive assistant at the South Korean consulate in Atlanta, which also covers Florida. The license plate on Kelley's silver Mercedes-Benz reads, "Honorary Consul 1JK."

Smith was not authorized to say anything more about Kelley's activities on that country's behalf, although she confirmed that Kelley still maintained her position. When Kelley called police Tuesday to complain of reporters staking out her home, she cited her honorary position and requested "diplomatic protection."

During last year's FBI citizens academy, which Kelley attended, Natalie Shepherd, a reporter with Channel 8 in Tampa, was one of two media representatives also invited. Among the 30 people on the list was the head of the host committee for the Republican National Convention, a vice president of security for Walt Disney Corp., and the Hillsborough County tax collector.

"She's the only person on the list who's just listed as her name," Shepherd said.
Each Tuesday evening session at the local field office covered a different topic, such as domestic terrorism, international terror or cybercrime. Shepherd said agent Humphries led one talk about Afghanistan.

Shepherd recalled Kelley as attentive and inquisitive, but otherwise low-key — especially given recent revelations.

"She wasn't dropping names or alluding to those connections at all," she said. "She seemed like one of the normal people in the class."

The FBI did not immediately return a call requesting information on Kelley and the class.
Frodiman, the magazine publisher, said there's a sense that Kelley's many efforts to rise socially have been undercut by the scandal.

"I think she has now been tainted," he said. "Just too much has come out, that even if it's not true, people will remember. I would imagine that they will ultimately leave the community."
___

Cassata reported from Washington. Also contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Matt Sedensky and Tony Winton in Tampa, and Adam Goldman in Washington.

Gingrich ‘dumbfounded’ by Obama win

 



"I was wrong last week, as was virtually every major Republican analyst. And so, you have to stop and say to
yourself, 'If I was that far off, what do I need to learn to better understand America.''

Add Newt Gingrich to the list of Republicans coming to terms with the loss of the presidential election.

On Monday, the former speaker of the House sounded reflective on the "Today" show, saying,

"We need to stop, take a deep breath and learn." He added, "The president won an extraordinary victory. And the fact is, we owe him the respect of trying to understand what they did and how they did it."

Gingrich said,

"But if you had said to me three weeks ago Mitt Romney would get fewer votes than John McCain and it looks like he'll be 2 million fewer, I would have been dumbfounded."

The former GOP candidate had previously predicted that Romney would enjoy an easy victory. He said on Fox News,

 "My personal guess is you'll see a Romney landslide, 53 percent-plus ... in the popular vote, 300 electoral votes-plus."

But Gingrich sounded a different tone postelection, writing for Politico,  

"For the conservative movement and the Republican Party to succeed in the future (and while they are not identical the two are inextricably bound together) we will have to learn the lessons of 2012. An intellectually honest and courageous Republican Party has nothing to fear from the current situation."

Asked about the editorial on "Today," Gingrich admitted,

The Romney lesson

By Charles Lane, Published: November 12

Republicans pondering the lessons of November 6 should consider two events, almost exactly 49 years apart, involving the Romney family and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

On June 29, 1963, Gov. George Romney of Michigan joined hundreds of marchers through Grosse Pointe, a white suburb of Detroit, demanding an end to housing segregation. At Romney’s side strode Edward Turner, president of the NAACP’s Detroit chapter. In 1966, Romney was reelected with 30 percent of Michigan’s black vote.

On July 10, 2012, George Romney’s son Mitt stood before the NAACP’s annual convention as the soon-to-be Republican nominee for an office his father had coveted in vain: president. “If you want a president who will make things better in the African American community,” he declared, “you are looking at him.” He invoked his father’s legacy.

The audience responded with catcalls.

And on Election Day, Democrat Barack Obama, the first black president in U.S. history, won reelection with the support of approximately 80 percent of non-white voters.  Romney got six out of 10 white votes, but given the country’s changing demography, it was a paltry consolation prize.

