The House overwhelmingly passed a bill on Friday to give the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) flexibility to defray spending cuts from its budget as part of the sequester, allowing the agency to restore furloughed air traffic controllers whose absences had spurred nationwide flight delays.

The House moved quickly late Friday morning to follow the lead of the Senate, which unanimously approved legislation late Thursday evening to give the secretary of transportation increased authority to transfer funds from its existing budget to restore furloughed air traffic controllers.

The legislation heads to the White House next for President Barack Obama's signature. White House press secretary Jay Carney said at his press briefing on Friday that Obama would sign the legislation.

Though some House Democrats griped on Friday that the air traffic controller furloughs should provide the impetus for Congress to address all of the cuts prescribed by the sequester, the House easily cleared the two-thirds procedural threshold it needed to approve the FAA patch. 

The sequester, a series of $85 billion in automatic spending cuts applied across all government agencies, started on March 1. It was an outgrowth of the 2011 agreement between Congress and the Obama administration to raise the debt ceiling, and only took effect because of their subsequent inability to reach an alternative fiscal agreement.

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This story was originally published on Fri Apr 26, 2013 12:13 PM EDT

It’s not yet been two months since the automatic spending cuts known as the sequester went into effect, but some members of Congress are already unhappy with the results.  

Congress passed those cuts in the Budget Control Act two summers ago as a fallback plan, hoping to spark a deal to control the national debt.  But that idea backfired and the fallback plan became operative.

The sequester exempts most entitlement benefits, and thus falls almost entirely on the discretionary, or annually appropriated, programs, from national parks to airport control towers.

Congressional Democrats keep hoping that the budget bargain that wasn’t reached in 2011 will somehow be found this year which would allow the sequester to be cancelled.

But at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee Wednesday, ranking Republican member Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma assured the witness, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, that the sequester “is going to stay.”

He added after the hearing, “That money is not coming back…. There isn’t going to be a Republican who’s going to vote to take that spending reduction away.” (Coburn voted against the Budget Control Act.)

He added “As stupid as the sequester is, and how we did it, the benefit of the sequester is that it’s causing everybody to re-think everything, what’s important, what’s not, what a priority, what’s not.”

Kevin Lamarque / REUTERS

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano speaks about the effects of the sequester from the White House in Washington February 25, 2013. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

And in her testimony on the Department of Homeland Security’s spending request for the new fiscal year, Napolitano did not say that the sequester is forcing her department to jeopardize public safety by, for example, skimping on border patrols. She did tell senators that the more than $3 billion in cuts having to be absorbed in just six months was “having significant effects.” The cuts “will affect operations in the short and long term.” She pledged to “do everything we can to minimize the impacts on our core mission and our employees.”

A high-profile sequester casualty – control towers at smaller airports – was the focus of Tuesday’s Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing featuring Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) administrator Michael Huerta.

Spending cuts have led the FAA schedule the closing of 149 air traffic control towers across the nation. But please, not in my state, both Republican and Democratic senators told Huerta.

“Why close Nashua's tower? I certainly don't want you to close Lebanon's too, but it seems a little arbitrary to me,” complained Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R- N.H., referring to the FAA’s decision to close an airport tower in Nashua, Ayotte’s home town but to keep one in Lebanon, N.H., which gets less traffic, operating.

Huerta explained some of the arcane points of airport funding and then told Ayotte that Nashua was a tower that fell below the FAA’s measure of 150,000 annual operations and 10,000 commercial operations. So it will lose its federal funding.

Ayotte was one of the 26 senators voted against the sequester in 2011 but Sen. Mark Pryor, D- Ark, one of the 74 who voted for it and who is up for re-election next year, also complained to Huerta at Tuesday’s hearing about the closing of the tower at the Texarkana airport.

Huerta explained to Pryor that all but one of the 149 towers FAA will close in June is already closed “for a significant portion of every day. And so, they have existing rules of how they operate in a non-towered capacity. And therefore, when they convert to 24-hour non-towered operations, they simply revert to those rules.” Huerta added later “We’re not doing anything that is not safe.” But he said, “in order to maintain the highest levels of safety, what you sacrifice is efficiency.”

