Wednesday morning’s Senate Banking Committee hearing with embattled JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is not only an opportunity for lawmakers to investigate his firm’s $2 billion hedging strategy loss, but also allow those up for re-election a time to shine as Capitol Hill interrogators.

The campaign manager’s dream is the vivid 15-second sound bite with his senator crossing swords with the man from corporate America.

Mario Tama / Getty Images

JPMorgan Chase & Co. chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon looks on while speaking at Simon Graduate School of Business at the University of Rochester's New York City Conference.

Critics of Wall Street are raising questions about whether, even with the enactment of the Dodd-Frank regulatory regime, mammoth financial firms such as JP Morgan are getting enough scrutiny from in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve and other regulators.

So Wednesday’s event seems tailor-made for two first-term populists on the committee who are in tight re-election races this fall: Democrats Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana.

Brown faces Republican state Treasurer Josh Mandel while Tester will vie with Rep. Denny Rehberg.

In an interview Tuesday, Brown referred to a report in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that some J.P. Morgan executives and directors knew of hazardous trading practices by the firm’s London-based traders two years ago – way before the investment snafu blew up.

“As these stories come out, on what they should have known, and how they should have prepared, and how that bank has done a lot of lobbying of these agencies, I just need to know more,” Brown said.

In his testimony before the Banking Committee last week, Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin said the screw-up at JP Morgan has important cautionary lessons for regulators and bankers but “is not about the solvency of the firm or for that matter the stability of the broader financial system.”

“It’s ultimately about the latter,” Brown said Tuesday, “because what we care about in the end is the stability of the system. And this is a well-run bank. In my state it’s got 14,000 employees at pretty much one site. This is a big deal to us, it’s important to us. But are these institutions that are $800 billion and up, the six largest institutions, are they too big to manage?”

Reverting to his populist side, Brown noted that big financial firms “get advantages when they borrow money that the First National Bank of Sycamore, Ohio doesn’t get – 50 to 80 basis points difference in the cost of capital.”

He added, “I don’t blame them and I don’t finger them, but I do worry about this too-big-to-manage.” As for Dimon himself, “I’d like him to acknowledge that the size of his bank – just the size alone -- is problematic for our financial system,” Brown said.

He added that Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry (no relation to this reporter) “has to walk a line between the people that are working there (in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and carrying out his duties. If that means he has to bring in new people and let go some of those who have, I think, shown a basis toward the largest banks, then so be it.”

Asked whether voters in Ohio were worried by the JP Morgan news that they might again get saddled with the cost of a bailout of the financial sector, Brown said, “People are always concerned because they see this government too often give breaks to the most privileged and they pay the price – from China currency to health care to collective bargaining.”

J. Scott Applewhite / AP

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins denounces gay marriage as a group of pastors from across denominational lines gather on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, May 24, 2012.

Conservative religious leaders rallying outside the Capitol Thursday promised to make the preservation of marriage as a union between one man and one woman an issue in 2012 campaign.

But with traditional marriage already having been made the law in most states, and with the federal courts -- and ultimately the Supreme Court -- likely deciding the constitutionality of these laws, it's not yet clear how the leaders will persuade the conservative base to get mobilized.

At the rally outside the Capitol, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, chided Republican leaders for not focusing more on the marriage issue: “The Republicans have said they’re not going to be distracted” by the same-sex marriage issue, but instead will focus on the economy as the theme of the 2012 campaign.

“The pastors and Christians across America are saying marriage is under attack. That’s not a distraction; that should be a priority,” Perkins said.

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Republicans cannot sit back and assume they will win grassroots conservatives’ support on the issue. “If the Republicans want the support that’s going to be leaving the president (due to his backing support for same-sex marriages), they have to show that there is a clear contrast between the president and them,” he added.

Bishop Harry Jackson, senior pastor of the Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Md., said President Barack Obama’s personal endorsement of same-sex marriages was merely a prelude: “Some further action will follow,” he said, not specifying what he thinks the action would be.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced last year that Justice Department lawyers would no longer defend the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, which federally defines marriages as solely between one man and one woman for purposes of awarding benefits.

