In its brief with the court (pdf), Catholic Answers argues that, in seeking to establish the legality of the group’s claim to tax-exempt status, the IRS has forced the group to continue to refile refund claims for years, effectively postponing a decision in the matter and thereby “chilling speech.”

Tax-exempt nonprofit groups such as churches are barred from performing express political candidate advocacy. They can take up political issues, however, and in championing charged issues like abortion, the line separating advocacy for an anti-abortion position and the Republican Party generally has become thinner and thinner.

Catholic Answers calls itself an “apostolate,” by which it means it is carrying on its educational and evangelical mission with the Church’s blessing, although none of its members are ordained. Established in 1979, the group produces books, magazines, videos and a daily radio show on Church teachings and Church positions on issues of the day.

The group is being represented in its case against the IRS by high-profile religious-right attorney James Bopp, a reported adviser to presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Bopp advised Citizens United in its now-famous campaign finance case. He also defended the national anti-abortion organization Susan B Anthony List in a defamation suit filed by former Congressman Steve Driehaus. Bopp has also served as general counsel for National Right to Life and as special counsel for Focus on the Family.

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No one loved the internet rules written by the Federal Communications Commission last year that sought to safeguard the free-flowing egalitarian quality of the internet, where communication-industry giants don’t get to decide which information streams to users and at what speed. One side thought the rules were overreaching socialism and the other thought they were riven with the kind of loopholes corporate interests could wiggle through when it came time to assert control. In the spring, Republicans in the House opposed to the rules voted to strip the FCC of the cash it would need to enforce the rules. On Wednesday, a small band of senators, including Colorado’s Mark Udall, sent a letter to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Ranking Member Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) objecting to the House action and asking the committee to strip out the budget amendment that would hold back the FCC funds.

“The… network neutrality rules are built on principles everyone should support – promoting transparency of broadband service operations; preventing blocking of legal content and websites; and prohibiting discrimination of individuals, applications, and other websites,” the senators wrote. “Some members of Congress have decided that they know better what is good for the Internet than the people who use, fund, and work on it. We side with the agency of expertise and supporters of the rule and urge you to reject any proposals that will prevent the FCC from implementing or enforcing its net neutrality rules.”

Joel Kelsey, a spokesman for Free Press, a media watchdog group that supports net neutrality, decried the “defunding” budget amendment strategy and applauded the group of senators who opposed it.

“This amendment is a poorly disguised play to hijack the budget process in order to prolong a political grudge against the FCC. We hope the Appropriations Committee heeds the advice of the senators on this letter and leaves this amendment where it belongs – on the cutting room floor.”

The letter:

June 29, 2011

Dear Chairman Inouye and Ranking Member Cochran:

The House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee has included language in its funding bill for 2012 barring the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from using any funds to put into effect the Open Internet rules it approved last year. We write to you to renew our objection as a matter of both policy and process to any similar effort in the Senate.

Congress created the FCC in 1934 and reaffirmed in 1996 that the agency’s mandate is to provide all Americans with fair and equitable access to communications over wire and airwaves.

Consistent with those values and that mandate, the FCC approved an order to establish network neutrality ground rules for our nation’s broadband infrastructure. Those rules, which are in the public interest, establish guidelines for how telephone and cable companies can treat information that travels over their wires and connects Americans to the Internet and each other.

The final network neutrality rules are built on principles everyone should support – promoting transparency of broadband service operations; preventing blocking of legal content and websites; and prohibiting discrimination of individuals, applications, and other websites. In the wake of the order, a host of companies, venture capitalists, and hundreds of thousands of users of the Internet expressed their approval. Opponents of the rule predicted that we would see a decline in investment in broadband infrastructure because of the agency’s defense of the open Internet. In the intervening months, investment in infrastructure has continued to grow and innovative firms are developing and providing services over the Internet free from discrimination. The predictions of opponents have fallen flat.

Some members of Congress have decided that they know better what is good for the Internet than the people who use, fund, and work on it. We side with the agency of expertise and supporters of the rule and urge you to reject any proposals that will prevent the FCC from implementing or enforcing its net neutrality rules.