 

The NAACP didn’t boo Mitt Romney because he is especially hostile toward civil rights, much less a racist — or even because the NAACP’s delegates thought of him that way. It happened because the delegates could not easily forget the intervening political history, in which the GOP had evolved from the party of George Romney into the party of white backlash. They could not forget it, and Mitt Romney’s personal heritage was not sufficient to trump it.

How different history might have been if George Romney had prevailed in the intra-party debates of his day.

The 1960s were a time of robust competition for black votes between Republicans and Democrats. Richard Nixon won about a third of African American votes in both 1960 and 1968. This is one reason the period was so fruitful, legislatively, for civil rights.

Romney was a leader of the GOP’s then-sizable liberal-to-moderate wing. He was pro-business, chilly toward labor unions — and believed civil rights was both good policy and, for Republicans, good politics.

He fiercely resisted Barry Goldwater’s right-wing takeover of the party in 1964 and, after his own 1968 campaign for president fizzled, joined Nixon’s administration as housing secretary. In that role, Romney the “Open Communities” initiative, which made federal grants for local infrastructure conditional on fair housing.

When white suburbs in Romney’s home state complained to the White House in 1970, Nixon ordered Romney to stop. Romney hung on until the end of Nixon’s first term, but his power was gone and so, it turned out, was his political career.

Nixon, of course, was eyeing a 1972 reelection campaign and beginning to see the advantages of pursuing white votes over black ones. That would more or less be the strategy of every GOP presidential candidate — and many other Republicans lower down on the ballot — for the next four decades. The party remade itself as a shifting coalition in which white Southerners increasingly dominated. Republicans all but forfeited African American votes to the Democrats from 1972 on, and competed intermittently for Latinos thereafter.

In cold political terms, Nixon, not Romney, was probably right about where the GOP’s interests lay in the 1970s. There was more hay to be made by catering to the “silent majority” — whose fears reflected not only racism but also legitimate concern about crime, social unrest and the mistakes of liberal policy.

In 2012, Mitt Romney did not commit his father’s mistakes. He made peace with the Republican base. Alas for him, he conquered the party just as demographic and attitudinal changes were undermining its whites-mostly electoral strategy.

The day George had warned against had finally arrived, albeit in a form he hadn’t quite foreseen. But Mitt either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it coming — much less respond effectively.

The Republican future could be brighter than it seems. Free markets and limited government are powerful themes, and the GOP still owns them. The party does not need to win a majority of blacks, Latinos and women, merely a significant share of them. Certainly more two-party competition for everyone’s vote would be healthy for the political system overall.

But that probably won’t happen unless the GOP practices more inclusiveness, in word and deed — as George Romney did a half-century ago.

The son lost. The father, though, could still win.

Supreme Court to Revisit Voting Rights Law

By MARK SHERMAN | Associated Press – 14 hrs ago

 

Enlarge Photo

Reuters/Reuters - People line up for admission at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington October 1, 2012. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court will consider eliminating the government's most potent weapon against racial discrimination at polling places since the 1960s. The court acted three days after a diverse coalition of voters propelled President Barack Obama to a second term in the White House.

 

With a look at affirmative action in higher education already on the agenda, the court is putting a spotlight on race by re-examining the ongoing necessity of laws and programs aimed at giving racial minorities access to major areas of American life from which they once were systematically excluded.

 

"This is a term in which many core pillars of civil rights and pathways to opportunity hang in the balance," said Debo Adegbile, acting president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

In an order Friday, the justices agreed to hear a constitutional challenge to the part of the landmark Voting Rights Act that requires all or parts of 16 states with a history of discrimination in voting to get federal approval before making any changes in the way they hold elections.

The high court considered the same issue three years ago but sidestepped what Chief Justice John Roberts then called "a difficult constitutional question."

 

The new appeal from Shelby County, Ala., near Birmingham, says state and local governments covered by the law have made significant progress and no longer should be forced to live under oversight from Washington.