He’ll need to furlough 47,000 FAA employees for up to 11 days between April 21 and Sept. 30 and as a result, at the largest hub airports travelers will undergo up to 90-minute delays during the peak travel periods. But he said, “As we to undergo the difficult process of implementing the deep cuts required by the sequester, we refuse to sacrifice safety.”

Summing up the effects of the spending cuts on the FAA’s modernization plan for air traffic control, Commerce Committee chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D- W.V., called it “a terrible situation” and “incomprehensible – but there it is.” He added that the delay in the implementation of Next Gen, the new air traffic control system, would be “awful and dangerous.” Rockefeller voted for the Budget Control Act.

On the House side of the Capitol, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Tuesday scrutinized how three agencies ­-- the National Park Service, the Smithsonian and the National Archives -- that deal with the tourists who visit the nation’s capital are coping with the spending cuts.

Republicans used the hearing to attack National Park Service director Jonathan Jarvis for not starting to plan for the sequester back in 2011. The National Archives implemented a hiring freeze in 2011 but the Park Service did not.

Committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R- Calif. – who voted for the sequester as did 268 other House members – called the spending cuts “the first real down payment on reducing the size of government in my twelve-plus years on the Hill,” but also called the sequester “the worst possible way to save money.” 

Yet, he said, some executive branch officials – such as Archivist of the United States David Ferriero, who runs the agency that displays the original Constitution and Declaration of Independence – had frugally managed their money and made the effect of the sequester “less onerous than it would otherwise be.”

Jarvis told the committee, “No national parks are closing – what we’re doing is reducing operating hours, reducing services at some of them, reducing the ranger-led programs, as well as maintenance.” He added that he could have chosen to close 70 to 100 smaller national park sites, but “we chose to spread the impact across all units, reducing services but not actually closing any individual park.”

Rep. Mark Meadows, R- N.C., whose district includes parts Great Smoky Mountains National Park, told Jarvis that signs had gone up in his district saying that the Park Service is closing operations due to sequestration. “I’m unaware of any signs,” Jarvis said, telling Meadows that he would instruct his subordinates to take them any such signs down.

And Jarvis said he was not aware of any order from his superiors to make the sequester as painful as possible.

“No, sir, we do not want to make this painful,” Jarvis told Meadows. But referring to the cuts in park services, he told Meadows that “there’s a difference between intentionally making them painful and the fact that they will be painful…. A cut of this level is painful by definition.”

Related:

Bush is back -- but not his popularity

In solidarity with government employees facing the effects of the mandatory budget cuts under sequestration, Secretary of State John Kerry will follow President Obama’s lead and give 5 percent of his government salary to a charity that benefits State Department employees, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland announced today.

Kerry’s donation will be on top of his regular charitable contributions. The charity or charities haven't been decided yet.

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

Secretary of State John Kerry

“We have a number of employee charities that serve as -- that benefits folks who have been injured or killed in the line of duty. We have a number of charities that benefit children of our employees. We're still looking at the best choice and whether all of the money will go to one or whether it'll be spread,” Nuland said.

As Secretary of State, Kerry earns an annual salary of $183,500, and 5 percent of his salary is $9,175. But Kerry's wealth -- due to his wife's fortune -- is significantly greater than that salary.

But other major political figures -- including Vice President Biden, House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell -- have yet to follow Obama's example.

Boehner's office tells NBC News that the speaker hasn't reached a decision yet.

Cantor spokesman Doug Heye says that the sequester has impacted the office's budget, but he declined to answer if the majority leader will give up 5% of his pay.

McConnell's office has so far been unable to answer if the Senate minority leader will give up 5% of his salary. But it maintains that he already returns a significant portion of his office's budget, not just during sequestration. 

NBC also has reached out to the offices of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, but has yet to receive a response.

President Barack Obama huddled with Senate Democrats on Capitol Hill Tuesday, stepping onto congressional turf as part of a week of outreach to both his own party and his GOP rivals.

With new budget and gun control bills snaking through the legislative process -- and with comprehensive immigration reform measures being drafted by bipartisan lawmakers -- Obama’s series of in-person conversations with congressional heavies are meant to smooth the way for compromise after the budget sequester stalemate last month.  

But it’s not exactly a bipartisan campfire kumbaya.

Even as the president was leaving the building, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters that Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn has already said he will object to a bipartisan measure to temporarily fund the federal government -- a snag that could slow efforts to avert a government shutdown later this month.

