With roughly an hour to spare before a midnight deadline, federal lawmakers and President Barack Obama struck a deal to avoid a shutdown of the federal government — at least for this week.

“We have agreed to an historic amount of cuts for the remainder of this fiscal year, as well as a short-term bridge that will give us time to avoid a shutdown while we get that agreement through both houses and to the President. We will cut $78.5 billion below the president’s 2011 budget proposal, and we have reached an agreement on the policy riders,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) wrote in a joint statement.

“In the meantime, we will pass a short-term resolution to keep the government running through Thursday. That short-term bridge will cut the first $2 billion of the total savings.”

Federal funding for Planned Parenthood was kept intact despite the deep cuts.

“We protected the investments we need to win the future,” said Obama. “At the same time, we also made sure at the end of the day this was a debate about spending cuts — not social issues like women’s health and the protection of our air and water. These are important issues that deserve discussion, just not during a debate about our budget.”

In addition to the larger budget deal, lawmakers quickly passed a short-term funding extension late Friday night (Senate) and early Saturday morning (House), which will allow the government to continue operations through Thursday, April 14. President Obama is expected to sign the measure later Saturday.

“I am pleased that an agreement has been reached and I will vote in favor of the legislation to keep the government running,” said Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.). “I continue to believe we can be fiscally responsible and make government more efficient. Republicans and Democrats need to work together to come up with real solutions to our fiscal policy.”

“Tonight, at the eleventh hour, House Republican leadership backed off of their threats to shut down the government over a policy that had nothing to do with budgeting – cancer screenings and other preventative health care for women,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). “Now that this debate is over, Congress can refocus on the budget for the next fiscal year and the long term. It remains my hope that the next proposal will include spending cuts and necessary revenue increases, while making room for critical investments in education, job training, infrastructure, and research – things that are essential for jobs now and for economic expansion and job creation in the years ahead.”

According to CNN Money, the temporary truce marks the seventh extension passed by Congress for this fiscal year and since Obama provided his first budget on Feb. 1, 2010.

… The latest stalemate had lawmakers veer toward the precipice as they argued over a few billion dollars and a set of contentious political issues — like abortion — that were inserted into the debate.

There were multiple White House meetings and hours in which earnest aides tried to reach an agreement.

What happens next? Congress has given itself another week to pass a budget and again avoid a shutdown. See you on Friday.

As last-ditch negotiations between the White House and U.S. House Republicans appear to head south, federal lawmakers seem poised to allow a Friday deadline pass without agreement on a temporary continuing resolution. Without the bill, or something similar in place, a government shutdown looms.

“We don’t want a shutdown,” U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said, contrasting federal Democrats with Republicans. “We are not applauding anyone who says they want to shut the government down, but evidently the entire Republican caucus in the House would like to see the entire government shutdown.”

Harkin — as well as U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Waterloo) in a Wednesday conference call — briefly described scenes around the U.S. Capitol that included citizens holding signs advocating for a shutdown, or loudly voicing their opinion that if certain cuts were not agreed upon by Democrats that the government should stall. Harkin noted that he had seen Reps. Michele Bachmann and Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican once a rumored 2012 GOP candidate, encouraging such demonstrations.

“It is flabbergasting that people are walking around and saying, ‘Shut the government down.’ I’ve got to ask sometimes: Where is their patriotism?” said Harkin.

Such a situation, he said, will not only directly impact Iowans and state agencies that work with federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Transportation, but would hurt the national economy. A shutdown would directly impact the National Parks Service, which has been preparing events to commemorate the 150-year anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

“It sends a terrible signal to the rest of the world that we can’t govern ourselves,” Harkin said.

The bill, presented by Republicans to slash $12 billion from the budget while agreeing to fund operations for a single week, has attached “rider” policies such as a ban on all federal funding for Planned Parenthood and limits to environmental protection regulations.

On the Senate floor Thursday morning, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said such riders have no place in “a stopgap spending measure.”

“The only thing holding up an agreement is ideology,” Reid added, making a point that Harkin and Braley have previously made toward GOP budget motives.

In response, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell described the bill as “reasonable” and said that Democrats could either accept it or deal with a shutdown.

“That’s it. That’s the choice,” he said.

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), however, remains at least somewhat optimistic that an agreement can be hammered out before the Friday deadline, and that Republicans are working to fill a leadership void that President Obama has allowed.

