Although the presidential campaign rhetoric in recent days has been dominated by “sending jobs overseas,” more than 5 million Americans do live and work overseas and some of them vote and contribute to candidates. Highlighting their importance, Mitt Romney will be appearing at fundraising events when he visits London and Jerusalem at the end of July.

Related: Romney planning to visit Israel over summer

As with candidate Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin during the 2008 campaign, Romney’s foreign tour is a reminder that Americans living abroad are no longer forgotten citizens in election years. They’re a source not only of votes, but of campaign funds: one of Romney’s London events is a dinner with a minimum contribution of $25,000 and his event in Jerusalem asks $50,000 per couple (unless you've raised $100,000 for the Republican's campaign).

Jae C. Hong / AP

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., waves as he arrives at the Victory Column in Berlin July 24, 2008.

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinatat, president of the Overseas Vote Foundation said, “Too many Americans abroad still think they need to be maintaining a U.S. residence or mailing address to vote -- that is totally untrue. Some think their ballots aren't counted -- another myth!”

If it’s a close election this November, the outcome might come down to a few thousand votes in swing states such as Florida, Virginia and Ohio. And some of those last few thousand swing-state voters may be residing not in Miami, Charlottesville or Cincinnati, but in Tel Aviv, Shanghai and Berlin. The votes of Americans overseas are counted in the state in which they last resided: the Virginian residing in China has his or her vote counted in Virginia.

According to the federal Election Assistance Commission, in the 2008 election those three states had almost 150,000 overseas votes counted:

• 26,300 in Ohio
• 28,000 in Virginia
• 95,000 in Florida

Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition -- who just returned from a voter-mobilization trip to Israel with Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for President George W. Bush -- said about 150,000 Americans living in Israel are eligible to vote.

“We wanted to go over there to help raise awareness of the critical issues facing Israel and facing the Jewish community in the 2012 election and encourage those folks who are eligible to register and to vote in November,” Brooks said.

“We believe this is going to be a very close election and if we’re able to mobilize a significant number of U.S. citizens living abroad who are eligible to vote, especially in the battleground states -- Florida was decided in 2000 by a little over 500 votes -- we’re going to leave no stone unturned,” Brooks said.

He contended that “President Obama has a problem with the Jewish vote and the Jewish community” partly due to his “failed policies” in the Middle East.

David Harris, the president of the National Jewish Democratic Council, the Democrats’ counterpart to the RJC, said, “We hope to travel there or get Democratic surrogates -- including elected officials -- to Israel,” to make the case for Obama to American voters there.

Of the RJC, Harris said, “We have a much easier sale than they do,” since Jewish voters have long preferred Democratic candidates by about a three-to-one ratio.

Another group working on facilitating voting by Americans living in Israel is iVoteIsrael, formed last year.

National Director Elie Pieprz said, “By creating a streamlined process, sort of a voting concierge, iVoteIsrael seeks to overcome the largest obstacle to voter participation,” which is overseas residents receiving their ballots too late from their state or county elections official in the United States, or sending them back too late for the vote to be counted.

“The goal of the campaign is to maximize the absentee vote from Israel,” Pieprz said. “We are not endorsing any candidate or party, and our message is targeted at both sides of the aisle.”

But the Federal Voting Assistance Program, the agency in charge of helping overseas Americans vote, recently stirred a furor by changing the form used to register to vote or request a ballot.

On the revised federal post card application, the would-be voter is asked to check whether they “intend” or “do not intend” to return to the United States.

Roland Crim, a spokesman on voting issues for American Citizens Abroad, said in a statement that if overseas Americans declared an intent not to return they would “risk having state election officials improperly disqualify their votes in federal elections.” He said, “The language of the new form acted as a form of voting repellent, particularly for voters uncertain as to what the future might portend.”

“No voter should be asked to check that box,” Dzieduszycka-Suinatat said, partly because state and local election officials might not send the ballot to the voter if they think he’s never coming back to the United States.

According to Defense Department Spokesperson Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, the FVAP, which is part of the Defense Department, changed the language on the 2011 form "to assist voters in complying with voter eligibility laws in most states." She said 40 states and the District of Columbia have statutory language regarding the intent of an absent voter to return to the state or district.