Another section of the law says that states can refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 38 states have prohibited same-sex marriages, either through state law or by amending their state constitutions.

NCSL’s tally doesn’t include California, Maryland, and Washington. In California, a federal appeals court has ruled that the state constitutional amendment adopted in 2008 violates the U.S. Constitution, but an appeal is pending in that case. The Maryland and Washington legislatures have passed laws allowing same-sex marriages, but voters will either ratify or reject those laws in November.

Legal challenges to DOMA are pending in two federal appeals courts and the issue seems likely to come before the Supreme Court as soon as next year. Also likely to come before the high court is the constitutionality of California’s marriage amendment, Proposition 8.

Jackson recalled the power of the marriage issue in the 2004 election: “In 2004, George Bush won a second term in office by a shift in the vote” that occurred in Ohio and Florida, due in part to conservative alarm over prospect of legalization of same-sex marriage.

Perkins said that in Ohio in 2004, it was conservative activists, and not the Republican Party establishment, who put the marriage constitutional amendment on the ballot and mobilized voters to turn out and approve it.

In 2004, one-man/one-woman marriage referenda were on the ballot in Ohio and 12 other states and all were approved by voters.

A dramatic additional motivation for voters came only a week before the 2004 election with the announcement that Chief Justice William Rehnquist had been hospitalized for thyroid cancer. Voters knew that either Bush or his Democratic opponent John Kerry would likely get to fill at least one vacancy during the four-year term beginning in January 2005.

But whether the marriage issue, or the high court vacancy issue, will play as powerful a role this year as in 2004 depends partly on whether voters think they can do something to influence the outcome.

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Both Jackson and Perkins warned Thursday of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s recent statement of support for bringing a bill to repeal DOMA to the Senate floor for a vote this year.

A bill to repeal DOMA was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, but stands no chance of advancing in the House even if the Senate were to pass it.

But such a vote could benefit both conservatives opposed to same-sex marriage and the proponents of it by giving them a recorded vote to rally supporters on. Depending on the state, senators up for re-election this fall might be put in a tight spot by such a vote.

And yet such a vote might be beside the point, if the issue will be decided by the Supreme Court anyway.

“Why is DOMA important?” Perkins asked the rally. “DOMA does two things: DOMA not only defines marriage for purposes of federal law, but DOMA is also the thin line of protection for the 30 states that have enshrined the definition of marriage in their constitutions and the other dozen states that have it in their statutes.”

Without DOMA, he said, the few states that have legalized same-sex marriage “could impose their definition” on the majority of states that outlaw same-sex marriages.

Perkins also drew a parallel between the abortion issue and the marriage issue. Legalization of abortion, he said was “thrust upon the country not democratically, not through the legislative branch, but through the courts -- and after 40 years it is not resolved.”

He acknowledged that the high court could strike down DOMA and find that there is a fundamental constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry. “The courts may impose a definition of marriage -- but they will never make it right and Americans will never accept it.”

Such a ruling, he said, “will make the abortion issue look minor.”

It’s a political eternity between today and the first presidential debate on Oct. 3. And voters may be fated to spend it hearing point/counterpoint from the Obama and Romney campaigns on the Republican’s career as head of the private equity firm Bain Capital in the 1980s and 1990s.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released this week suggests that for now, Obama, and those who write his campaign ads, have some work to do in scuffing up Romney’s image: nearly three out of five poll respondents said if the former Massachusetts governor were president, his business experience would be an advantage in helping improve economic conditions and in reducing the federal deficit.

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But even if voters mute the TV when the campaign ads come on, questions emerge from this week’s rhetoric and polling data that could be answered in the fall debates:

• On Monday, Obama denigrated Romney’s Bain experience by saying, “When you’re president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot.” What does Obama believe is the role of profits in providing the capital for investments that entrepreneurs rely on to create firms and new jobs?