Grassley told Bret Hayworth of the Sioux City Journal that a lot people believe it’ll be great to have a halting of government services, seeing a paring of expenses. However, he said, lots of federal government employees will then have to handle duties missed during the shutdown, meaning a lot of “overtime pay to catch up.”

Grassley also said a government shutdown would have one certain result: “It will make (Americans) more cynical.”

At a news conference Thursday morning, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said negotiators are further away from a deal than they were even on Wednesday night, adding that Democrats were using “gimmicks” instead of real spending cuts.

If the government shuts down, agencies could have a difficult time processing first-time payments from the Veteran’s Administration or through Social Security, including disability benefits. Taxpayers with outstanding tax refunds may have delays in receiving their checks, and there might be difficulties for those taxpayers who do not file tax documents electronically. Although the Republican bill provides funding for the Defense Department through Sept. 30, failure to reach an agreement on that bill could cause delays in payment and outreach services to Iowa’s military veterans and their families. Citizens heading out on spring break may find national parks closed, and those needing access to the federal court system may also see delays.

A shutdown would not, however, send home employees who deliver what are considered “essential services.” For instance, air traffic controllers would not be subject to the shutdown due to the obvious public safety implications. Such individuals could be asked to work without pay on a promise of reimbursement at a later date.

“Perhaps one of things most under-reported about this is the fact that the Senate passed a bill that said if the government shutdown we would stop being paid,” Harkin added. “To date, that same bill has not been approved by the House.”

“It’s our understanding that we’re out of session until the 12th (due to the funeral of Sen. Byrd) so nothing until then,” Franken’s press secretary, Jess McIntosh, wrote in an email to the Minnesota Independent.

Harkin Communications Director Kate Cyrul clarified: “On this morning’s call, he was trying to drive home the point that the Senate needs to act on this extension as soon as possible. He is still committed to getting this extension passed and is hopeful we will take it up when we return.”

McIntosh, too, emphasized Franken’s commitment to the measure and says he’s cosponsored every extension that’s come along.

“Sen. Franken has expressed many times that not passing UI last week was one of the greatest frustrations he’s felt since coming to the Senate,” she noted. “He talks to folks -– often in the building trades, in union halls -– all over Minnesota who wouldn’t be in their houses if it weren’t for UI. These are people who have worked all their lives — their job is their identity. And this is really hard for them.”

Photos: Chris Steller/MnIndy, wdcpix

Both of Minnesota’s senators, Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, as well as Iowa’s Sen. Tom Harkin, introduced the Federal Response to Eliminate Eating Disorders (FREED) Act on Tuesday, which would direct the federal government to track, screen, diagnose and treat eating disorders. The bill is the first of its kind in the Senate and will improve access to treatment for people suffering from eating disorders, especially teens on government assistance.

“The statistics on young people struggling with eating disorders are staggering,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “We must provide better resources for prevention and treatment to ensure that everyone has access to the help they need to treat and survive this often fatal disease.”

Franken added, “I hear far too often from Minnesotans who have dealt personally with a loved one who suffers from an eating disorder. The fact is, we don’t know nearly enough about diagnosing, treating, and preventing these diseases. Today’s legislation is a major step forward in understanding eating disorders and how to stop them from destroying lives.”

According to a press release from the senators, the bill will:

* Expand research on the prevention of and effective treatment of eating disorders: Coordinates research on eating disorders at the National Institutes of Health and across the federal government, and creates research consortia to examine the causes and consequences of eating disorders, and to develop effective prevention and intervention programs.

* Improve the training and education of health care providers and educators: Authorizes grants to medical, nursing, social work and other health professions schools to train health care providers in the identification and treatment of eating disorders, and grants to train teachers and other educators in effective eating disorder prevention, detection and assistance strategies.

* Improve surveillance and data collection systems for tracking the prevalence and severity of eating disorders: Tasks CDC with addressing the lack of accurate information on the incidence and severity of eating disorders. Requires the development of new methods to accurately collect, analyze and report epidemiological data to ensure that the incidence of eating disorders and related fatalities are better understood.

* Prevent eating disorders: Authorizes grants to develop evidence-based prevention programs and promote healthy eating behaviors and in schools, recreational sports programs and athletic training programs.

* Build on existing reform efforts to ensure that treatment is available and affordable: Creates a patient advocacy program to aid people suffering from these diseases and their families negotiate the health care system. Incentivizes states to ensure that adolescents covered by Medicaid are diagnosed and treated.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa

On Oct. 30, 2009, the nation observed the first Cold War Patriots National Day of Remembrance, dedicated to those who served their country working in jobs relating to the nuclear weapons program.