Now on the FVAP website, both the older post card application -- which does not ask about intent to return to the United States -- and the 2011 revised form are available. Voters “can use either form depending on their needs and comfort level,” Hull-Ryde said.

Apart from that controversy, Dzieduszycka-Suinatat said voting for overseas Americans is often smooth since they can receive their ballots online. (Go to the Overseas Vote Foundation website.)

And she said, “FedEx teams with [the Overseas Vote Foundation] every election year to offer at-your-doorstep pick up for ballots to be sent back to U.S. election offices in a matter of a day or two at very reduced rates, special for U.S. voters overseas.”

She added that this year U.S. citizens residing abroad have another incentive to vote: their unhappiness with a 2010 law called Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which imposes fines for those who do not report information on their foreign bank accounts (if their aggregate value exceeds $50,000) to the Internal Revenue Service. The minimum penalty for failing to submit the information is $10,000; the maximum penalty is $50,000.

“It makes all kinds of sense to find people who are hiding money overseas to keep it from being taxed,” she said. “But what happened is that in their net, they ended up persecuting the average Joe who lives overseas.”

She said, “It’s almost as if the U.S. doesn’t appreciate the fact that we’re out here representing the country, building trade.” She said, “without representation, overseas Americans can be somewhat persecuted.”

Saul Loeb / AFP - Getty Images

The Supreme Court is seen on June 18, 2012. The high court is set to rule within days on the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

The Supreme Court of the United States – as much as campaign spending, the news media, and political ads on television – is a force shaping the 2012 presidential campaign.

That’s not only because the justices will soon decide the fate of both the Affordable Care Act and the Arizona anti-illegal immigration law, but because the court’s docket for its term beginning in October has a number of contentious cases on it. Among them: the use of racial preferences in admissions to state universities, the ability of U.S. citizens to challenge the validity of the government’s use of electronic surveillance to detect terrorist threats, and whether federal law allows suits in U.S. courts over alleged human rights violations committed in foreign countries.

Other high-profile cases dealing with same-sex marriage, campaign finance, the Voting Rights Act, and an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote have a good chance of being added to the docket before October.

Election Day seems likely to serve as a referendum on the court itself, especially if the justices strike down all or parts of President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the health care overhaul.

Obama has signaled that if the justices struck down the law, he would make “judicial activism” a theme of his campaign. In his 2010 State of the Union address, he already complained about the court loosening campaign finance rules in its Citizens United decision.

And after the justices heard oral arguments in the health care litigation, Obama told reporters, “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” He said conservatives had complained for years about “a lack of judicial restraint -- that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

Obama would take up that conservative grievance and ask voters to give him a second term put his imprint on the court.

And that appointment power is what’s looming over voters’ choice of Obama versus Mitt Romney; the ability to select successors to Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy -- the three oldest justices on the court, all of whom are over the age of 75.

As is almost everyone else in Washington, several former Justice Department officials and law professors who spoke at a panel discussion Tuesday sponsored by the progressive-leaning American Constitution Society speculated on what the court might do in the landmark health care case, which could be announced as early as Thursday.

Paul Wolfson, who has argued 20 cases before the Supreme Court and clerked for Justice Byron White, said the provision in the ACA which expands Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income people, is more significant than many observers have noticed.

“In terms of the progressive policy objective of making health care universally accessible and affordable to all Americans, the expansion of Medicaid is equally as important, if not more important” than the insurance purchase mandate that most commentators have focused on.

That provision expands the Medicaid-eligible population by one-third and imposes a uniform income eligibility standard in every state (135 percent of the federal poverty line) -- which means that middle-class people in poorer states will be covered. The states challenging that part of the ACA claim that they are being coerced into going along with the Medicaid expansion, even though most of the most is being borne by the federal taxpayers.

Washington attorney Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general during the Clinton administration and a supporter of the ACA, hazarded the guess that the justices will affirm the health care law.