 

"The America that elected and reelected Barack Obama as its first African-American president is far different than when the Voting Rights Act was first enacted in 1965. Congress unwisely reauthorized a bill that is stuck in a Jim Crow-era time warp. It is unconstitutional," said Edward Blum, director of the not-for-profit Project on Fair Representation, which is funding the challenges to the voting rights law and affirmative action.

 

But defenders of the law said there is a continuing need for it and pointed to the Justice Department's efforts to block voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas, as well as a redistricting plan in Texas that a federal court found discriminated against the state's large and growing Hispanic population. "What we know even more clearly now than we did when the court last considered this question is that a troubling strain of obstructing the path to the ballot box remains a part of our society," Adegbile said.

 

Since the court's decision in 2009, Congress has not addressed potential problems identified by the court. Meanwhile, the law's opponents sensed its vulnerability and filed several new lawsuits.

Addressing those challenges, lower courts have concluded that a history of discrimination and more recent efforts to harm minority voters justify continuing federal oversight.

 

The justices said they will examine whether the formula under which states are covered is outdated because it relies on 40-year old data. By some measures, states covered by the law are outperforming some that are not.

Tuesday's election results also provide an interesting backdrop for the court's action. Americans re-elected the nation's first African-American president. Exit polls across the country indicated Obama won the votes of more than 70 percent of Hispanics and more than 90 percent of blacks. In Alabama, however, the exit polls showed Obama won only about 15 percent of the state's white voters. In neighboring Mississippi, the numbers were even smaller, at 10 percent, the surveys found.

 

The case probably will be argued in February or March, with a decision expected by late June.

The advance approval, or preclearance requirement, was adopted in the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to give federal officials a potent tool to defeat persistent efforts to keep blacks from voting.  The provision was a huge success, and Congress periodically has renewed it over the years. The most recent occasion was in 2006, when a Republican-led Congress overwhelmingly approved and President George W. Bush signed a 25-year extension.

 

The requirement currently applies to the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. It also covers certain counties in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, and some local jurisdictions in Michigan and New Hampshire. Coverage has been triggered by past discrimination not only against blacks, but also against American Indians, Asian-Americans, Alaskan Natives and Hispanics.

 

Before these locations can change their voting rules, they must get approval either from the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division or from the federal district court in Washington that the new rules won't discriminate.

 

Congress compiled a 15,000-page record and documented hundreds of instances of apparent voting discrimination in the states covered by the law dating to 1982, the last time it had been extended.

Six of the affected states, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas, are backing Shelby County's appeal.

 

In 2009, Roberts indicated the court was troubled about the ongoing need for a law in the face of dramatically improved conditions, including increased minority voter registration and turnout rates. Roberts attributed part of the change to the law itself. "Past success alone, however, is not adequate justification to retain the preclearance requirements," he said.

 

Jurisdictions required to obtain preclearance were chosen based on whether they had a test restricting the opportunity to register or vote and whether they had a voter registration or turnout rate below 50 percent.

A divided panel of federal appeals court judges in Washington said that the age of the information being used is less important than whether it helps identify jurisdictions with the worst discrimination problems.

 

Shelby County, a well-to-do, mostly white bedroom community near Birmingham, adopted Roberts' arguments in its effort to have the voting rights provision declared unconstitutional.

 

Yet just a few years earlier, a town of nearly 12,000 people in Shelby County defied the voting rights law and prompted the intervention of the Bush Justice Department.

 

Ernest Montgomery won election as the only black member of the five-person Calera City Council in 2004 in a district that was almost 71 percent black. The city redrew its district lines in 2006 after new subdivisions and retail developments sprang up in the area Montgomery represented, and the change left his district with a population that was only 23 percent black.

 

Running against a white opponent in the now mostly white district, Montgomery narrowly lost a re-election bid in 2008. The Justice Department invalidated the election result because the city had failed to obtain advance approval of the new districts.

 

The case is Shelby County v. Holder, 12-96.