Poll highlights Obama's economic vulnerabilities

• Obama spoke of the need for tax revenue that “allows us” – meaning his administration – to “invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.” When Obama speaks of his administration “investing” in science, technology and infrastructure, what has been the return on those investments in the last three years? For every Solyndra (the solar firm that went bankrupt and took with it $535 million in federal subsidies), have there been five or ten successes? Is the time horizon for federal investments too long to be measured merely on one presidential term? That was the implication of what Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner – himself a former telecom entrepreneur – told NBC’s Chuck Todd: “If you’re in public service, if you’re investing in pre-school, if you’re investing in long-term infrastructure, you’ve got a much different time horizon” than private-sector investors looking to reap short-term profits.

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• How do Romney and Obama each define investment – and what is each man’s preferred mix of government investment versus private investment?

• Romney and other Republicans argue for lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends in order to spur investments in job-creating firms. In fact, there has been a bipartisan consensus in Congress for most of the past 80 years to tax capital gains at a lower rate than earned income. And in 2003, Congress cut the tax rate on dividends to 15 percent. A question for Romney is whether those lower tax rates have been effective in spurring job creation. If they have not been, why haven’t they?

• Obama repeatedly refers to “fairness” – as in his comment on Monday, that part of his job as president is “to think about how we set up an equitable tax system so that everybody is paying their fair share.” In putting the emphasis on “fairness” as the guiding principle in designing a tax system, how much higher does the top marginal rate need to go? Why does Obama not agree with former President Bill Clinton that all income tax rates must go up – even tax rates for middle-income people, not just the top-two tax brackets on upper-income people?

NBC/WSJ poll: Obama, Romney locked in tight contest

• To what degree do attempts to achieve fairness in the tax system get in the way of efficiency in collecting taxes? For example, the Alternative Minimum Tax, first enacted in 1978, was intended to achieve fairness by catch high-income people with lots of deductions and require them to pay higher taxes. But now the AMT must be “patched” each year by Congress or it will hit more middle-income people. The AMT adds to the complexity of the tax system and the frustration of complying with it: millions of tax filers are forced to do the AMT calculation just to see whether or not they are required to pay the AMT.

• Are the poll respondents mistaken in thinking that Romney’s business experience would be an advantage in dealing with the federal deficit if he were president? Aren’t talents he’d need to clinch an accord on spending and taxes those of political bargaining and trade-offs, not business planning and analysis of corporate balance sheets? The last president who served at a time of balanced budgets and budget surpluses, combined with brisk economic growth, was a man who, like Obama, had spent his adult life not in business but in academia, politics and government – Bill Clinton. 

In two weeks, California voters will take part in an intriguing electoral experiment –and while House Democrats are likely to emerge better off from it, the question is how much better off? Will they see a net gain of two or three House seats? Or perhaps a five, six, or seven seat score?

When Californians cast their ballots in the June 5 primary, they’ll be in new congressional districts drawn not by political insiders, as was done in the past (and as is still done in most states), but by a citizen panel.

Map of California's redrawn congressional districts.

For decades, House members and their allies in the state legislature used gerrymandering to protect incumbents of both parties. That changed when voters adopted citizen redistricting in 2008.

As governor, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger “pushed redistricting reform for the purpose of creating competitive seats” and “Republicans had dreamed that the whole state would become competitive as a result of this process,” said Bruce Cain, professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on redistricting in the state.

Three other ingredients are being added to that redistricting experiment: the retirement of seven incumbents (four Republicans and three Democrats) from the California delegation, a 28 percent increase in the state’s Latino population since 2000 (although the increase in actual Latino voters doesn’t necessarily match the increase in the overall Latino population), and a new top-two balloting system under which only the leading vote-getters in each congressional primary advance to the November ballot.

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Only one seat in California changed hands in the last ten years, but according to the latest ratings from the non-partisan Cook Political Report, there are now four Democratic and five GOP House incumbents in competitive districts. At this same point after redistricting in 2001, Cook rated only two California House races as competitive.