“I’m wondering whether the court might possibly do something undramatic” and that would be to focus on the government’s argument that a person is complying with the law if he pays the penalty for not purchasing health insurance. Since the penalty (or tax) for not buying insurance is so small, Dellinger said, a majority of the justices might see it as not too much of an infringement on individual rights. “The penalty is OK, but the mandate isn’t” because it “would preserve the idea that you can’t be forced into a transaction” is how Dellinger summed up this possible ruling. That, he said would leave the law intact.

But another lawyer on the ACS panel, Patricia Millett, a former lawyer in the solicitor general’s office during the Clinton administration who has argued 31 cases before the high court, said it was clear from the justices’ questions during oral argument that the difficulty of removing one section of the law which the court found to be unconstitutional without damaging the rest was weighing on their minds: “Do we then create a Frankenstein of a statute that functions in a way that Congress would have never wanted?”

Looking to the new term that begins in October, Dellinger said it’s likely the court will address the constitutionality of Section 3 of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage in federal law as the union of one man and one woman. He said that provision of DOMA undermined the existing laws in a handful of states that do allow same-sex couples to marry -- because it deprives those couples of federal benefits, including those protected under the federal estate and gift tax exemption.

He was bullish on the court striking down Section 3 of DOMA: “The DOMA case is a very powerful case to go to the Supreme Court because states’ rights and gay rights are on the same side.”

Dellinger said it was “a troublesome fact” that the ideological alignment on the court was so often the five appointees of Republican presidents (Scalia, Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts) opposing the four justices appointed by Democratic presidents (Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan). “For the first time in my lifetime, we have an alignment of ideology and political party,” he said. Formerly there would be at least a few justices such as Byron White who, although being appointed by a Democratic president, turned out to be conservative on some issues, or like John Paul Stevens who although appointed by a Republican president turned out to be liberal on some issues.

But former Solicitor General Paul Clement, who argued both the Arizona immigration case and the ACA cases before the court, pointed out that in the current term of the court there have been several unanimous decisions such as in the Texas redistricting case, a religious freedom case, a search-and-seizure case including GPS devices, and a major environmental case on the Clean Water Act.

These were “tremendously important and consequential cases,” Clement said --  all were voted 9-0 by the justices.  

It was not a random sample and it will have no predictive value, but a quaint New Hampshire tradition – dating back to 1960 -- was preserved Tuesday just after midnight when voters in two tiny mountain towns, Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location, were the first ones to cast their ballots in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.

The winners in midnight democracy in Dixville Notch: Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, with two votes each; the winner in Harts Location: Romney, with 5 votes. Ron Paul came in close second with 4 votes, followed by Huntsman with 2, according to the Union Leader.

Herb Swanson / EPA

Town Moderator Tom Tillotson checks his watch before opening the polls to let voters cast their ballots in the New Hampshire Primary, after the stroke of midnight in the northern town of Dixville Notch.

More photos: Votes cast in Dixville Notch

Another 250,000 or so voters are expected to join those early birds by casting their ballots later Tuesday. Polls in the Granite State close at 8pm ET.

In 2008, John McCain won the balloting in Dixville Notch with 4 votes. Mitt Romney finished second with only 2. McCain also won Hart’s Location in 2008, edging Mike Huckabee, 6 votes to 5.

From msnbc.com's Tom Curry:  According to NBC's Jim Miklaszewski, the Defense Department puts the cost of the U.S. military operation against Libya’s Gadhafi regime at $550 million through March 28. On a per diem basis, that would average out to about $55 million a day.

Defense Department officials also said that with non-U.S. NATO forces now assuming most of the burden of the Libya mission, the U.S. military cost should be approximately $40 million over the next three weeks. That would equate to less $2 million a day.

Obama has stressed the cost reduction argument in his speeches on Libya, saying Monday night, “Because of this transition to a broader, NATO-based coalition, the risk and cost of this operation -- to our military and to American taxpayers -- will be reduced significantly.”

Obama added that “if we tried to overthrow Qaddafi by force” the dangers to U.S. forces “would be far greater. So would the costs and our share of the responsibility for what comes next. To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq.”

Welcome to the era of what political scientist Michael Mandelbaum calls “the Frugal Superpower.”