Jacquelyn Martin / Jacquelyn Martin / AP

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. walks toward the Senate chamber on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Dec. 31, 2012.

“This is in this new era of ‘let’s get along,’ all this cheering and yelling about this ‘bipartisan’ bill,” Reid lamented to reporters after meeting with Obama, “I just learned when I was in here with the president that -- who else? -- Coburn now won’t let us move the bill.”

And the news of that hiccup wasn’t the only challenge Obama received during his trek to Capitol Hill.

One Democrat in the room told NBC News that a senior senator in the closed-door meeting challenged the president on his administration’s unmanned drone policy, saying the White House has treated Obama’s own party poorly in dealing with the issue.

The meeting with Senate Democrats -- which participants said included discussion of entitlement reform, immigration and gun control -- kicked off a series of closed-door sessions that Obama has scheduled this week with lawmakers on the other end of Pennsylvania Ave, including a Wednesday luncheon with House Republicans.

His conspicuous “charm offensive” aimed at the GOP started last week, when he dined with a dozen Republican senators as well as with House budget chief Rep. Paul Ryan.

For the most part, Republicans say ‘the more, the better’ when it comes to Obama’s outreach.  

“We welcome it,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday.

“It’s a good opportunity to have a candid conversation and we all know that, with the president’s request to raise the debt ceiling here again later this summer, we will be discussing again the possibility of finally solving our huge deficit and debt problems by making the kind of changes to [entitlements] that we all know we have to make to save these programs and save our country,” McConnell said.

Still, the effort has not been without some skeptics.

A National Journal report out Tuesday morning quoted an unnamed White House aide griping that the vigorous schedule of bipartisan meetings is “a joke” and a waste of time staged merely to make the press “happy.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney dismissed that sentiment as inaccurate during a briefing with reporters.

“I have no idea who said that," he said. "But I can tell you that opinion has never been voiced in my presence, in the president's presence, in the West Wing. It does not represent the president's view, it does not represent the White House's view, and it does not represent the administration's view."

With less than 36 hours to go until the much-discussed 'sequestration' deadline, the Senate blocked a pair of competing bills to prevent the broad, automatic cuts from taking effect.

Neither measure was expected to reach the 60-vote threshold required to move a fix forward, with Republicans and Democrats taking up the legislation largely for show the day before the cuts are slated to kick in. 

The Republican sequester ‘replacement’ proposal -- which would have offered the administration more authority to allocate the spending cuts -- was killed with a vote of 38 to 62. The White House had threatened to veto that bill in the unlikely event that it passed.

A Democratic plan focused on closing tax loopholes and raising some taxes garnered 51 votes, short of the 60 necessary to move it forward. 

With both sides still deadlocked over how to address the deficit, congressional leaders will meet with the president at the White House tomorrow. 

President Barack Obama lambasted Senate Republicans in a statement, saying that GOP opposition to the Democrats' bill stood in the way of a solution. 

"Even though a majority of Senators support [the Democrats'] approach, Republicans have refused to allow it an up-or-down vote - threatening our economy with a series of arbitrary, automatic budget cuts that will cost us jobs and slow our recovery," he said.

"Instead of closing a single tax loophole that benefits the well-off and well-connected, they chose to cut vital services for children, seniors, our men and women in uniform and their families," the statement read. "They voted to let the entire burden of deficit reduction fall squarely on the middle class."
"

Earlier Thursday, competing press conferences, lawmakers from both parties continued to lay blame at each other's feet as they acknowledged that the across-the-board reductions to the nation's military and domestic spending programs are inevitable.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid olds a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on the eve of the budget sequester Feb. 28, 2013 in Washington, DC.

House Speaker John Boehner argued Thursday that the budget ball remains in Democrats' court, a case he says he will make again tomorrow in the meeting with Obama.

"My message at the White House will be the same that I'm telling you today,” he said. “It's time for them to do their job and to pass a bill."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid responded that Republican calls for Democratic action "take a lot of pizzazz."

"They've done nothing," Reid said, saying that House Republicans are hiding behind the lower chamber's now-expired passage of budget measures last year while failing to allow compromise legislation to come up for a vote.

The weariness over the sequester jockeying – which promises to drag on for weeks as the fight shifts to future deadlines for greenlighting federal funding -- even spilled over into the Senate chaplain’s opening prayer this morning.