Sincerely,

John Kerry
Jay Rockefeller
Al Franken
Maria Cantwell
Tom Udall
Richard Blumenthal
Mark Udall
Ron Wyden
Bernard Sanders
Mark Begich

Although it seems to be at a crucial stage as more and more media moves to the web and as broadband access expands to the last corners of the country, the battle over net neutrality and how it will be enforced is sure to continue for years.

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Menendez’s office said in press release that the bill is “aimed at addressing the broken immigration system with tough, smart, and fair measures.”

The Immigration Policy Center explains that Menendez’s proposal includes the creation of Lawful Prospective Immigration (LPI) status. Applicants for LPI status would be required to submit biometric data, go through security checks and pay a fine. After six to eight years of LPI status, undocumented immigrants could transition to Legal Permanent Resident status only after they pay taxes and additional fines, learn English and U.S. civics, and undergo additional background checks. And even then, LPIs would have to wait behind those already in line for LPR status.

The Policy Center also says the bill includes improvements to regulate the future flow of legal immigrants by creating a standing commission that would study labor market and economic conditions to determine the number of employment-based visas needed. The bill also supports programs that better facilitate immigrant integration, such as enhanced policies to help immigrants learn English and grants for states that successfully integrate newcomers.

The release issued by Menendez adds that the

Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2011 includes both a mandatory employment verification system and a program to require undocumented immigrants in the U.S. as of June 1, 2011 to register with the government, learn English, and pay fines and taxes on their way to becoming Americans.

The bill promotes effective and accountable enforcement within the U.S. through measures such as: additional resources for the Border Patrol; expanded penalties for passport and document fraud; new requirements for the Department of Homeland Security to track entries and exits at the border; common-sense rules governing detention to ensure U.S. citizens are not unlawfully detained; and new criminal penalties for fraud and misuse of Social Security numbers.

As the Obama Administration tentatively feels its way through the political crisis in Egypt, some key lawmakers on Capitol Hill are sending a strong message to embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, who chairs the subcommittee that approves foreign aid and who has voiced strong opinions about the official “thuggery” on display on the ground in Egypt directed at protesters and journalists, is proposing that Congress not release the more than a billion dollars in aid the U.S. sends to Egypt each year unless Mubarak steps down. Members of the Colorado delegation have yet to weigh in on Leahy’s proposal.

The Leahy plan sends a message not just to Mubarak but also to the Obama administration. Charged with managing the fraught relationship the U.S. has maintained for decades with the Middle Eastern public and with Middle Eastern dictators, Obama has tread softly as the streets of Egypt have turned into a battleground and as the Egyptian authorities have trained their high-grade American-made weapons on the protesters. The back-stage diplomacy and front-stage brutality have (some would say at last after decades) given rise to frustration, including on the part of the U.S. lawmakers pushing for an end, at least, to our financing the Mubarak regime.

Democrats spearheading the proposal to cut funding from Egypt– Leahy, as well as Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry and Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett– have asked Mubarak to leave office immediately. Leahy said Mubarak had “no credibility” even to oversee a transition.

News coming fast from the streets of Cairo, however, may overtake the Leahy proposal.

Speculation jamming the internet Friday as evening curfew arrived in Egypt was that weary Mubarak would announce any minute that he was in fact stepping aside, but that speculation and the energy it produced now is fading.

Meantime, images from the streets tell the story. Nevine Zaki posting photos at yFrog is pleading with al Jazeera journalists to use her photos in their stories.

This one captures Christian Egyptian protesters forming a human cordon around Muslim Egyptian protesters so they could take time to pray.

And more vivid images documenting the violence.

Zaki’s caption: “@ajelive please use this, the police IS using violence & are hitting people left & right ”

“These are not rubber bullets.”

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The story, by Ryan Lizza, is nearly 10,000 words, but it’s definitely worth a read. It documents, in extensive detail, how the White House and Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and (at least for a time) Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) were often not on the same page as they tried to hash out a climate bill.

For instance, the White House announced a plan in March to open up new areas of the Outer Continental Shelf to drilling. The plan was announced while Kerry, Graham and Lieberman were simultaneously negotiating a plan to open up more drilling in exchange for key industry groups’ support for their climate bill.

But, Lizza reports, the White House made its drilling announcement without consulting the senators, taking away their leverage in negotiations with industry.

