The Senate is set to pass a $15 billion jobs bill on Wednesday, with the House expected to quickly follow suit, setting the stage for President Obama to sign legislation into law on his top domestic priority.
Mr. Obama will discuss more ideas to foster economic growth this morning in an address to the Business Roundtable. On Tuesday night, the president dined at the White House with several top executives of corporations and banks.
His discussions with business leaders are also occurring as Wall Street and other financial service donors seem to be shifting their contributions away from Democrats and toward Republicans, as financial regulatory changes begin to take shape in Congress, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
As far as the next item on the president’s domestic agenda, health care, the debate is beginning anew. The White House released more details Tuesday about Thursday’s bipartisan health care summit. The Times’s Sheryl Stolberg said the six-hour meeting would go something like this: Mr. Obama will open things up, followed by select members of both parties; then the group will proceed with four successive discussions about controlling costs, checkmating insurance industry practices, cutting the deficit and expanding coverage.
There are plenty more unknowns, too, The Times’s David Leonhardt noted. Among them: What will happen after Thursday?
Separately, on Tuesday, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, named three Democrats to serve on President Obama’s deficit reduction panel.
Mr. Reid picked Senators Max Baucus, Richard J. Durbin and Kent Conrad to serve on the panel, which is tasked with making recommendations for balancing the budget for the 2015 fiscal year.
In the House on Wednesday, lawmakers on the Energy and Commerce subcommittee will look into controversial premium increases by the insurer Anthem Blue Cross. Angela Braly, the chief executive of Anthem’s parent company, WellPoint, is expected to testify alongside others.
The Times’s Sewell Chan wrote that the Obama administration was also in the midst of renewing its push for a regulatory overhaul. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, summoned the heads of major trade groups to a meeting on Thursday, where he plans to warn them against trying to block provisions they may oppose.
Still, that may not be enough. The Wall Street Journal notes that the Senate is expected to scrap one of the provisions, known as the Volcker rule, when Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the banking committee, introduces legislation next week.
The Washington Post, too, noted how Wall Street, weary of Democrats, is warming up to Republicans.
Hill Happenings: Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is slated to discuss the state of the economy in front of the House Financial Services Committee this morning. he’s expected to say that the Fed will not raise key interest rates for at least another few months, according to The Journal.
Toyota Apologies: With his company caught in a firestorm, the chief executive of Toyota, Akio Toyoda, will testify in the House about sudden acceleration problems in his company’s cars that have prompted two major recalls. According to his prepared statement, Mr. Toyoda, the grandson of Toyota’s founder, is expected to tell the House Oversight Committee that a rush to grow eclipsed safety as the company’s top priority. He’ll also enumerate the changes the world’s largest automaker is making to its quality control process in light of the recalls.
On Tuesday, James E. Lentz III, Toyota’s top American executive, told the House Energy and Commerce committee that the recalls might not be enough.
The Times’s Micheline Maynard looks at the pressure surrounding Mr. Toyoda as he makes his debut in America.
Iraq Rebuilding: Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for reconstruction in Iraq, will appear before the House Foreign Affairs committee to discuss a report he released Monday that calls for a special organization to oversee the rebuilding effort.
Several cabinet secretaries fan out on the Hill in the morning and afternoon to defend their departments’ budget requests for the 2011 fiscal year. Secretaries Hillary Clinton of State, Timothy Geithner of Treasury, and Janet Napolitano of Homeland Security are just a few.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Two top military commanders expressed reservations about repealing the ban against gays serving openly in the military when the generals appeared before a Congressional panel on Tuesday, according to the Times’s Thom Shanker.
Guns: The Times’s Ian Urbina takes a look at how states, anticipating an unfavorable approach by Mr. Obama’s on guns, have begun rolling back their own restrictions.
2010 Midterm Dispatch: Now that he’s finished his seven-year sentence in federal prison, former Representative James Traficant told CNN he’s ready for the next thing. Mr. Traficant, the former eight-term Democrat from Youngstown, Ohio, who was convicted on bribery and racketeering charges and expelled from Congress, told CNN on Tuesday that he planned to run as an independent — again. (He also ran as an independent in prison but lost to a former aide.)
Mr. Traficant, who was freed in September 2009, has until May to register as a candidate.
About those midterm spending patterns — Politico writes off a report by the Center for Responsive Politics that put the tab on the midterm elections at a grand total of $3.7 billion — and that’s a conservative estimate.
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