Jeb Bush Appears to Support Middle Ground on Citizenship for Illegal Immigrants

As Congressional Republicans stake out an approach to overhauling the nation’s immigration system, a high-profile voice has emerged in support of a middle-ground option for the 11 million immigrants already in the country illegally.

Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida and the younger brother and son of former presidents, has been one of the Republican Party’s most outspoken voices on the importance of Hispanic outreach, advocating not just a change in tone but also a comprehensive approach to immigration.

In his new book, “Immigration Wars,” Mr. Bush and his co-author, Clint Bolick, a lawyer at the libertarian Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, outline a plan that would offer those already in the United States illegally a way to stay here as permanent legal residents. But, as he has emphasized in a series of interviews, they should not be provided a special route to become citizens. “To do otherwise would signal once again that people who circumvent the system can still obtain the full benefits of American citizenship,” Mr. Bush and Mr. Bolick write, according to The Huffington Post, which obtained a copy of the book a day ahead of its release.

But unlike some on the right who would preclude the possibility that illegal immigrants could ever attain citizenship, Mr. Bush would offer them an option: “However, illegal immigrants who wish to become citizens should have the choice of returning to their native countries and applying through normal immigration processes that now! would be much more open than before.”

In ruling out a special path to citizenship, Mr. Bush seems to moving closer to a group of House Republicans who have expressed openness to a permanent legal status as a form of compromise.

Senate Judiciary Committee Likely to Vote on Bipartisan Guns Bill

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote Thursday on a bipartisan gun safety measure designed to curb illegal gun trafficking and purchasing.

The bill, which would toughen the penalties for those who purchase a gun illegally for others to up to 15 years and make gun trafficking a felony, has attracted the most bipartisan support so far of four measures headed for the committee.

The measure is a marriage of a gun-trafficking bill designed by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the committee, and a similar bill that was being put together between Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, and Mark Steven Kirk, Republican of Illinois. It will be co-sponsored by Senators Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut.

Most significantly, the bill has received intense interest from Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, who has a strong rating from the National Rifle Association. “Senator Grassley is working with the co-sponsors of the gun trafficking and straw purchaser proposals,” said Beth Levine, a spokeswoman for Mr. Grassley, “and he hopes they can come to a bipartisan consensus.”

A proposal to reinstate an assault weapons ban, which would also ban certain high-capacity magazines, is unlikely to attract Republican votes and would have almost no chance of passing the full Senate, should it even get out of the committee.

Since the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., last December, gun control groups and lawmakers interested in finding a bipartisan consensus had hoped for a broad-based bill that would make background checks for gun buyers universal.

Under current law, people who buy firearms in a gun shop are subject to a background check using the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which is intended to weed out people with a criminal history or with documented mental health problems. But the system excludes private gun sales, and many states have done a poor job of keeping the system up to date, something that would be addressed in a measure that is being negotiated between Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma.

But the two senators are at odds over whether private sellers should have to keep records of gun transactions, as gun stores must, which Mr. Coburn vehemently opposes. Mr. Schumer may well find another Republican who has a strong gun rights background to partner with on the measure if the two cannot have a meeting of the minds.

Should the Senate fall short of a viable background check bill, it would be a major blow to gun safety advocates and a victory for the N.R.A. On Wednesday, Representative Mike Thompson, Democrat of California and chairman of the Congressional Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, will hold a hearing exploring the relationship between background checks and preventing riminals and the dangerously mentally ill from obtaining guns.

Another measure, to provide extra money for school safety, is also expected to receive a vote, although it is not a bill that is core to the agenda set by President Obama to stem gun violence, as are the other bills under consideration. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, will most likely take the most viable bill and use it as the central measure to take to the floor.

“The absence of any federal law defining gun trafficking as a crime in this country is shocking,” Ms. Gillibrand said in a statement. She added: “By cracking down on straw purchasers, illegal gun traffic! kers and ! their vast criminal networks, we can stop the flow of illegal guns and reduce gun crime. I look forward to working with all of our colleagues on both side of the aisle to pass this important piece of legislation.”