But there had been no communication with the senators actually writing the bill, and they felt betrayed. When Graham’s energy staffer learned of the announcement, the night before, he was “apoplectic,” according to a colleague. The group had dispensed with the idea of drilling in ANWR, but it was prepared to open up vast portions of the Gulf and the East Coast. Obama had now given away what the senators were planning to trade.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. – working with Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine – is trying to talk Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., into making a carbon cap limited to electric utilities part of the final energy package Reid is expected to send to the Senate floor by the end of the month. That gives the Senate just a few short weeks to debate the energy package before the August recess.

Udall last summer expressed disappointment in the RES initially proposed in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, on which he serves. That proposal called for a 15-percent standard – meaning the percentage of electrical power produced for renewable sources such as wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal – by 2021.

In a letter to his fellow senators this week, Udall urged them to support a 25-percent RES by 2025, citing a study showing it would create an additional 274,000 jobs in the clean energy sector. Last week Udall led the charge of 10 freshmen senators, including Colorado’s Michael Bennet, in pushing Reid to move a bill including a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and a federal renewable energy standard.

“We refuse to be the generation of leaders who posterity will view as those who failed to act,” the freshmen class wrote in a letter to Reid, who faces a tough reelection battle and hails from the mining-rich state of Nevada.

Udall, meanwhile, has taken a shotgun approach to revamping the nation’s power grid, including supporting a nuclear power renaissance that’s not popular with environmentalists. He campaigned for Colorado’s Amendment 37 in 2004, which saw one of the first voter-approved renewable energy standards in the nation.

The state legislature in 2007 upped it to 20 percent by 2020, and this past session – with the backing of the state’s largest utility, Minnesota-based Xcel Energy – increased it another 10 percent to the second highest RES in the nation behind only California.

According to the New York Times, some major utilities and trade associations have yet to take a position on the Kerry utility-only cap, including the Edison Electric Institute, which represents about 70 percent of the U.S. electric power industry.

But other utilities, including Duke Energy Corp – the sixth largest electric utility in the nation, according the DOE’s Energy Information Administration – supports the Kerry proposal because it would provide market certainty in the face of more stringent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of emissions. The EPA push promises to involve years of litigation.

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When General McChrystal called me this morning, I emphasized that my concern is our policy in Afghanistan and what it will take to be successful there. I respect General McChrystal as a soldier and always have. What’s most important is the 94,000 American troops serving in harm’s way in Afghanistan. Their safety and their mission should be the priority we stay focused on above all else. The Commander in Chief and his national security team, including his top commander on the ground, must have confidence in each other and confidence in the path forward in Afghanistan. It would be a grave mistake to allow this unfolding news drama to distract anyone from the mission at hand. Now is not the time for Washington to be sidetracked by chatter. Everyone needs to take a deep breath and give the President and his national security team the space to decide what is in the best interest of our mission, and to have their face-to-face discussion tomorrow without a premature Washington feeding frenzy.

You could read that either way, but it’s certainly a statement that Obama needs to decide not just what McChrystal’s future is, but what the future of Afghanistan strategy is.

At Small Wars Journal, the premiere counterinsurgency blog, Robert Haddick makes a case that McChrystal dug himself in too deep a hole to stay on:

It is hard to believe that President Obama and his staff will be able to continue to work with McChrystal after the revelation of the Rolling Stone affair. President Obama will have to defend his commander-in-chief powers under Article II of the Constitution and that will almost certainly require McChrystal’s swift retirement. To allow McChrystal to apologize and stay on would set a bad precedent, send the wrong signal regarding civil-military relations to the rest of the military, and would cause great uproar among Obama’s civilian staff.

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“What I have withdrawn from is a bill that basically restricts drilling in a way that is never going to happen in the future,” Graham said. “I wanted it to safely occur in the future; I don’t want to take it off the table.”

Lest your memory be as short as Graham’s, this is the bill that Graham helped write. He, Kerry and Lieberman drafted it together, but Graham pulled out at the last second to protest Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) prioritization of immigration reform. Environmental advocates hoped that he’d still vote for the eventual bill, even if he wasn’t present for the rollout. But then the Gulf of Mexico oil spill hit, and Kerry and Lieberman decided to give states some control over whether drilling happened near their shores. Apparently that was too much for Graham.