 

 

GOP Political Action Committees Taking Stock After 

$380 Million Loss

President Barack Obama, election night November 6, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican-leaning independent groups were supposed to be a key to victory for Mitt Romney. But they ended up being among the big losers of the presidential race, spending an eye-popping $380 million on ads to oust President Barack Obama only to come up woefully short.

Unleashed by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which allowed wealthy individuals and corporations to spend freely to influence elections, these super political action committees and other groups played a big role in GOP victories in 2010 — only to fall down badly two years later in their first national electoral test. Republican losses from the top of the ticket on down are forcing the groups' leaders to re-examine their strategy and determine how best to spend their donors' money going forward.

Among those feeling the sting of defeat:

• American Crossroads and its nonprofit arm, Crossroads GPS. Together, the two groups spent $180 million on ads to oust Obama. The Crossroads organization, cofounded by former President George W. Bush's longtime political counselor Karl Rove, also spent $76 million on ads to help Republicans running in competitive Senate seats, but the GOP lost five of seven of those races. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $33 million on ads for losing Republican Senate candidates.

• Restore Our Future, a super PAC founded by former Romney advisers specifically to boost him, spent $91 million on commercials. Americans for Prosperity and American Future Fund, two nonprofits founded by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, together spent about $66 million on presidential campaign ads.

• Several smaller groups rounded out the total, including the Republican Jewish Committee, the Ending Spending Action Fund, and Thomas Petterfy, a Hungarian-American billionaire who spent $2.8 million on ads he starred in himself.  Several other enormously wealthy donors also saw their investments in outside groups apparently go down the drain.

• Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, were the top contributors to Republican-leaning groups. The couple gave at least $53 million to organizations supporting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich during the GOP nominating period and later to groups trying to help Romney, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending.

• Texas-based leveraged buyout specialist Harold Simmons and his wife, Annette, contributed $24 million; Texas builder Bob Perry gave $21 million, and TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts gave nearly $13 million.

Carl Forti, a senior strategist for the Crossroads groups and Restore Our Future, said the ads run by outside groups helped mitigate Obama's fundraising advantage and kept Romney in the game.

"I don't buy the premise that it didn't bear fruit. We did what we needed to do to critique Obama's record," said Forti. "If we hadn't spent on TV, the race wouldn't have been as close as it was. We spent out of necessity."

Asked what the organizations should do now to regroup for the future, Forti said, "That's what we have to figure out."

There are no end to theories about how and what the Republican-leaning super PACs could have done differently.

John Geer, a Vanderbilt University political science professor who studies campaign commercials, said the groups fell short in part because their ads were just not that persuasive. Research conducted by Geer's Vanderbilt Ad Rating Project found that few of the super PAC ads had much impact on voters — the vast majority of whom had made up their minds long ago about whether to give Obama another term.

"These ads didn't have a recurring theme, and they weren't particularly good," Geer said. "I was surprised that the super PACs ran a huge amount of ads that collectively were uninspired."

Geer and other critics also said the various groups' ads worked at cross purposes with the Romney campaign and with one another.

Some Republican-favoring spots assailed Obama on spending and tax policy while others went after him on Solyndra, the green energy company that received millions in federal loan guarantees but ended up going bust. Still other ads criticized the president on welfare reform.

The disparate messages may have become muddled for voters.

"The Republican groups could have made a difference," said Bill Burton, whose pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action, spent about $67 million on ads. "Instead they blew through money with discordant messages and an erratic spending strategy."

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, defended the groups' emphasis on TV advertising in the 2012 election.

But he said Republicans need to recruit better candidates up and down the ballot and make structural changes such as improving their field operations to boost their chances in future races

"We need a deeper, stronger bench and we need to better message our issues and principles. The Romney campaign should have done this and outside groups should have done this," Phillips said.
Fred Wertheimer, a longtime campaign finance reform advocate, predicted that super PACs and other outside groups would be back with a vengeance.

"Some millionaires and billionaires will throw up their hands as a result of this election and say, 'I don't want to do this.' But other people with an interest in government decisions aren't going to walk away from the corrupting influence this system provides," Wertheimer said.