“The redistricting definitely favored the Democrats and nobody who has analyzed it thinks differently,” said Cain. “It would be shocking if the Democrats don’t pick up some congressional seats,” he said, but added, “I’d be surprised if the Democrats do better than (a net gain of) four or five.”

“California has been a fairly stable market for congressional races over last decade,” said Dan Conston, the communications director for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican Super PAC that had more than $5 million in cash as of April 15 to spend on House races.

“Under the new maps, the entire field has been shaken up and California will now be one of the key battlegrounds for control of the House for the next decade,” he said.

Conston added, “When you consider the national battlefields, it is clear that if we perform well in California, it is very difficult for Democrats to have any shot of reclaiming the majority.”

Thanks to the Citizens United decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, and other federal court rulings, mega-donors in California and elsewhere can give unlimited money to Super PACs (both Democratic and Republican) bypassing donation caps to candidates or party committees.

Conston said that the number of newly competitive seats in California has “piqued donor interest. That is why we set up a separate fund within the Congressional Leadership Fund where all resources raised go to our California efforts.”

Among the Democrats at whom Republican groups will be aiming their ads are Rep. Lois Capps and Rep. John Garamendi, both of whom will now be competing on less Democratic-leaning turf than their present districts.

Leaders of the Democratic Super PAC, which works on House races, are also making California their focus.

In its fund raising pitch to donors, the House Majority PAC said, “Democrats have the opportunity to go from a 34-19 majority in California to a 41-12 majority – a net gain of seven seats, nearly a third of what we need to retake the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives ... This may well be a once-in-a-generation opportunity.”

But without a competitive presidential or Senate race in California, there will be no pull for Democratic voters from the top of the ticket. “This is particularly important in the Hispanic community – the presidential election will not be focused on communicating with these voters in California,” the fund-raising pitch said.

All the more enticing for Democratic mega-donors to give to the House Majority PAC, which had nearly $1.7 million in cash on hand as of March 31.

Like its Republican rival, it too has a California-specific fund and appeals to home-state pride in its pitch: “For a long time, California donors have dutifully contributed to Democratic efforts and that money has been spent everywhere but California. In 2012, California donors have the opportunity to fund critically important races right here in the Golden State.”

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Initially, some Democrats – including President Barack Obama – denounced Super PACs and non-profit groups called 501c4s, which were given a new birth of fundraising freedom under the Citizens United decision.

But “I don’t hear that (objection) as much (from Democratic donors) anymore,” said Ali Lapp, executive director of the House Majority PAC. “More and more, there are a lot of Democratic donors out there that totally understand that if we try to fight this fight with one hand tied behind our back, the country is not going to get any better.”

Lapp said, “The way I think about, there are nine competitive seats in California ... Of those nine, I think we will win five or six – if we’re really lucky, seven. If we won only two, it would not be a happy day; we would have had a horrible election if we won only two of those nine.”

One place where House Majority PAC had been spending money in recent weeks is in the new 26th Congressional District in Ventura County, where four Democrats and one Republican, state Sen. Tony Strickland, are running. So far, Strickland has outraised all other contenders by a wide margin.

Also on the June 5 ballot is a former-Republican-turned-independent, county supervisor Linda Parks, who won a glowing endorsement from The Los Angeles Times which sees her as exactly the type of centrist pragmatist that reformers had hoped citizen-driven redistricting would promote.

If Parks and Strickland are the top two finishers on June 5, Democrats will start the November campaign already one seat behind.

“This is a lean-Democratic district that in November has a better chance of going for a Democrat than for a Republican,” said Lapp.

“But because of the dynamics of the top-two primary system where you have an independent with very high name ID and you have a bunch of Democrats on the ballot, there was a very real chance we could be squandering this opportunity if we didn’t get involved and make sure that voters knew who Julia Brownley is, what she stands for, and that she is the leading Democrat in the race.”

But that race is only one of the places where the House Majority PAC is likely to invest money.  “On June 6, we’ll see what the match-ups are and – knock on wood – we’ll get the strong candidates we’re expecting to get from all these districts,” Lapp said.