At least he has a counterproposal:

Graham said his advice to lawmakers is to “start over and scale down your ambitions.” This includes allowing electric utilities more time to meet their emission reduction targets and completely removing energy-intensive manufacturers and other industries from a carbon control plan. The technology does not yet exist for them to be able to capture and store carbon emissions, he argued.

Well, a scaled-back energy bill does exist, in the form of the bipartisan proposal by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) that’s given environmentalists fits over its weak targets, and that might serve as the foundation for Kerry and Lieberman’s bill to be offered as an amendment. But apparently the Bingaman bill is no good for Graham either:

Graham also said he would vote against an energy bill approved with bipartisan support last year on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Democratic leaders have suggested that measure may be the starting focal point of energy legislation on the floor this summer. But Graham said the plan’s renewable energy production mandate is too low and does not go far enough in promoting nuclear and biomass energy.

He said he will offer up later this year a “hodgepodge of ideas out there that I think form a potential pathway forward.”

Ah yes, the hodgepodge of ideas that will save the planet. It seems pretty clear at this point that Graham has been looking for a way out of his support for climate legislation for some time; now, he’s found it.

Comprehensive immigration reform could still jump to the front of the Obama administration legislative agenda line in the wake of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, even though it’s clear that highly contentious issue has little chance of passing this session.

But mounting climate change evidence and the ongoing British Petroleum oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico would seem to give Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman’s American Power Act a leg up as the next-most-pressing agenda item.

What the New York Times deems the “nation’s leading scientific body” – the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council – this week issued a trio of comprehensive studies showing climate change is indeed happening and that it is caused by man.

The reports recommend immediate action and the adoption of a carbon-pricing system. It also concludes the Kerry-Lieberman bill’s target of reducing national carbon dioxide emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is a reasonable goal.

Meanwhile, Americans United for Change recently launched a TV ad campaign skewering Senate Republicans in particular and the GOP in general for taking $35 million in oil and gas money over the last three and half years.

The ad uses brutal imagery of oil continuing to pour into the Gulf and urges Republicans to stop stalling climate change legislation, which the House passed last summer.

Home well exploded by gas fracking in Dimock, Penn. (Mainlinepeaceaction)

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the high-pressure process of injecting water, sand and undisclosed chemicals deep into natural gas wells to crack open tight geologic formations and free up more gas. Oil and gas companies argue the chemicals are proprietary formulas kept secret to give them an edge over their competition.

Critics say the process can and has led to groundwater contamination and that government officials and the public at large have a right to know the contents of frack fluids. Industry officials counter the process has been used for decades with no known instances of contamination.

Recognition of the fracking debate in the Senate climate change bill is significant because it has yet to take up Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette’s FRAC (Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals) Act, introduced nearly a year ago in the House.

Kerry-Lieberman calls on oil and gas service companies to “disclose all chemical constituents used in a hydraulic fracturing operation to the public on the Internet in order to provide adequate information for the public and state and local authorities.”

State officials who regulate natural gas drilling in Colorado have said the FRAC Act, which would remove a 2005 exemption for fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act, would impose another layer of federal regulations that simply can’t be accommodated by the understaffed Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

Counties and towns in gas-rich areas around the state are split on whether to support the FRAC Act, as is Colorado’s congressional delegation. U.S. Rep. John Salazar, a blue-dog Democrat representing the mostly rural and energy-rich Western Slope, opposes the bill despite a survey indicating the majority of his constituents favor the legislation.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which issued a highly criticized report on fracking during the Bush administration, has undertaken a new study of the process, but calls for the FRAC Act have continued.

Last month, Exxon Mobil, the nation’s largest energy producer which in December jumped into natural gas by acquiring XTO Energy for nearly $30 billion, told shareholders it wants fracking chemicals disclosed to ease the fears of landowners. Exxon joins several other smaller energy companies that called for full disclosure last fall.

Under its one-year-old oil and gas drilling regulations, Colorado requires oil and gas companies to keep an inventory of chemicals on site and to make it available to emergency services personnel in the event of a spill. The Senate bill takes that one step further.

But some environmental groups are concerned that merely requiring companies to disclose the chemicals on a website will not carry the same regulatory authority as removing the Safe Drinking Water Act exemption.

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