POST RACIAL AMERICA

Racist demonstrations at the University of Mississippi on the day President Barack Obama was reelected.

 Five weeks ago, the University of Mississippi was celebrating how far it has come since becoming racially integrated on Sept. 30, 1962.  On Tuesday, 400 students gathered on campus protesting the re-election of President Barack Obama, shouting racial slurs and burning a campaign poster. Police arrested two students – one for public intoxication and one for failure to comply with police orders.

University of Mississippi Tuesday, November 6, 2012

In a statement Wednesday, Mississippi Chancellor Dan Jones shamed “the few students” who damaged the university’s reputation while pointing to “the vast majority of students who are more representative of our university creed.”

Nearly 700 students (and faculty and staff) demonstrated that on Wednesday night, in a candlelight vigil put together in just five hours. The “counter-protest” affirmed the values of “the people who are building a new university, moving forward,” said Susan Glisson.

Students threw bottles & shouted racist epithets at the Minority Student Union, Hampden-Sydney College Richmond, Virginia November 6, 2012

At the same time, nearly 300 people at the small, all-male Hampden-Sydney College in Richmond were assembling for the same reason. Hours after the election, about 40 students there threw bottles, shouted racial epithets and set off fireworks outside the Minority Student Union on campus. the Associated Press reported. Wednesday night, Chris Howard, the first black president of the college, gathered with others on campus to discuss and condemn the incident.

Students at Hampden Sydney

Both outbursts caused significant consternation on their campuses, but the Mississippi protest seemed particularly startling, given the sheer number of students and proximity to the anniversary, which has been widely celebrated on the campus (in various events since last spring) but also in the public and the press.
University employees are now in reflection mode, Jones said, asking  why this happened, what can be done to prevent it, and what responsibilities they have moving forward.

“Sadly, it happened here. It shouldn’t happen anywhere, it shouldn’t happen here,” Jones said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed. “I am proud to say that our students are providing leadership on this."

The protest started with 30 or 40 students but as word of a "riot" spread through social media it escalated to hundreds, Jones said, with “a handful” involved in hate speech directed broadly at ethnic groups and the president, but not at individuals on the campus.

The students’ “asinine behavior,” which followed a presidential vitriolic campaign infused with racist rhetoric, Glisson said, makes a new campus -- and nationwide -- conversation an imperative.
Glisson reinforced her agreement with controversial comments that one faculty member made during the celebration in September. Charles W. Eagles, a history professor and author of The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss, said in an address that in highlighting its more recent history, the university was avoiding its less savory past.

“The doors were open for 50 years, yes, but they’d been closed for a century,” Eagles said. “We don’t want to talk about that, do we?”

Eagles took some heat for the comments -- but Glisson said she “absolutely” agrees.

“It’s important to commemorate our history,” she said, “but if you miss the reflection of that history and you don’t try to repair the wounds of history, then it’s all just PR.”

However, while respecting criticism of the celebration from both sides (and there has been criticism), Jones countered that a number of events have reflected on and apologized for the past – in some cases, in “gruesome detail.”

“When you’re dealing with race, there’s so, so many opinions, we just can’t satisfy everybody,” Jones said. (He also said understanding the history is “critically important.”) “I’m sure that more could be done, but I don’t think you’ll find an absence of critical review of the past.”

It’s true that the conversation about history should be had, but it would be unwise to assume this is only an issue at Mississippi, said Beverly Tatum, president of Spelman College and author of Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria and Other Conversations About Race.

“Are there people in the world -- some of them at the University of Mississippi – who are still struggling with an old paradigm around issues of race? Absolutely. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean the institution hasn’t progressed. It would just happen that the story’s taking place there; it could have happened somewhere else,” Tatum said. “The fact of the matter is that for a lot of students their knowledge of social change and how it has taken place in our society is quite shallow, and we would all benefit, I think, from a deeper understanding of our own history.”