Darron Cummings / AP

Senate candidates running in the GOP primary, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.,and Richard Mourdock, left, participate in a debate Wednesday, April 11, 2012, in Indianapolis.

In the 2010 midterm elections, the GOP was jarred by an array of suddenly-potent Tea Party-backed challengers taking on the party establishment. The movement achieved mixed results overall, but resulted in a Republican Party heavily influenced by it.

History is repeating itself in Indiana where one of the Senate’s two longest-serving Republicans, Richard Lugar, 80, who was first elected in 1976, is facing a challenge in the May 8 primary from state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who became famous in 2009 for opposing the auto industry bailout and the forced write-downs for Chrysler bond holders. 

Mourdock is backed by Tea Party activists, the Club for Growth, the National Rifle Association, and old-line social conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly.

As Lugar struggles to fend off Mourdock’s challenge, Democrats hope their candidate, Rep. Joe Donnelly, will profit from the GOP schism and pick up the incumbent’s seat in November.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Wednesday, “The race is very close now and it’ll be decided on May 8 and a number of factors could apply. Obviously turnout is important. Gov. (Mitch) Daniels’s ad supporting Sen. Lugar is a very positive development for him,” he said. “But our job is to hold the seat (in November) and we’ll support the nominee in the general election, but I think we will hold that seat regardless of what happens in the primary.”

A Lugar loss would end the political career of a man who was first elected in 1964 to the Indianapolis school board and who in the 1970s was known as “Richard Nixon’s favorite mayor” when he held that office in Indianapolis. Since taking his Senate seat in 1977, Lugar has become his party’s cerebral foreign policy expert.  

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. who serves alongside Lugar on the Foreign Relations Committee, said “the knowledge that Sen. Lugar has – having worked on these issues for decades – has been invaluable ... Certainly he’s someone who’s very respected in the Senate and he’s listened to by both sides of the aisle.”

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But no matter how deeply respected Lugar is on Capitol Hill, Mourdock’s charge is that Lugar isn’t conservative enough – although Lugar’s lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, based on dozens of roll call votes, is 77 out 100, putting him a long way from Senate GOP centrists such as Olympia Snowe of Maine, who has a 48.5 lifetime ACU rating.

Mourdock’s campaign ads regularly link Lugar with Democratic President Barack Obama. Early in Obama’s Senate stint, Lugar helped him establish his foreign policy credentials. In 2005 Obama accompanied Lugar on a trip to Russia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan to inspect weapons dumps and sites where smallpox and other pathogens were kept.

“When Dick Lugar moved to Washington, he left behind his conservative Hoosier values,” Mourdock says in one of his television spots. “How else to explain his support for amnesty, for Obama’s liberal Supreme Court choices, even his vote to bail out Greece?”

An ad the NRA has run against Lugar tells viewers that, “Some things shouldn’t change. Our Indiana values, stewardship of the land, and the protection of our Second Amendment and hunting rights. But over his 36 years in Washington, Dick Lugar has changed ... He’s become the only Republican candidate in Indiana with an “F” rating from the NRA.”

The NRA grievance against Lugar goes way back: he voted for Bill Clinton’s 1993 Brady handgun bill and for the ban on certain semiautomatic weapons, called “assault weapons” by gun control advocates.

Lugar, always avuncular and courteous, told reporters this week in Washington that his battle with Mourdock is “a very close contest (and) has been throughout.”

Asked about Mourdock’s view that he has changed in his years in Washington, Lugar chuckled amiably and said “I think it’s his view but we’re getting along fine with voters.”

Since last year, Democrats have accused Lugar of being detached from Indiana issues and denounced him for living in Virginia. They gained ammunition when he had to reimburse the Treasury for some hotel stays in Indiana that were charged to his Senate office account. On the residency issue, Lugar said Tuesday, “It was clearly somebody engaging in negative campaign research, trying to find some difficulty.”