While the U.S. Senate resolution for the National Day of Remembrance was approved by unanimous consent, a bill addressing problems in the federal program designed to help nuclear workers with what they say they need most — medical benefits and compensation for illnesses that were caused by on-the-job exposures to radiation and toxic substances — remains stuck in a Senate committee awaiting another in a long list of studies from the Government Accountability Office detailing its shortcomings.

Signed into law in 2000, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act was designed to compensate former nuclear workers with lump sum payments and medical benefits for illnesses linked to their exposures to radiation and toxic substances.

But the program has instead created such layers of bureaucracy and claim denials that it has become the target of criticism not only from former nuclear workers struggling to get compensation for their dangerous work history, but from advocacy groups, medical experts and even the senators who authored the original legislation.

Even the program’s ombudsman, whose office produces an annual report of claimant concerns for both houses of the U.S. Congress, said some sort of legislative correction is needed.

Senate Bill 757, The Charlie Wolf Nuclear Workers Compensation Act, aims to fix the problems in the program but has languished in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee since March 2009, when it was introduced by U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo.

“More than nine years after enactment [of the federal program], many workers have died without receiving the health care or compensation they deserve,” Udall said in a statement. “Others are still struggling with bureaucratic delays, years after they first applied for benefits.”

The senators who requested a GAO investigation of the program in 2008, including Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, said they are awaiting the final report, due to be published this month, before discussing or considering the bill. But Terrie Barrie, a Colorado advocate and co-founder of the Alliance of Nuclear Worker Advocacy Groups (ANWAG), said that while her group has high hopes for the report they also have grave concerns that it won’t be enough to motivate legislators.

A Troubled Timeline

In May 2004, a GAO study found the Department of Energy “off to a slow start” in processing claims, and took the Department of Energy to task for a backlog of claims waiting for physician review.

In Oct. 2004, the Bunning-Bingaman Amendment to the 2005 Defense Authorization Act yanked oversight of EEOICPA from the Department of Energy when it was discovered they had spent over $90 million in administrative costs, but had compensated only 31 claimants. Congress gave oversight to the Department of Labor and also created an Office of the Ombudsman, which is required to make an annual report to Congress on the type and number of complaints made to the office about the program.

In Feb. 2006, the GAO criticized the EEOICPA for conflicts of interest in key administrative positions, and for lack of oversight in contract spending. By May, the GAO found $24.6 million in “improper and questionable payments for contractor costs,” and estimated that these payments represented 30 percent of the $92 million in total program funds spent by the Department of Energy through 2005.

In April 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama demanded administrative cost estimates of EEOICPA from federal administrators.

In July 2008, U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., who now serves as U.S. Secretary of the Interior, introduced the Compensation and Respect for Energy Workers Act (CARE) to correct problems. This bill never gained traction and was lost in the election year news cycle.  By September, in response to an investigative report by the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, the original framers of the EEOICPA, including Harkin, demanded yet another GAO investigation into the program.

“A recent series of articles in the Rocky Mountain News described what it characterized as ‘a pattern of ongoing decisions and rule changes within the 8-year-old program that consistently made it more difficult for sick and dying workers–or their survivors–to be compensated,’” said the request letter to the GAO, which was signed by Sens. Harkin, Salazar, Edward Kennedy, Lamar Alexander, Harry Reid, Wayne Allard and Jeff Bingaman.

The letter asked the GAO to look at claim delays, processing costs, credibility and transparency of the decision making process. The publication of the report is expected this week.

Not enough

Despite improvements to the program over the years both administratively and by legislative force, advocates say it hasn’t been enough. While ANWAG’s Barrie said the creation of an ombudsman’s office in 2004 has helped claimants with processes and provides a formal avenue for complaints, it hasn’t changed the system.

“They hear the same complaints over and over again, but nothing changes,” she said. “The office hasn’t been given enough power to intervene on behalf of claimants.”

Malcom Nelson, ombudsman for the EEOICPA, says that legislative change will be necessary because the issue is complicated by the fact that other agencies help administer the program.

“Statutory issues cannot be fully addressed without legislative action by Congress. On the other hand, there are issues that concern the administration of the program and these issues can be addressed by the relevant government agency. [The Department of Labor] and the other governmental agencies involved with EEOICPA need to collaborate to address the administrative problems,” Nelson said.