Mentioning the cuts in his invocation, Senate Chaplain Rev. Barry Black prayed "Rise up, oh God, and save us from ourselves."

NBC's Mike Viqueira contributed to this report. 

This story was originally published on Thu Feb 28, 2013 1:41 PM EST

With automatic, across-the-board spending cuts set to begin Friday, majorities of Americans believe that approach is not a good idea and also say the contentious budget negotiations make them less confident about the U.S. economy, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Click here for full poll results (.pdf)

Despite those findings, a majority still supports Congress moving ahead with either the current cuts or a plan containing even more cuts as a way to reduce the deficit, suggesting the public’s general appetite for reducing spending.

But the poll also shows that as the nation’s political actors once again quarrel over these automatic cuts totaling $1.2 trillion over 10 years – commonly referred to as sequestration or the sequester – President Barack Obama finds himself in a much stronger position than his Republican adversaries. 

Related: NBC/WSJ poll: Public says GOP less interested in unity than Obama is

“If the president needs some tweaks and adjustments, the Republican Party is pretty much in need of a major makeover,” says Democratic pollster Fred Yang of Hart Research Associates, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. 

“The Republicans don’t need a silver lining; they need a whole new playbook,” Yang adds.

Cut a deal – or let the cuts take effect?
In the poll, 52 percent of respondents say the sequester cuts are a bad idea, versus just 21 percent who say they’re a good deal.

What’s more, 51 percent believe that the budget negotiations between Obama and congressional Republicans make them feel less confident about the economy, which is unchanged from when this question was first asked in last month’s poll.

Just 16 percent say the negotiations make them more confident about the economy.

But a combined 53 percent prefer that Congress move ahead with the current sequester cuts or a plan that contains even more cuts. Thirty-seven percent want a plan with fewer cuts.

And in a separate question, exactly half of respondents say that Obama and congressional Republicans should work together to avoid the sequester cuts from taking place, while 46 percent believe the cuts – while not perfect – should go into effect.

But the NBC/WSJ pollsters caution that all of these numbers could change if these sequester cuts take place and are as dire as critics say. “A month from now, we might find a very different dynamic at play,” Yang says. “When you feel [these cuts], that’s a different story.”

Obama’s brief honeymoon – but growing support for his top priorities
In addition to the budget debate, the poll shows that Obama’s rise in the polls – after his re-election, his inaugural speech and his State of the Union address – has ended for now.

His overall approval rating stands at a healthy 50 percent, but that’s down two points since January and three points since December. 

The percentage approving of the president’s handling of the economy has dropped five points, from 49 percent last month to 44 percent now.

And just 32 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction – down three points since January.

“The poll points to significant vulnerabilities for the president” heading in next year’s midterm elections, says McInturff, the GOP pollster. 

Alex Wong / Getty Images

President Barack Obama waves during a visit to Newport News Shipbuilding Feb. 26 in Newport News, Va.

Democratic pollster Yang adds: “The transition from campaigning to governing hasn’t brightened the public’s mood.”

That said, strong majorities support the broad outlines of Obama’s top domestic priorities – on immigration, gun control and raising the minimum wage. 

Fifty-four percent favor giving undocumented immigrants the ability to apply for legal status, which is up two points from last month’s NBC/WSJ poll. 

Also, 61 percent believe the laws covering the sale of firearms should be stricter, which is up five points since January.

And nearly six in 10 support Obama’s proposal from his State of the Union address to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $9.00.

Asked which of Obama’s proposals Republicans in Congress should offer a helping hand, 36 percent answer eliminating tax loopholes for the wealthy; 28 percent say expanding background checks for guns; 23 percent cite making preschool available for every child; 17 percent say giving illegal immigrants a path to legal status; and 11 percent say addressing climate change and global warming.

GOP’s poor standing with the public
While Obama has seen his poll numbers drop – albeit within the survey’s margin of error – his political standing remains significantly stronger than Republicans’.

Only 29 percent of respondents say they agree “with most” of what Republicans in Congress have proposed (versus 45 percent for Obama and 40 percent for congressional Democrats). 

An identical 29 percent have a favorable view of the Republican Party (compared with 49 percent for Obama and 41 percent for the Democratic Party).