New Estimates Question Savings from Farm Bills

Farm bills passed by the full Senate and the House Agriculture Committee in 2012 would cost billions more this year if they were enacted without changes, according to a new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.

Though lawmakers said last year that the legislation could provide farmers with a safety net while reducing the deficit by cutting billions for agriculture and nutrition programs, the new figures show that the Senate version of the farm bill, which the C.B.O. said last year would save $23 billion over 10 years, would  save only $13.1 billion. The House bill would save $26.6 billion istead of the $35.1 billion estimated last year. The farm bill is passed every five years and sets the nation’s agriculture and nutrition policies.

The new estimates, which were released Friday, now show that the Senate farm bill would cost about $963 billion over 10 years, $10 billion more than last year’s estimate. The House bill would cost $950 billion, about $8.5 billion more than projections from last year.

The C.B.O. said the decline in total savings it estimated last year resulted from underestimating spending for new disaster programs outlined in the farm bill for crops and milk, higher disaster aid costs and new calculations for spending in the food stamp program.

A spokesman for Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and chairwoman of the Senate Agricultur! e Committee, said the new estimates were not surprising.

“C.B.O. regularly adjust their formulas for calculating savings,” said Ben Becker, the spokesman. “The committee will be able to achieve the savings needed, once its passes the new version of the farm bill.”

But critics of the proposed farm bills said the new estimates showed that the bills would have added to the deficit and did  not overhaul agriculture programs as proponents claimed.

“Taxpayers dodged a bullet last year when Congress wisely rejected cramming a trillion-dollar farm bill onto the fiscal cliff package, instead extending most programs through the end of this September,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington group. “Lawmakers from agriculture-heavy states had been selling their farm bill proposals as deficit reduction bills. But just as we predicted, the ‘savings’ aren’t appearing.”

The farm bill could end up costing less than the new estimates becauseof  the automatic-spending cuts that went into effect on Friday. Agriculture programs in the farm bill are expected to be cut by $6 billion.

The Senate and House are expected to begin work on new farm bills later this year after failing to get legislation passed last fall. The Senate passed its version of the bill, which eliminated some farm subsidy programs, including direct payments, which cost about $5 billion a year and are paid to farmers and farmland owners whether they grow crops or not. The House Agriculture committee passed its version of the bill, but House leaders refused to bring the bill to the floor for a vote, after a fight over cuts in the food stamps program threatened to divide Republicans.

Lawmakers extended the current farm bill, first passed in 2008, to Sept. 30.

For Budget Nominee, Obama Again Pulls From Rubin’s Circle

When Robert E. Rubin became the first director of the National Economic Council at the beginning of the Clinton presidency in 1993, he had at his side a young Rhodes Scholar and McKinsey consultant named Sylvia Mathews, who served as the council’s staff director.

She was just one of a host of ambitious Democratic aides who would work under and around Mr. Rubin in the Clinton administration. And like many of them, she is now back in government, nominated by President Obama on Monday morning to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

It is hard to overstate how pervasive the experience of the Clinton years is in shaping the people who have populated the upper reaches of the Obama administration. And it is equally hard to overstate Mr. Rubin’s role in supporting a generation of Democratic economic policy makers who have circled in and out of his orbit over the past 20 years.

Mr. Obama’s choice as his new budget director - now Sylvia Mathews Burwell â€" is a good example. From her start in government at the N.E.C., she followed Mr. Rubin when he became Treasury secretary, serving as his chief of staff. She went on to become deputy White House chief of staff and deputy budget director under Mr. Clin! ton.

Gene Sperling, who was a deputy under Mr. Rubin at the N.E.C., went on to become the council’s director under Mr. Clinton. He now has the same job under Mr. Obama, succeeding another Rubin protégé, Lawrence H. Summers, after having served as a top adviser to former Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. Mr. Geithner in turn served under Mr. Rubin at the Treasury Department in the Clinton years and later became president o the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with Mr. Rubin’s support.

