"We are boxed in, which I don’t like,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.).

A committee spokesman said Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) had already subpoenaed Lois Lerner to ensure her appearance before the panel.

An internal IRS investigation found that the agency was improperly scrutinizing conservative groups a full year before a Treasury audit made similar findings, a House Oversight aide said Tuesday.

The aide said that Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner ousted by President Obama last week, sent other agency officials to the Cincinnati office at the center of the IRS uproar.

Those officials reported back to Miller, then deputy commissioner for services and enforcement, on May 3, 2012, that there were “significant problems in the review process and a substantial bias against conservative groups—conclusions virtually identical to those reached by the IG a year later.”

WEDNESDAY'S BIG STORY: 

Talkin' bout the IRS, or not: So Lois Lerner, who has played a leading role in the all-hell-breaking-loose political scandal season, has decided she will not tell a House panel how she spilled the beans about the Internal Revenue Service's in-depth look into conservative groups.  

The House Oversight Committee will tackle the matter Wednesday with Lerner, former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman, Treasury watchdog Russell George and Treasury Deputy Secretary Neal Wolin, who is the first Treasury official to directly testify on the matter and could face the bulk of questions in the hot seat. 

Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS who publicly apologized for improperly singling out certain groups seeking tax-exempt status and set off the scandal, informed the panel that she won't answer questions from lawmakers on Wednesday.

That should make for an interesting few hours, in which lawmakers will likely lecture Lerner about her actions. Her lawyer argued to the panel that she has not committed a crime or lied but has "no choice but to take this course."

She will get plenty of practice exercising her Fifth Amendment rights, even if her lawyer has suggested that just sitting there would "have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her." 

Read more...

The full House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday approved the first of 12 annual spending bills for 2014, a $73.3 billion measure funding military construction and veterans affairs programs.

The bill is the least controversial of the 12 annual bills and, reflecting that, it was approved on a voice vote.

The bill increases spending by $1.4 billion above the enact 2013 level. This comes out to about $2.4 billion more in spending compared to the post-sequestration level the government is currently operating on after automatic cuts came into effect on March 1. 

Democrats supported the bill but were adamantly opposed to an overall 2014 spending plan for all 12 bills that the GOP majority also adopted at the same markup.That plan has deep cuts to social programs to pay for increased defense spending. 

The veterans affairs bills makes an attempt to address an embarrassing backlog in veterans benefits claims.

It supports an increase of 94 claims processor and requires the VA to report monthly to Congress on the backlog. 

“They may as well get ready to be constantly harassed and frankly starved moneywise until they get this right,” committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said.

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who is running for Senate, offered an amendment to cut claims processor pay by 25 percent if a 25 percent reduction in the claims backlog is not reduced 180 days after Oct. 1.  He withdrew the amendment but committee leaders promised to work with him on the proposal as the bill comes to the House floor in early June.

Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), whose district contains a huge number of federal workers,  offered an amendment to end the three year pay freeze for federal workers covered by the bill. The amendment was defeated on a 23 to 25 vote with Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) voting with Democrats. 

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) bucked members of his own party Tuesday by objecting to a GOP request to prohibit budget committee conferees from raising the debt ceiling.

“If my colleagues on this side of the aisle think that we are helping our cause as fiscal conservatives by blocking going to a conference on the budget, which every family in America has to be on, because of certain requirements that they demand, then we are not helping ourselves with the American people at all,” McCain said of his own party.

Community banks are pressing a federal consumer watchdog to wrap the bulk of their reliable mortgage products under the qualified mortgage (QM) rule to ensure they can keep up their pace of lending.

The Independent Community Bankers Association (ICBA) is specifically calling on the the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to include heavily used balloon loans into the part of the QM rule geared toward smaller lenders.

Ron Haynie, senior vice president of mortgage finance policy at ICBA, said the balloon loan issue is "really big" because of the high number of banks that make them, especially to rural and underserved areas where some customers may be unable to qualify for a loan in the secondary market. 

"We're trying to paint the picture for them that this is a big issue for community banks," he told The Hill.

The Senate rejected two amendments to the farm bill Tuesday that would have changed the $4 billion-worth of cuts to food stamps.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) introduced an amendment that would have cut at least an additional $12 billion for the supplemental food assistance program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. His amendment failed on a 40-58 vote.

“My goal is simple to restore integrity to the supplemental food assistance program,” Roberts said ahead of the vote.

A set of regulations contained in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law is having unintended consequences in war-torn central Africa, lawmakers and witnesses said during a hearing Tuesday on Capitol Hill.