Minnesotans set sights low in election year

WASHINGTON - President Obama will frame an election-year agenda Tuesday night in his third State of the Union speech, but some Minnesotans in Congress are already talking about a "lame-duck" session.

That's political-speak for the legislative session that follows the Nov. 6 elections, which could upend control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.

While Minnesota lawmakers in Washington say they will press ahead on projects from the St. Croix River bridge to tax relief for the state's medical device makers, they face a headwind of low expectations for election-year legislative accomplishments.

"It's no secret to anybody that it's a presidential election year and politics are going to start dominating things," said Rep. John Kline, the most senior of the four Minnesota Republicans in the U.S. House, which has been in session just three days so far this month.

Ramping up slowly after last year's bruising showdowns over taxes and spending, members in both parties are approaching 2012 warily, struggling to find even a sliver of common ground on the growing national debt problem that shadows the elections.

That may leave Minnesotans in Congress nibbling at the edges of a limited legislative agenda that will be eclipsed by a hard-fought and potentially historic presidential election. For Kline, who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee, it adds uncertainty to his efforts to lead the overhaul of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Minnesota's Collin Peterson, the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, is only "relatively optimistic" about renewing major farm legislation this year, while Tim Walz, another rural Minnesota Democrat, sees little prospect of "doing a farm bill of any type."

Payroll tax showdown

Congress faces an urgent showdown over the popular payroll tax "holiday" that ends next month. Republicans may still try to tie the issue to approval of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas. Lawmakers also have to deal with the year-end expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts.

For Congress to leave those tax issues unresolved could saddle Americans with the biggest across-the-board tax increase in history -- a result neither Obama nor Congress seems to want, even though such an action could wipe out a quarter of the federal debt over the next decade.

"There are middle-class tax cuts that are very important to the economy," said Democrat Betty McCollum, who supports Obama's push to increase taxes on the wealthy.

But Congress appears no closer to a long-term tax and deficit deal than it was after November's debt-reduction "supercommittee" ended in failure, capping one of the least productive sessions in modern history. Given the potential stakes in a frenzied election year, fear of paralysis has already set in.

Lawmakers recall that the 2010 elections that ended the Democrats' control of the House produced a year-end session featuring a major tax deal, a nuclear arms treaty and repeal of a ban on gays serving openly in the military.

As always, much depends on who wins the elections. "All that will inform or even dictate what happens in a 'lame duck,'" said Kline.

'Doing nothing'

While some see little hope of breaking the partisan impasse that nearly shut down the government three times in 2011, the coming year will provide fewer pivot points for political brinkmanship. The House opened last week with a largely party-line vote on the debt ceiling, but agreements are in place to effectively carry the government into 2013.

Others hope that election-year jitters could open the door to smaller, bipartisan acts. Bipartisan legislative majorities already have signed on to a bill by Walz to ban insider stock trading by members of Congress, as well as for one by Paulsen to repeal $20 billion in medical device taxes created under the new federal health care law.

But with the Obama campaign targeting congressional Republicans, and Republicans targeting Obama, the possibility exists of a no-deal Congress that kicks a major deficit reduction package into 2013, possibly even forfeiting the Bush tax cuts.

"We're good at doing nothing," Peterson said, "and that's all you've got to do to make it happen."

Kevin Diaz is a correspondent in the Star Tribune Washington Bureau.