Mr. Rubin’s economic policy research group, the Hamilton Project, has associations with other Clinton-era veterans who have played key roles in the Obama years, including Peter Orszag, Mr. Obama’s first budget director, and Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Citigroup, where Mr. Rubin worked from 1999 to 2009, employs Mr. Orszag and formerly employed Jacob J. Lew, who was sworn in last week to succeed Mr. Geithner as Treasury secretary.

To many liberals, Mr. Rubin’s influence is corrosive, evidence of excessive Wall Street sway and of a shift in the Democratic Party away from progressive values to a bond market-centric focus on deficit reduction.

Mr. Rubin undoubtedly had a profound influence on Mr. Clinton’s willingness to raise taxes to narow the deficit and later to pursue a balanced budget pact with Congressional Republicans. He has also been criticized for failure to rein in financial market excesses during the 1990s that led to the market meltdown of 2008.

But it is not entirely clear that he has left a clear ideological stamp on the current generation of Democratic policy makers. After leaving Washington following the Clinton administration, Ms. Burwell worked for both the Gates Foundation in Seattle and the Walmart Foundation in Arkansas, spanning the ideological spectrum in the foundation world.

Mr. Lew comes out of the world of House Democrats, and is as associated with his first mentor, Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr., an old-school liberal, as much as with Mr. Rubin. Mr. Sperling is widely viewed as closer to a traditional liberal than as a budget hawk in the style of Mr. Orszag.

In any case, times have changed. The kinds of budget deals Mr. Clinton made with Speaker Newt Gingrich in the late 1990s might not be possible today, given the influence of conservatives on Speaker John A. Boehner. Mr. Obama has already signaled that he sees much of the job of deficit reduction having been completed for the short run and that rather than be caught up in endless crises over budget deadlines, he is eager to get on with the rest of his agenda, including overhauling the nation’s immigration laws and tightening gun control.

As a result, it is likely that Ms. Burwell’s job wll be less to bring an ideological vision to the table than to carry out an agenda that is already well underway.

Follow Richard W. Stevenson on Twitter at @dickstevenson.

Q&A: Making a Phone-to-PC Bluetooth Connection

Q.

How do I connect my Android smartphone to my Windows 7 laptop with Bluetooth so I can transfer files wirelessly My laptop said it came with Bluetooth, but I’m not sure how it works or if it’s even on.

A.

Check the settings on both the phone and the laptop to make sure the Bluetooth function is turned on and in “discoverable” mode so they can sense each other’s wireless Bluetooth signal. On the Windows 7 computer, go to the Start menu and select Devices and Printers on the right side.

In the box that appears, right-click on the icon for your laptop and select Bluetooth Settings from the contextual menu. On the Options tab in the Bluetooth settings box, turn on the checkbox next to “Allow Bluetooth devices to find this computer.” You should also turn on the options that allow other Buetooth devices to connect to the computer, and for alerting you when they do. For easy access to the Bluetooth settings, turn on the checkbox to add a Bluetooth icon on the Windows Notifications area.

If you want to share files between the phone and computer, click the Share tab in the Bluetooth settings box and turn on the option for “Allow remote devices to browse, send, and receive pictures, music and other files.” Click the OK button when you are finished in the Bluetooth settings box.

You need to make sure the Android phone is set up for Bluetooth use as well. The steps will vary based on the version of Android being used, but you can usually find them in the Settings area, under “Wireless & networks.” Google has sample steps for turning on Bluetooth and pairing the phone with other Bluetooth devices in Android 2.3 and Android 4.0; your phone’s manual should also have the information.

“Pairing” devices means that you formally introduce the phone to the computer so they can connect to each other. To pair the two from the PC, go back to the Start menu to the Devices and Printers area. In the Devices and Printers box, click “Add a device” at the top to start the Windows software wizard that walks you through the steps for connecting computer to phone.

Microsoft’s frequently-asked-questions page for Windows 7 and Bluetooth has more information and troubleshooting tips if you get stuck. The site called 7Tutorials has detailed istructions for and transferring files between a Windows 7 PC and a phone over a Bluetooth connection as well as using the Bluetooth Device control panel.