And the public believes the GOP is more interested in partisanship than Obama is: 48 percent say Obama is pursuing a path on unifying the country in a bipartisan way, while 43 percent say he's taking a partisan approach that doesn't unify the country.

By comparison, 64 percent say Republicans are taking a partisan approach, versus 22 percent who say it's focused on unity.

What’s more, the polls shows the Democratic Party beats the Republican Party on almost every issue – looking out for middle class (by 22 points), Medicare (by 18 points), health care (16 points), reducing gun violence (15 points), Social Security (14 points), immigration (7 points) and even taxes (3 points) and the economy (2 points).

The only issues where the GOP holds the advantage in the survey are reducing the federal deficit (by 6 points), controlling government spending (16 points) and ensuring a strong national defense (26 points). 

The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted Feb. 21-24 of 1,000 adults (including 300 cell phone-only respondents), and it has a margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.

The Senate voted to confirm former Sen. Chuck Hagel as President Barack Obama's next secretary of defense following weeks of dogged opposition by Republican senators to their erstwhile colleague.

The Senate voted 58 to 41 to formally confirm Hagel, on the heels of a procedural vote earlier in the day that cleared the way for Tuesday afternoon's final vote.

That earlier vote dispensed with a filibuster that Senate Republicans had waged for a week and a half against Hagel, whose confirmation was delayed by Republicans past the President's Day recess in order to allow for more time to dig into the former Nebraska senator's background.

A number of Republican detractors — including Sens. John McCain, Ariz., Lindsey Graham, S.C. and Kelly Ayotte, N.H. — reversed their votes on Monday in order to allow the Hagel nomination to move forward.

The Senate voted 71 to 27 to move forward with Hagel's nomination, clearing the 60-vote threshold needed to end the GOP filibuster. A handful of the Republicans who allowed Hagel's nomination to come to a final vote ultimately voted against confirmation.

In the end, Obama was able to win confirmation for Hagel, his choice to succeed outgoing Secretary Leon Panetta at the Pentagon. But not before Republicans were able to drag out the confirmation fight and, in the process, ding Hagel, their onetime GOP Senate colleague from the Cornhusker State.

Republicans had fought strenuously to defeat Hagel, accusing him at points of harboring hostilities toward Israel, and sympathies for the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Tied into Hagel's nomination as well have been Republicans' long-running effort to ding Obama and his administration over their handling of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. 

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Former Senator Chuck Hagel testifies during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on his nomination to be Defense Secretary, on Capitol Hill in Washington, in this January 31, 2013, file photo.

"What has their filibuster gained my Republican colleagues?" Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., asked on the Senate floor. "Twelve days later, Senator Hagel's exemplary record of service to his country remains untarnished."

Reid added: "Senate Republicans have delayed for the better part of two weeks for one reason and one reason only: partisanship."

Hagel didn't necessarily help his cause during a combative confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Republicans aggressively questioned Hagel on a variety of matters during the Jan. 31 hearing. 

Even still, Democrats held firm in their backing for the former Nebraska senator, helping to move his nomination forward. Republicans, though, managed to buy themselves more time — they said, to more fully investigate Hagel's background — by waging a filibuster against the nomination on Feb. 14. 

Democrats angrily protested the delay, especially as current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta planned to leave the job, as dangerous and unprecedented. Republican opponents of Hagel, though, said at that time that they would drop their objections to holding a confirmation vote after last week's recess.

This story was originally published on Tue Feb 26, 2013 12:37 PM EST

The nation’s capital was enveloped in a familiar kind of gridlock late Monday, as Republicans again demanded that President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats act first to put off $85 billion in automatic cuts slated to take effect on Friday.

“The president says we have to have another tax increase to avoid the sequester,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said of the hefty and indiscriminate spending cuts. “Well, Mr. President, you got your tax increase. It's time to cut spending.”

Related: Obama to govs: Push Congress to avert cuts

As Congress returned to work following a weeklong recess, the Obama administration and lawmakers appeared no closer to resolving the automatic spending cuts before their Friday deadline. While both Democrats and Republicans bemoan the cuts as potentially catastrophic for the economy and the national defense, both sides have been locked in a virtual staring match over the sequester.

The end result is that the cuts seem likely to take effect, if only for some limited period of time, come Friday. Both sides spent Monday posturing rather than working toward a solution.

