Inside Politics

Down to the wire

Rep. Patrick J. Toomey has moved to within 5 percentage points of Sen. Arlen Specter in the final week before the Pennsylvania Republican primary.

The Quinnipiac University survey of 431 likely Republican voters found Mr. Specter at 49 percent and Mr. Toomey at 44 percent, with 7 percent undecided. That was a dramatic improvement for Mr. Toomey from a 15-point deficit the Quinnipiac poll found in early April.

The latest survey, taken by phone April 12-18, has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.

The much-watched primary between the conservative Mr. Toomey and the liberal Mr. Specter takes place Tuesday. The winner will face Democratic Rep. Joseph M. Hoeffel in November.

Final blitz

The conservative Club for Growth has launched a new TV-ad campaign through its political action committee that accuses Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, of wasting taxpayer dollars on global junkets.

An announcer says: “What did Arlen Specter do after boosting your income, gas and Social Security taxes? Road trip! Merry old England. Romantic Paris. Historic Egypt. Dozens of trips all at taxpayer expense. He’s rated the most wasteful spender in Congress, so he demands perks. Luxury hotels, gourmet meals, daily squash games. That’s Arlen Specter: very liberal with your taxes.”

The ad began running yesterday on cable news channels statewide and in broadcast markets outside Philadelphia.

The group said it would be the first installment of a $400,000 ad campaign before Tuesday’s primary election, in which Mr. Specter is being challenged by conservative Rep. Patrick J. Toomey. The next portion of the ad campaign will be released later in the week, the group said.

Conflicts galore

Under the September 11 commission’s rules, its general counsel decides whether a member such as Jamie S. Gorelick should recuse herself or be disqualified, Andrew C. McCarthy writes at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).

“Now, those who set up the commission took great pains to ensure its membership was an even split of Republicans and Democrats; and the commission’s staff, too, is a studiously bipartisan mix. But, alas, there is only one general counsel, and he is — surprise! — a Democrat who, like Gorelick, was a high-ranking Clinton operative. Their careers, in fact, are a study in overlap,” says Mr. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others.

“The general counsel is Daniel Marcus, and, as the commission’s Web site details, his Democratic roots run deep and prominent … After that, Marcus was for many years, until 1998, a partner — and ultimately part of the management committee — at the Washington law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. That is the firm at which Gorelick became a partner in 2003.

“Marcus had left the firm by then, in 1998 to be precise. That was when, during the high pitch of the impeachment scandal, President Clinton made him senior counsel in the White House Counsel’s Office — an entity, you may recall, whose sense of the defensible when it came to behavior by public officials was somewhat elastic.

“By the next year, 1999, Clinton had survived. The [Janet] Reno Justice Department, however, had experienced the turnover of high-level officials that is common in a two-term administration. Gorelick, for example, had left after three years as deputy attorney general in mid-1997 (to become vice chair at Fannie Mae). To fill some of the voids, Clinton dispatched none other than Daniel Marcus to Justice, where he served until the end of the administration, eventually as Reno’s associate attorney general.”

“I would not hold my breath waiting for Marcus to tell Gorelick that her conflict is disqualifying.”

That ’scorecard’

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) has accused Rep. Nick Lampson, Texas Democrat, of trying to mislead voters by preparing a “Catholic Voting Scorecard” that compares the votes of Catholic lawmakers on both sides of the aisle on issues important to Catholics, the Hill newspaper reports.

The Hill’s article reported that a preliminary version of the scorecard shows that the 67 House Democrats adhered more closely to the position of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on 11 key issues such as abortion, homosexual “marriage,” AIDS research and cloning than did the 49 Catholic Republicans. The scorecard also includes votes on social issues such as housing vouchers, welfare and increasing the minimum wage.

“But the content of the scorecard has raised eyebrows because it appears to give equal weight to issues that many Catholics say are of utterly dissimilar moral valence — such as opposition to abortion and support for a higher minimum wage,” reporter Michael Rochmes writes.

“Lampson, who is spearheading the scorecard project with Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), had an 80 percent rating, compared with the Democrats’ overall rating of 76 percent and the Republicans’ cumulative rating of 64 percent.

“The NRCC noted that the 11 issues used to rate Catholic members do not include other issues ’that are dear to Catholics, such as the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, school vouchers and stem-cell research,’ because most Catholic Democrats ’are on the wrong side of those issues.’”

Bush 2000 fined

President Bush’s 2000 campaign agreed to pay a fine for failing to report money raised for the vote recount, the Federal Election Commission said.

According to the FEC, Bush-Cheney 2000 Inc. agreed to pay a $90,000 civil penalty for its failure to report the income and spending from a bank account dedicated to paying for the recount.

FEC regulations require candidate committees to itemize reports on committee receipts and disbursements for any account that has more than $200 in an election cycle. Filings with the Internal Revenue Service in 2002 and 2003 suggest the account raised about $11 million and spent about $13 million, the FEC said.

The finding came yesterday as the result of a complaint filed by Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, United Press International reports.

Cheney on abortion

Vice President Dick Cheney reaffirmed the Bush administration’s opposition to abortion yesterday before a pro-life group, saying the issue was a nonpartisan question of protecting the “weakest members of our society.”

“To be part of this cause is to believe that every mother carrying a life, that every child waiting to be born, deserves understanding,” he said in a 10-minute speech to the National Right to Life Committee Educational Trust Fund.

Mr. Cheney praised two pieces of legislation that President Bush has signed since November — a ban on partial-birth abortion and a fetus-protection bill — as “historic action” to safeguard the “weakest members of our society.”

The vice president also reaffirmed the administration’s opposition to cloning and vowed that the Bush administration would “confidently and vigorously” defend the ban on partial-birth abortions in court.

Keynote speaker

We hear that President Bush has agreed to give the keynote address at the American Conservative Union’s 40th anniversary gala May 13 at the J.W. Marriott hotel in Washington.

• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.