Tatum also noted that this and other incidents do not undo 50 years of change or render the university’s celebration of its progress illegitimate. This year’s student government president is the fourth black student in campus history to hold the office. (And she recalled similarly distasteful protests by students at other universities before, during and after the 2008 election.)

“While the timing is ironic,” she said, “if we were to go back 50 years, the response of the president of the university today is quite different than would have been the response of the president 50 years ago, in terms of clearly condemning the activity and responding.”

Jones said the university is “initiating a thorough review of this incident to determine the facts and any follow-up actions that may be necessary.”

There was one reassuring thing to come out of the protests, Tatum said, and it was very meaningful.

“Nobody wants to feel targeted…. But the silence of good people with more positive attitudes is often more damaging than the isolated negativity,” she said. (Students continue to organize meetings and opportunities to discuss what happened and how things should change.) “Those who are wanting to emphasize a campus climate of civility and the importance of community – when those people speak up in voices louder or in greater numbers than the more negative points of view, it makes a difference.”

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/09/racism-defines-post-election-student-protests-mississippi-hampden-sydney#ixzz2Bju3EzM4
Inside Higher Ed

A FEW THOUGHTS FROM THE BLOGGER:  

1.  Perhaps the University of Mississippi celebrated too soon.
2.  Whom, precisely, was "startled" by this?  You need to be specific, because they are part of the problem.
3.  "Asinine" is not the correct word.  RACIST, is the correct word.
4.  “When you’re dealing with race, there’s so, so many opinions, we just can’t satisfy everybody,” Nor should you expect to; why are you seeking to satisfy people?  This is the LAW.  This is the Constitutionally designated process by which we elect the President of the United States.  That process does not change depending on who the candidate is.  No, the university should not seek to satisfy but to instruct - what is legal, what is appropriate and what will send your ignorant racist little ass to jail.



Republican leader Boehner may be ready to bargain

After Mitt Romney’s defeat on Tuesday, John Boehner is the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.  Pity him.



President Obama’s reelection and the Democrats’ successful defense of their Senate majority have put the House speaker in a vise. Squeezing him on one side are the tea party conservatives and their ilk, dominant in the House Republican majority, who say Romney lost because he was too accommodating and moderate. Squeezing him on the other side is a Democratic president who campaigned for the rich to pay a higher share of taxes.

Boehner’s first instinct on Tuesday night was to side with his House firebrands. “While others chose inaction,” he said at a Republican National Committee event, “we offered solutions.” Americans, he said, “responded by renewing our House Republican majority. With this vote, the American people have also made clear that there’s no mandate for raising tax rates.”

After sleeping on it, Boehner appeared at the Capitol on Wednesday and offered a dramatically different message: He proposed, albeit in a noncommittal way, putting tax increases on the table.

“Mr. President, this is your moment,” he said into the cameras, reading, sometimes with difficulty, from a teleprompter. “We’re ready to be led, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans. . . . We want you to succeed. Let’s challenge ourselves to find the common ground that has eluded us.”

Boehner left himself sufficient wiggle room, saying, “We’re willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions” — which keeps alive the possibility that the revenue would come only from economic growth (the old Republican position) and not from a higher tax burden.

Still, Boehner’s new tone was starkly different from the one set two years ago by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who declared that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” McConnell continued that approach after Tuesday’s election, saying, “The voters have not endorsed the failures or excesses of the president’s first term.”



Rep. Mitch McConnell, KY: "The single most important thing is for Obama to be a one-term president"



But the voters denied McConnell his top priority. And exit polls Tuesday showed that a majority of them favored higher taxes on income over $250,000, as Obama has proposed — something Boehner’s Democratic counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), made sure to point out in a news conference before the speaker’s appearance. The voters, Reid said, “want a balanced approach . . . and taxes are a part of that.”