How does the cost so far of the Libya intervention compare to the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?

According to an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, the Afghanistan operation in the current fiscal year will cost $110 billion, which would average out to more than $300 million per day.

At the height of the Iraq conflict – at least in terms of cost, if not in terms of intensity of combat – it cost $140 billion in fiscal year 2008. That would equate to about $383 million a day.

CBO cautions that most appropriations for Afghanistan and Iraq and for related activities "appear in the same budget accounts as appropriations for DoD’s other functions," so it's not possible "to determine precisely how much has been spent" on those two wars, but CBO's is probably the best estimate we have.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates testified to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees last month that by the end of calendar year 2011, he expects there to be fewer than 100,000 troops deployed in both Iraq and Afghanistan with “virtually all of those forces in Afghanistan.”

This will allow him to “begin reducing Army active duty end strength by 27,000 and the Marine Corps by somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000,” Gates said. That will mean reduced future payroll, health care, and other costs.

But maintaining 100,000 troops in the field remains a very expensive proposition.

The larger picture is that the Defense Department this fiscal year will spend about $712 billion (or 19 percent of total federal spending), according to the CBO. That works out to about $1.95 billion a day.

If there were no Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the current fiscal year, Pentagon spending would be about 20 percent less – assuming the money now being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t used for some other military purposes.

From msnbc.com's Tom Curry:  Despite Republican rhetoric about excessive spending and Democratic rhetoric about the failure to raise taxes on upper-income earners, the latest report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office shows that as of last month, almost halfway through the current fiscal year, federal revenues were up 8.5 percent while spending was up only 0.6 percent (excluding the effects of payments shifted because of weekends, holidays and other factors).

Meanwhile individual income tax revenues were up a healthy 26.6 percent, compared to the same period in fiscal year 2010.

Former Treasury Department official Eugene Steuerle said some of this increase in income tax revenues is due to the ending of the Making Work Pay tax credit which was part of the 2009 stimulus and which expired in December. 

Measuring the combined income tax and Social Security and Medicare taxes withheld so far this fiscal year, compared to last year, there has been a strong 10.7 percent increase, “which leaves one cautiously optimistic about the recovery,” Steuerle said.  

The growth areas in spending are Medicaid (up 6.3 percent) and interest payments on the federal debt.

The increased Medicaid spending is one sign that despite the news last Friday of 192,000 jobs being created in February, the overhang of unemployed people who’ve lost their health insurance and must rely on Medicaid is still a burden on both federal and state governments. 

As for debt, the CBO says, “Net interest on the public debt rose by $11 billion (or 13 percent) as a result of substantial growth in the national debt over the past year.”

This heavier debt load comes at a time when interest rates are historically low and the government is able to borrow cheaply: rates on the 10-year Treasury bond are about 3.6 percent, compared to their 50-year average of about 6.6 percent.

So if interest payments are a growing burden for the federal government when interest rates are historically low, what happens if they go up?

CBO gave some answers to that question in a recent letter it sent to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan who had asked the agency to assess scenarios in which interest rates are higher than CBO is assuming in its own forecast.

CBO’s estimate is that rates will go up in the next few years with the rate on the ten-year Treasury note hitting 5.4 percent by 2017. As a result, “interest payments on the debt are poised to skyrocket over the next decade,” CBO said in its budget outlook released in January.

But at Ryan’s request, CBO re-ran the numbers using the average interest rates over the period from 1991 to 2000 (when the ten-year Treasury rate was about 6 percent).

The results were ugly. If those 1991-2000 rates were in effect over the next ten years, it would add another $1.1 trillion to the interest costs CBO is projecting in its own forecast.

From msnbc.com's Tom Curry:  When a debtor’s borrowing costs start to exceed what he spends on necessities such as food and medical care, it might give him pause.

 Likewise, to understand the federal government’s growing debt problem, consider these two items from President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), presented Monday in the president’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposal:

Last year, taxpayers spent more than twice as much on the Medicare program as they did on interest payments on federal debt. 