For their part, the House GOP is content to rest upon the two bills they had passed in the last Congress meant to offset the $85 billion in spending cuts with a series of additional, alternative cuts. Democrats, led by Obama, had rejected that alternative as “unbalanced” because it did not include some measure of new tax revenue.

But, buoyed by stronger approval ratings than congressional Republicans, the president has also been generally unwilling to budge from his stance that a sequester replacement would have to include new tax revenue – likely through closing loopholes and deductions – in addition to other spending cuts.

“Unfortunately, in just four days Congress is poised to allow a series of arbitrary, automatic budget cuts to kick in that will slow our economy, eliminate good jobs, and leave a lot of folks who are already pretty thinly stretched scrambling to figure out what to do,” Obama told a bipartisan group of governors at the White House this morning.

The president leaned on the governors to pressure their respective states' congressional delegations to support a compromise agreement.

Obama has relied increasingly on these public events to make his arguments to the public, pursuing a sort of "outside" strategy meant to rally pressure on lawmakers to strike deals on a range of issues. For instance, Obama will travel to Newport News, Va., on Tuesday to highlight the negative toll the sequester would take on that region's defense industry.

For their part, Republicans have derided the president as spending more time on campaigning against the GOP than working toward a deal.

"Instead of using our military men and women as campaign props, if the president was serious, he'd sit down with Harry Reid and begin to address our problems," Boehner said Monday, referencing the dire warnings of furloughed workers and potential pay cuts for some employees involved with the nation's defenses.

Boehner and the rest of the House GOP appeared no closer to relenting on their demand that any final compromise originate in the Senate. After a roller-coaster past two years in the House, in which conservative lawmakers often threatened to upset delicate agreements Boehner had struck with Obama, the speaker has adopted a strategy of deferring to the Senate on many top legislative matters.

Before the recess, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the rest of the Democratic leadership unveiled a sequester proposal that would offset the impending cuts with new taxes on corporations and the ultrawealthy, more modest defense cuts and additional cuts in discretionary spending.

"Congress has the power to prevent these self-inflicted wounds," Reid said Monday on the Senate floor. "We have the power to turn off the sequester."

J. Scott Applewhite / AP

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio responds to President Barack Obama's remarks to the nation's governors earlier today about how to fend off the impending automatic budget cuts, Monday, Feb. 25 on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Amid the pessimism about the prospects for a deal, Boehner half-heartedly told reporters that "hope springs eternal" that an agreement could be reached by Friday.

"The president can sit down with Harry Reid tonight and work with Senate Democrats, who have the majority in the Senate to move a bill. It's time for them to act. I've made this clear for months now, and yet we've seen nothing," he said.

This story was originally published on Mon Feb 25, 2013 4:18 PM EST

A vote on President Barack Obama's nominee to lead the Defense Department, Supreme Court arguments about the future of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act and the expected onset of automatic spending cuts known as the "sequester" mean the nation's capital is bracing for a politically consequential week ahead.

After a weeklong recess, Congress returns to Washington with a full agenda of business that needs handling. Topping that list is an item which lawmakers are arguably unlikely to resolve over the course of the week: the sequester, about $85 billion in automatic spending cuts set to begin taking effect on Friday, the first day of March.

Lawmakers left town before the President's Day holiday no closer to resolving the sequester, the second part of the so-called "fiscal cliff," which was delayed for two months by the New Year's Day deal on taxes.

Last week's recess was more full of posturing and blame-placing by Obama and Republicans in Congress — who each blame the other for the sequester's creation — than any substantive progress toward a deal to address the cuts, which both sides agree would be perilous.

"So now Republicans in Congress face a simple choice: Are they willing to compromise to protect vital investments in education and health care and national security and all the jobs that depend on them?" Obama said last Tuesday at the White House. "Or would they rather put hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to protect a few special-interest tax loopholes that benefit only the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations? That's the choice."

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, responded in the pages of the 'Wall Street Journal': "The president's sequester is the wrong way to reduce the deficit, but it is here to stay until Washington Democrats get serious about cutting spending." 

The administration has been warning of the potential consequences to the spending cuts, including military readiness and even delays and inconveniences in air travel.