But Boehner’s talk of common ground is likely to enrage the no-compromise wing of his House Republicans, who live in fear of the tea party, Grover Norquist, the Club for Growth and other enforcers of conservative orthodoxy. And tea party leaders have convinced themselves that Romney lost because he wasn’t conservative enough. The Tea Party Patriots, for example, attributed Romney’s defeat to his being a “weak moderate candidate, handpicked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment.”  More likely, the tea party itself bears the blame for Romney’s loss — just as losses of far-right candidates kept Republicans from taking over the Senate.

To survive conservative primary challenges from Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and others, Romney had to take positions that ultimately doomed him in the general election. His tough-on-immigration stance, in particular, helps to explain his loss of more than 70 percent of the Latino vote, which sealed his defeat.

Boehner knows this, of course, and that is why he was so careful when he made his remarks Wednesday afternoon, taking the rare precaution of using a teleprompter. He left without answering questions, and when reporters shouted queries at him, he only smiled.

“The American people have spoken,” Boehner said somberly, his eyes glistening. “If there’s a mandate in yesterday’s results, it’s a mandate for us to find a way to work together.”

Although he was vague about what he was offering, his bargaining position was very different from 18 months ago, when he went to the Economic Club of New York and pronounced tax increases “off the table.” This time, he outlined the general framework of a grand bargain: “In order to garner Republican support for new revenue, the president must be willing to reduce spending and shore up entitlement programs.”

Boehner chose to make his post-election speech in the Capitol’s Rayburn room, named for Sam Rayburn, the late House speaker who is credited with saying: “Any jackass can kick down a barn. It takes a carpenter to build one.”

Boehner sounds as though he’s ready to pick up hammer and nail. But will his fellow Republicans stop kicking?

WALL STREET GAMBLED ON MITT ROMNEY 

AND LOST

Sen. Elizabeth Warren with Governor Duval Patrick.  Wall Street firms are worried about Elizabeth Warren, whose victory in the Massachusetts Senate race may galvanize her to push for more regulations on bank lending to protect consumers. Warren was instrumental in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which banks were hoping to weaken.

 

 

Faced with the prospect of even tougher regulations in President Barack Obama's second term, they have to build better ties with the new financial regulators he will appoint.

Stock investors fear banks will meet with limited success. Shares of Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Citigroup dropped 5 percent, Bank of America lost 6 percent and Morgan Stanley fell 7 percent in midday trading on Wednesday.

Obama lost the support of many bankers in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which sought to shore up the financial system but also cost banks billions of dollars in annual profit.

The President Barack Obama, has openly stated his distaste for "fat cat bankers" who "don't get it," and bankers fear more trouble is ahead if they cannot influence how the Dodd-Frank rules are implemented.

"He will continue to increase regulation, demonize and vilify businesses, and spend a lot of money, and tax people, and so forth," said Dick Kovacevich, a former Wells Fargo & Co CEO and supporter of Republican challenger Romney.

 

Wall Street does have some ways to push back. Banks can sue to try to block provisions of Dodd-Frank that they object to, a tactic that has already met with some success. The financial industry can also press regulators to write rules that soften some reform laws.  And banks can roll up their sleeves and turn on the charm, which can help, industry lobbyists said.

"We're going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting over the next four years. But it's not an impossible task," said Frank Keating, chief executive of the American Bankers Association.

But given that Obama won and that financial reform is popular among Americans, many on Wall Street acknowledge that there's only so much they can do.

"Obama will be less likely to hold back on regulation this term," said Chris Tobe, who advises pension plans as a principal at Stable Value Consultants and is a trustee of the Kentucky state pension fund. The industry's support for Romney does not help, he added.

People working in the U.S. securities and investment industry gave $20 million to Romney's campaign, versus $6 million to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Four years ago, Obama received $16 million and Republican nominee John McCain only attracted $9 million.

 

Wall Street was so confident in Romney's chances that the Financial Services Roundtable, a leading industry group in Washington, recently named as its head Tim Pawlenty, a Romney campaign co-manager who has little financial firm experience and few ties to Washington policymakers.

 

Representative Barney Frank, a Democrat and the co-author of Dodd-Frank, said picking Pawlenty, a partisan Republican, was a "terrible mistake."