Barrie said the expected GAO report concerns her advocacy group, because certain issues remain uncovered and may affect the sense of urgency legislators feel in correcting the problems.

Members of ANWAG met with GAO officials in December to raise concerns, most importantly that the GAO may not be able to calculate the total administrative costs of EEOICPA. Barrie said she was blown away that the GAO would not be able to precisely figure out total costs.

“Isn’t that what they are supposed to be good at?” she said.

Movement in March?

Aides to Sen. Harkin told The Iowa Independent that he would not comment on the program until the GAO report became available to the HELP committee for review, which is expected this week.

The Charlie Wolf Nuclear Workers Compensation Act makes line item corrections to the current act and targets key areas that claimants and advocates have considered the most unfair. Those include the list of accepted cancers and the administration of the database the Department of Labor uses for determining what substances workers were exposed to, called the Site Exposure Matrix.

“This legislation is the fix we are looking for,” Barrie said, adding that advocates hope the GAO report gives legislators, and claimants, the support the bill needs.

“We hope the GAO finds enough evidence to validate our concerns and validates what the ombudsman’s office has been hearing from claimants for years,” she said. “We need this legislative hearing, because it’s the only way to force the Department of Labor to improve the program.”

Nelson believes that the GAO report will do just that.

“Each year, my office makes an earnest attempt to talk to as many claimants as we can,” he said. “The issues addressed in our annual report represent the most common complaints, grievances and requests for assistance received by our office during the past calendar year and I believe that the GAO report will bear this out.”

The unprecedented USDA/DOJ workshops will be held around the country throughout the rest of the year, with events in Alabama, Colorado and Wisconsin, and a culminating conference in Washington in December. But the inaugural event next week has raised the ire of farm activists. Feeling left out of Friday’s daylong event in Ankeny, they’re holding a town hall the previous night as a kind of shadow convention, the Iowa Independent reports.

“After years of ignoring the corporate concentration and lack of competition in our food system, the DOJ and the USDA are finally admitting that there might be a problem,” said Dave Murphy of Clear Lake and affiliated with Food Democracy Now. “Unfortunately, family farmers, consumer advocates, and organized labor are underrepresented on the panels at the DOJ/USDA anti-trust workshop. This grassroots townhall meeting is essential to ensure that the voices of people most affected by this problem are heard loud and clear.”

But it’s possible the workshops will include more people who actually make a living on the land after all. This morning, Iowa Independent reporter Lynda Waddington asked U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin to comment on the dearth of farmers on the panels.

His reply, in part: “My office didn’t set the schedule, but we will be asking the DOJ and USDA to include more farmers and processors in these discussions.”

Sen. Tom Harkin. Photo: WDCpix

Calling yesterday’s health care summit in Washington the “the final port of call” in achieving health care reform, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) says he can see “that final harbor… without binoculars,” adding that he thinks action on a health care bill will be taken in the next four to six weeks. As the Iowa Independent reports, he emphasizes that the bill may be modified, but it won’t be rewritten from scratch, as some Republicans have called for, and it will pass with or without Republican support.

“The House is pretty insistent on a public option,” said Harkin, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions (HELP). “The Senate is a little bit more divided on it. I think in our negotiations with the House in the next week or so there may be some decisions made on that. I just don’t know which way it is going to go,” he said, adding that his personal belief is that the bill will likely not have a public option.

According to a new Research 2000 poll, 62 percent of Minnesotan support inclusion of the public option in reform measures. So far, 24 senators, including Sen. Al Franken, have signed a letter urging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid use reconciliation to pass health care reform with a public option.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar has indicated she supports a public option and reconciliation but hasn’t signed the letter to Reid.

Klobuchar didn’t indicate she’d sign the letter, but said she supports “using reconciliation to pass the health reform bill with changes, such as getting rid of the Nebraska deal” — a reference to an addition to the bill to win conservative Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson’s vote.

Klobuchar continued, indicating her support for the public option:

I would want to make sure that the bill contains the Medicare care cost reform measures included in the existing bill.  I am also supportive of the President’s efforts to forge a bipartisan agreement.  We must reduce health care costs for the people of this country.

I support the House bill version of the public option which is based on negotiated rates. I do not support a public option based on Medicare rates because it exacerbates geographic disparities that already hurt Minnesota.