Related: Why Obama has the PR upper hand in sequestration battle

"We're not making this up in order to put pain on the American people," outgoing Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We are required to cut a billion dollars and we are going to do that unless Congress gets together and works together and compromises on this." 

With both sides still so far apart, an agreement to delay or soften the blow of the automatic cuts before Friday seems unlikely.

That legislative showdown would normally suffice to consume all the political oxygen in Washington. But this week also features several other major events worth noting.

One such item is another holdover from before recess. The Senate is set to vote Tuesday on final confirmation for former Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., to become the next defense secretary. The vote follows tenacious efforts by some Republican senators to block their former colleague from joining the Obama administration.

Senate Democrats had hoped to formally vote to confirm Hagel before last week's recess, but Senate Republicans — even some GOP senators who said they'll support final confirmation for Hagel — joined together to sustain a filibuster, and delay the confirmation vote until this week. For their part, Democrats decried the filibuster as unprecedented against a Pentagon chief's nomination.

Still, Hagel appears to be headed toward confirmation. Some of his most vociferous critics — Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., among them — said they would support moving toward a final vote on confirmation, which would only require a simple majority of the Senate's support. Even still, several GOP senators have said they intend to support Hagel, which only boosts his prospects for confirmation, barring some sort of development.

Hagel isn't the only member of Obama's prospective national security team left hanging over the recess.

After facing a grilling earlier this month before the Senate Intelligence Committee, John O. Brennan's nomination to become the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency faces an uncertain future. Senators are looking for more information about the Obama administration's secretive drone strikes program — and Brennan's role in crafting that strategy — before moving forward with his nomination.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has threatened to filibuster Brennan's nomination before the whole Senate until he's received a satisfactory answer. The concerns about Brennan aren't isolated to Republicans, either; Democrats like Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon have voiced similar misgivings about the secretive use of drone strikes to target suspected terrorists and the process behind them.

Joshua Roberts / Reuters file photo

Capitol Hill in Washington, DC

Also this week, the Supreme Court will hear potentially consequential oral arguments challenging a section of the historic Voting Right Acts. The justices will hear a challenge to a section of the law requiring nine states with a history of racial discrimination to seek Justice Department approval for any change in their voting procedures before those changes can take effect.

Obama, speaking Thursday in a radio interview, sought to calm fears that African American or other minority voters would face greater challenges to voting if the Supreme Court were to strike down that section of the law.

"I know in the past some folks have worried that if the Supreme Court strikes down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, they're going to lose their right to vote. That’s not the case," Obama said on "The Black Eagle" radio show. "People will still have the same rights not to be discriminated against when it comes to voting, you just won't have this mechanism, this tool, that allows you to kind of stay ahead of certain practices."

With broad automatic federal spending cuts scheduled to go into effect in just five days, the nation's transportation chief on Sunday defended his warnings about the consequences of the cutbacks but promised that it will remain safe for Americans to fly. 

"We're not making this up in order to put pain on the American people," said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We are required to cut a billion dollars and we are going to do that unless Congress gets together and works together and compromises on this." 

LaHood, a former Republican congressman, warned earlier this week that the scheduled cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration would result in flight delays due to closed air traffic control towers and furloughed transportation employees.

On Sunday, he emphasized that those cuts would mean major disruptions for passengers -- but not danger. 

"We will never compromise on safety," he said.  "People are going to be safe flying." 

Many in the GOP have suggested that the Obama administration is exaggerating the impact of the across-the-board cuts, totaling $1.2 trillion over 10 years.

"My advice to the president is to stop the campaigning," Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said on NBC. "Stop sending out your cabinet secretaries to scare the American people." 

LaHood said Sunday that the warnings are not overblown and argued that Republicans have failed to respond to the president's entreaties for compromise to avert the sequester. 

The former GOP lawmaker's harsh words for his own party were met with a fresh round of skepticism Sunday.

"Shame on Ray LaHood," Arizona Sen. John McCain declared on CNN's "State of the Union."

Pointing to reporting by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, McCain disputed the notion that the GOP is responsible for the looming cuts originally devised as a bargaining tactic in budget negotiaitons. 

"It came from the White House and the president's aides," McCain said. 

President Barack Obama used his bully pulpit Tuesday to warn of calamitous consequences for the U.S. economy should the automatic spending cuts known as the “sequester” go into effect next Friday.