The industry's best hope now may be to work with regulators, since legislative changes are unlikely, Frank said.

POPULAR SUPPORT

Americans blame banks for the 2008 financial crisis, and view financial reform as a way to ensure that bad mortgages and repackaged debt don't trigger another banking collapse.  A 2010 Gallup poll showed that Dodd-Frank was Obama's most popular law, exceeding healthcare reform, for example. Few Washington lobbyists thought that Romney could fully repeal Dodd-Frank, because public support for the law is too high.

"Most voters think that we need to change the status quo on Wall Street, and we need to make sure we do not have a repeat of the abuse of mortgage products," said Lisa Donner, executive director for Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of about 200 organizations that formed in 2008 as a response to the financial crisis.

The biggest banks will have to think about shrinking in the future, including shedding businesses that have become unprofitable under new rules, said Nancy Bush, a veteran banking analyst.

"The banks are going to have to accept some realities of their new existence," Bush said.

RELATIONS WITH REGULATORS

Banks must now focus on softening regulations to the extent they can. Among the financial industry's top complaints is the Volcker rule, which prevents banks from making big bets in financial markets with their own money. Big banks fear the rule will also limit some of their trading with clients.

"You could rethink some of the details without rejecting the concept of the Volcker rule," said Wayne Abernathy, executive vice president for financial institutions policy and regulatory affairs at the American Bankers Association.

The industry has other areas where it wants to ease rules, including the Durbin Amendment, which limits the fees they can charge merchants for processing debit-card transactions, and capital requirements, which make banks stronger but cut into the returns they can earn on their equity capital.

 

Gaining political support for such a move now seems unlikely, analysts said. Lawsuits may also work. In September, trade groups won a court battle against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over a Dodd-Frank rule that would have imposed "position limits" on commodity speculators. Last year, a court rejected a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that would have made it easier for shareholders to nominate directors to corporate boards.

SECOND-TERM APPOINTMENTS

Some banking industry lobbyists say their focus will be on the key regulators Obama is expected to name in his second term.

Major power players under Obama, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, are expected to step down, offering Wall Street a chance to reset relations.

Chairmen determine agendas at agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), so Obama's choices to fill any open spots could affect how quickly new rules are implemented.

One possible replacement for Geithner, who has said he will not stay for a second Obama term, is White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew, a former Citigroup Inc banker.

"I hope Obama puts someone in who understands fiscal issues and who will have stature to work on the Hill to negotiate some type of package on fiscal reform," said Sheila Bair, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp chairman.

SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro's term does not expire until June 2014, but speculation about her departure has been swirling for well over a year. Last month, she attempted to shoot down the rumors, saying she had not thought about her post-SEC plans.

CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler's term technically expired in April. He is allowed to stay on as chairman until the end of 2013 and his renomination is an open question.

Gensler has been assailed by Republicans over his implementation of Dodd-Frank and criticized by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle following the collapse of futures brokerages MF Global and Peregrine Financial Group.

Much of Wall Street's regulatory agenda, however, is set to take a backseat in the short term due to the looming fiscal cliff -- a package of tax increases and federal spending cuts that will begin in January unless lawmakers act.

Bankers fear an impasse in solving the issue could spark an economic downturn that would hurt the industry.

"My hope is that the bitter partisanship of recent years will now be put aside and that everyone will work together to solve the fiscal cliff and to get the economy moving again," said billionaire investor Wilbur Ross in an interview with Reuters.

------------------------------------------

(Reporting By Emily Stephenson and Sarah N. Lynch in Washington, D.C., Rick Rothacker in Charlotte, Lauren LaCapra, Dan Wilchins, Olivia Oran, Beth Gladstone, and Katya Wachtel in New York, and Aaron Pressman and Ross Kerber in Boston; Writing by Greg Roumeliotis and Aaron Pressman; Editing by Paritosh Bansal, Tiffany Wu, Dan Wilchins, Richard Pullin and Maureen Bavdek)