In addition to Franken, the letter to Reid was signed by Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Roland Burris of Illinois, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, John Kerry of Massachusetts, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, as well as Sanders.

Earlier Wednesday, the Iowa Independent reported that Sen. Tom Harkin, who chairs the powerful Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions (HELP), also supports the use of reconciliation.

Update: Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reports that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) became the 11th senator to sign the reconciliation letter, and that, like Klobuchar, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) supports reconciliation but hasn’t signed. Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Jack Reed (R.I.) are now listed as signatories on the letter as well, bringing the total number of signers to 13.

Sen. Tom Harkin. Photo: WDCpix

Momemtum is growing for adding a public option to the health care reform bill during the reconciliation process: Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has signed on to a letter urging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to “bring for a vote before the full Senate a public health insurance option under budget reconciliation rules.” While Sen.Tom Harkin of Iowa hasn’t yet joined Sen. Al Franken and nine others in signing, he does appear to be a supporter of the idea.

Jason Hancock of the Iowa Independent reports that Harkin, long a champion of the public option, won’t go on record whether he supports the plan, but last month a Democratic candidate seems to have let the cat out of the bag. Hancock reports:

Several sources, including a a former state lawmaker running against Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, say Harkin was adamant in his support of using reconciliation to pass health care reform when he addressed a recent closed-door gathering of state Democratic leaders.

“Tom Harkin informed the Iowa Democratic State Central Committee in Des Moines this morning that, after consultation with President Obama, he will break the health care reform bill into budget and non-budget components,” Democratic candidate for Senate Bob Krause said last month in a statement. “The budget component will move through the Senate under the reconciliation process and the non-budget items will move as a new and separate bill.”

Reconciliation would allow a bill to pass with a simple majority vote, a move that would circumvent Republican promises to filibuster the legislation.

The Minnesota Independent has a request in to Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s office to see whether she intends to sign the letter as well.

Photo: Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison has introduced a bill that would extend Minnesota-style, same-day voting rights to all eligible Americans in federal elections.

The Same Day Registration Act would let people register at the polling place on Election Day rather than requiring registration weeks or months ahead of time, as most states do.

Same-day registration is already law in seven nine states, including Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa, plus the District of Columbia. (North Dakota is the only state to do without voter registration altogether.)

Common Cause claims those states see voter-turnout rates as much as 7 percent higher than others; a 2009 Cal Tech/MIT study (pdf) confirms that “election day registration can increase turnout significantly” and doesn’t increase costs or fraud.

It’s an Upper Midwest thing, it seems. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin is the bill’s sponsor in the U.S. Senate, where Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar and Iowa’s Tom Harkin are co-sponsors. In the House, two of five co-sponsors are Minnesotans: Tim Walz and Jim Oberstar. So far, the bill’s sponsors are all Democrats.

In a statement, Ellison said,

Minnesota routinely leads the nation in voter turnout – usually over 70 percent. … Enacting a National Election Day Registration law would do for the nation what same day registration has done for our State – give a voice to all who want to vote.

That 70 percent figure applies to years with presidential races. In off-year elections, turnout has run about 10 percentage points lower.

Ellison’s statement also quotes Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie calling same-day registration a “no brainer” and claiming it is more secure than other states’ systems that require registration in advance, because “you have the person right in front of you — not a postcard in the mail.”

In the U.S. Senate election recount between Al Franken and Norm Coleman, Minnesota showed the nation flaws in its absentee-voting system — some involving the mail. Other states saw major controversies over voter registration in last year’s election. One was Colorado, where the secretary of state purged 44,000 voters from the registration rolls before Election Day, in defiance of court orders. A few hundred managed to cast provisional ballots that were counted.

Ellison’s bill comes just as millions across the country prepare to go to the polls next Tuesday — that is, as long as they’ve registered beforehand, in states where that’s required.

In Minnesota, officials expect half a million voters to turn out. But who knows? A few million more could decide to exercise their franchise on the spur of the moment, and if they haven’t registered yet, no biggie.

Here’s the key language in Ellison’s bill (H.R. 3957):

[E]ach State shall permit any eligible individual on the day of a Federal election and on any day when voting, including early voting, is permitted for a Federal election (A) to register to vote in such election at the polling place using a form that meets the requirements under section 9(b) of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993; and (B) to cast a vote in such election.

The bill’s first stop in the House in the Committee on House Affairs. None of the members of that committee come from states with same-day voter registration.