The president warned that the automatic cuts, totaling about $85 billion over the course of this year, would prompt job losses, weakened national security and canceled government services – among other consequences.

“So these cuts are not smart, they are not fair, they will hurt our economy, they will add hundreds of thousands of Americans to the unemployment rolls,” Obama said in a statement at the White House. “This is not an abstraction; people will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again.”

The speech featured no new, concrete proposal from the president detailing how he would prefer for Congress to replace the sequester.

Democrats in Congress released a plan last week that called for $55 billion in new revenues from closing tax loopholes and deductions, and additional cuts by $27.5 billion to each the defense and discretionary spending budgets over the course of the next decade.

Obama’s speech was otherwise spent reiterating points he’s made for the better part of the last two months. He said that any sequester replacement should be “balanced” – shorthand for a combination of new tax revenue and spending cuts – and Obama urged lawmakers to approve a shorter-term replacement for the automatic cuts if they couldn’t reach consensus on a broader package by the end-of-February deadline. 

Rather, the president, who was flanked by first-responders whose jobs Obama said would be threatened by the sequester, was making use of political optics and the presidential bully pulpit to pressure Congress to act. 

Still, the urgency appeared to have little effect on Republicans, who dismissed the president’s remarks as unserious about reaching a solution. 

"Once again, the president offered no credible plan that can pass Congress – only more calls for higher taxes," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a statement.

“Today's event at the White House proves once again that more than three months after the November election, President Obama still prefers campaign events to common sense, bipartisan action,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement. 

Indeed, many Republicans have treated the sequester as a fait accompli; Congress is out of town this week, and lawmakers would only have a handful of days next week to act upon the sequester. Some Republicans have also argued that even if the sequester is replaced, its $85 billion in cuts should set a baseline for offsetting cuts in other areas of the budget. 

“I have to say, though, that so far, at least, the ideas that the Republicans have proposed asks nothing of the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations,” Obama said of the GOP proposal. “So the burden is all on first-responders or seniors or middle-class families. They doubled down, in fact, on the harsh, harmful cuts that I've outlined.”

The president added, as if to drive home the point: “Well, that's not balanced. That would be like Democrats saying we have to close our deficits without any spending cuts whatsoever. It's all taxes. That's not the position Democrats have taken, that's certainly not the position I've taken.”

This story was originally published on Tue Feb 19, 2013 11:04 AM EST

PUBLISHED 2:29 p.m. ET -- President Barack Obama told his House Democratic colleagues that he would continue to challenge Republicans on how to best replace the impending sweeping spending cuts known as the "sequester."

Speaking at the House Democratic Issues Conference in Leesburg, Va., Obama said he wants to create an alternative to the sequester that includes some entitlement reforms but also more revenue through ending loopholes and deductions for the wealthiest earners, a point of disagreement with GOP lawmakers.

“I am prepared, eager and anxious to do a big deal, a big package that ends this governance by crisis,” he told the crowd.

Obama decried Republicans, who, he said, recognize “that the sequester is a bad idea, but what they've suggested is that the only way to replace it now is for us to cut Social Security, cut Medicare and not close a single loophole, not raise any additional revenue from the wealthiest Americans or corporations who have a lot of lawyers and accounts.”

While the president seemed to lament the lack of communication between himself and House Republicans, neither side has indicated that they negotiating in public or private. Earlier Thursday, White House press secretary Jay Carney lambasted House Speaker John Boehner’s reported offer, which includes cuts to Medicare premiums and federal pension programs, as “terrible.”

At the issues conference, Obama said he was steeling himself for another philosophical fight over cuts with the Republicans.

“I have to tell you, if that's an argument that they want to have before the court of public opinion, that is an argument I'm more than willing to engage in,” he said to applause.

But disagreements might not just be limited to the Republican side, the president added, saying he’s prepared to clash with fellow Democrats on key issues like immigration and gun safety.

“There will be times where you guys are mad at me, and I'll occasionally read about it,” he said.                 

Despite any such intra-party bickering, the president said he still believed Democrats would be in a good position in 2014 to retake the House of Representatives.

“As a by-product of doing that good work and keeping that focus, I would expect that Nancy Pelosi's going to be speaker again pretty soon,” the President concluded his remarks with, as the crowd erupted in cheers for their leader.