But starting in 2018, the federal government will pay more in interest costs than it will spend on Medicare, the health insurance program for the disabled and people age 65 and older.  (The OMB excludes from its calculation the premiums that Medicare beneficiaries pay; it includes only what taxpayers pay for the program, which covers 80 percent if its costs.) 

Analysts have long cited Medicare as the prime example of the relentless federal spending growth. For 30 years, Medicare has been growing faster than America’s national income. 

So if the cost of paying interest on the money the government borrows will soon exceed Medicare spending, that will be a cold bucket of water in the taxpayer’s face. More and more tax revenue will be going to pay for the privilege of being allowed to borrow more and more money. 

According to the OMB, interest costs will go from almost 6 percent of total federal outlays in 2010 to nearly 15 percent in 2020. 

“Huge deficits plus the assumption that interest rates will rise modestly are causing forecast interest costs to explode,” said former Congressional Budget Office director Rudolph Penner. “Consequently, we are sending money to foreign investors and domestic capitalists that could be much better used for other things.”

A debtor borrows because his current income falls short of his wants. Likewise for the federal government, there’s simply not enough income, or revenue. For the entire ten-year forecasting period in Obama’s budget proposal, revenues lag far behind spending.

The debt problem will also be driven by what Penner referred to: higher interest rates in the years ahead.  Morgan Stanley economist Richard Berner told the Senate Budget Committee at a recent hearing, “We enjoy low interest rates. And we enjoy favorable borrowing terms right now. But, of course, that's going to run out.”

From msnbc.com's Tom Curry: The day after the Congressional Budget Office released its new estimate of a $1.5 trillion budget deficit for this fiscal year, CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf told the Senate Budget Committee that health care is the biggest driver of the budget problem.

Responding to a question from Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who asked him to identify the single largest fiscal challenge facing the United States, Elmendorf said, "the part of the spending that is growing very rapidly, and much faster than GDP, is spending on the government's large health care programs, both because of the aging of the population … and because of rising health spending."

He added, "The crucial underlying factor here … is the rising number of older Americans, relative to working Americans, and the rising cost of health care, relative to other things in the economy."
This should come as no surprise, Elmendorf said. "Those fundamental forces have been foreseen for decades and, I think, are inexorable under current policies."

The CBO's budget estimate released Wednesday projected that over the next several years, Medicare spending will grow at an average annual rate of nearly 7 percent, while Medicaid will grow at an average annual rate of 9 percent – even while the nation's economy itself is growing at a rate of less than 3 percent a year.

(Medicaid is the government's insurance program for poor people of all ages, but the elderly and disabled account for 70 percent of its outlays.)

He also said that a sudden onset of investor skittishness about the federal government's creditworthiness could cause an interest rate shock.

"The swings in sentiment that drive fiscal crises are not usually telegraphed very well ahead of time. They often occur very suddenly," Elmendorf told Portman.

"It's very difficult to predict what will happen if there's a sudden shift of sentiment against buying U.S. Treasury debt."

Elmendorf stuck to the CBO forecast that the health care law Congress passed last year will reduce future deficits. He repeated CBO's previous estimate said repeal of the law would add $230 billion to future deficits over the next several years.

At the hearing Elmendorf also gave a word of praise to the soon-to-be-ending $814 stimulus program, calling it "an important boost to output and employment."

The stimulus has gotten little attention in President Obama's State of the Union speech or in the budget debate in recent days.

In response to Sen. Bill Nelson, D- Fla., Elmendorf said "The waning of the effects of the Recovery Act … is one of the reasons that the economy isn't growing more rapidly over the next few years in our projection."

Nelson said people don't appreciate the stimulus because most of the money wasn't in the form of bridges and other visible infrastructure, but in "a massive infusion of money" to state governments "that people don't ordinarily see -- such as Medicaid spending as well as education."

But Elmendorf then brought the conversation back to the topic of the moment: the debt -- pointing out to Nelson that the stimulus had the unhealthy effect of adding to the debt.

"The large accumulation of debt to pay for the Recovery Act and the automatic stabilizers (such as unemployment insurance)… in the past few years has pushed debt to GDP up in a way that creates damage and risks."