Daily Political Wire

George Wenschhof

Egypt Arrests Spiritual Leader of Muslim Brotherhood - Security forces arrested the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood on Monday night, in an escalating showdown with the influential Islamist movement that has led to the ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected president and some of the bloodiest urban violence in its modern history.
 
Mohammed Badie, a white-bearded professor, was shown on state television being whisked away to prison in a car, sitting next to a security officer in a bulletproof vest. His arrest, as well as those of other Muslim Brotherhood leaders, had been ordered after last month’s coup.

Badie’s detention was the latest in a rapidly unfolding series of events that seemed certain to outrage beleaguered Brotherhood supporters and intensify the crisis in the Arab world’s most populous nation.

Earlier Monday, an Egyptian court granted bond to the country’s former autocratic ruler, Hosni Mubarak, raising the prospect that he could be released from jail within days.  The Washington Post has more here.

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Musharraf Charged with Murder of Bhutto - A court in Pakistan charged former military dictator Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday with the 2007 murder of Benazir Bhutto in an unprecedented move likely to anger the all-powerful army.

The indictment of the army chief who seized power in a 1999 coup - once Pakistan's most powerful man - was almost an unthinkable event in a nuclear-armed country ruled by the military for half of its 66-year history.

Bhutto, a former prime minister, died in a suicide gun and bomb attack in December 2007 after a campaign rally in the city of Rawalpindi, not far from the heavily guarded court room where the charges were read out on Tuesday.  Reuters.com has more here.
 
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Report shows Senate Immigration bill would add 14,000 jobs per Congressional district - A new report released Tuesday indicates that the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate but faces an uphill climb in the House could generate an average of nearly 14,000 new jobs in each congressional district over the course of the next 10 years, Fusion reported.
 
The report was released by American Action Network (AAN), a conservative advocacy group pushing for immigration reform.

Using figures from a Regional Economic Models, Inc. (REMI) study of economic data and new worker visas and a report from the Congressional Budget Office on the Senate immigration bill, the study found that no fewer than 7,000 jobs would be created in each district by 2023. An average of 13,992 new jobs would be created in each district, according to the report.  TPM.com has more here.

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Obama Wants Dodd-Frank Bill Implemented - President Obama urged the nation’s top financial regulators on Monday to move faster on new rules for Wall Street, telling them in a private White House meeting that they must work to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.

Aides said Mr. Obama also told the regulators that the United States needed a more simplified and certain system of financing housing. The president recently endorsed proposals to reduce the government’s role in providing mortgages.
      

Administration officials and some lawmakers have expressed frustration that critical parts of Mr. Obama’s overhaul of the financial system, which was voted into law three years ago and is known as the Dodd-Frank act, remain unenforced as an alphabet soup of federal agencies wrangle over how to adopt it.  The NY Times has more here.

 

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Van Hollen Hopeful of Budget Deal, Debt Ceiling Increase - Two rules that have guided Speaker John A. Boehner’s leadership of the House could go by the wayside this fall when Congress takes up a debt ceiling increase, Rep. Chris Van Hollen predicted Monday.

 

In a sit-down interview with CQ Roll Call on Monday, the Maryland Democrat and ranking member on the House Budget Committee slammed the “Boehner rule” — which mandates dollar-for-dollar spending cuts for every dollar raised in the debt ceiling — as “unworkable, policy-wise and politically.”
             
“It gave birth to the sequester,” he added.

And the “Hastert rule,” calling for majority of the majority support for legislation, could be broken as well.

Van Hollen signaled that it had to be “selectively applied,” and he suggested that he didn’t see a scenario wherein Republicans would be able to pass a legitimate debt ceiling increase bill without significant Democratic support.  RollCall.com has more here.

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