Since this is his first primary challenge since 1976, is it difficult since he’s perhaps out of practice? “No,” Lugar replied, “I’ve been campaigning all over the country for the last 35 years and I’m campaigning vigorously again this time ... This is a very vigorous experience and we’re doing the best we can.”

The Republican fratricide in Senate races two years ago had at best mixed results for party leaders.

Darron Cummings / AP

Brent Gentry shows his support for Richard Mourdock before a U.S. Senate debate Wednesday, April 11, 2012, in Indianapolis. Mourdock is running against Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

One of the GOP incumbents, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, ultimately survived after losing the Republican primary by running in November as a write-in candidate.

Establishment GOP candidates in Arizona, Indiana, New Hampshire, and Missouri defeated their conservative primary opponents and went on to win in November. The party favorite in Washington beat his conservative challenger in the primary, then lost in November.

Elsewhere, conservative challengers forced one GOP senator, Robert Bennett, into retirement in Utah and another, Arlen Specter, into switching parties in Pennsylvania.

Conservative favorites won four Senate seats (in Pennsylvania, Utah, Kentucky, and Florida), but lost to Democrats in four other Senate contests (Delaware, Connecticut, Nevada, and Colorado) – races which more mainstream Republican candidates might have won.

One of the Establishment GOP victims of the Tea Party surge in 2010, was former Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware, who lost to Christine O’Donnell – who then was defeated by Democrat Chris Coons in November.

Castle is now a partner with the DLA Piper law firm.

Reflecting on the parallels with his bitter loss to O’Donnell two years ago, Castle said if Lugar loses the primary, “it has the effect of making it more and more difficult for people who take middle-of-the-road positions, who try to work with both sides of the aisle to get things done ... .”

The Tea Party trend puts such pragmatism, Castle said, “at jeopardy in the Republican Party ... It moves the party not just further to the right, but to a much more conservative stance than it used to have. It’s going to ultimately lead to a minority status in the country.”

Pointing to the danger of Mourdock winning the primary but losing to Donnelly in November, Castle said that for Indiana Republicans, Lugar “may not be 100 percent what they might want, but the alternative is you may elect somebody from the other party.”

Castle’s campaign fund has given $1,000 to Lugar’s campaign.

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Seeing the race from a different angle, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, whose Senate Conservatives PAC supported O’Donnell against Castle and Sharron Angle in Nevada in 2010, said, “Richard is a friend of mine – but of course, we’ve got two Richards in that race. Dick Lugar is a friend of mine, but I’d be honored to serve with Mourdock. He’s clearly someone who is in line with some of the things we’re trying to do,” but he added, “I’m not going to get involved” in the Lugar versus Mourdock primary. “I’m not involved in any incumbent races right now.”

Meanwhile Democrats are waiting to take on the survivor of the GOP primary. "While Joe Donnelly has been focused on jobs and the economy, both Richard Mourdock and Dick Lugar have spent the last year slinging mud, pandering to the Tea Party, and showing voters that they're both of touch with Indiana's middle class. Joe's candidacy gives us an excellent chance of winning in November regardless of who Republicans nominate," said Shripal Shah, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Despite the Democrats touting Donnelly's chances, there are echoes of Indiana’s 2010 Senate race when Democrats had hopes for former Rep. Brad Ellsworth, a centrist Democrat with a voting record much like Donnelly's.

Ellsworth ended up losing by 14 percentage points to Republican Dan Coats. Democrats say 2012 isn't 2010; turnout this year is going to be significantly higher and the economy is healthier now than it was in 2010.

But Donnelly voted for the Obama health care bill and for his stimulus plan, neither of which will help with conservative voters in Indiana. And his fund-raising has been less than stellar.  

Democrats privately say that Donnelly runs stronger against Mourdock than against Lugar.

Tom Williams / Roll Call/Getty Images

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., talks to a reporter before the Senate Republican Policy luncheon in the Capitol.

“Yeah, I understand that,” Cornyn said. “Sen. Lugar is a legend in Indiana. To show how quickly things change, six years ago, he was uncontested in the Republican primary and in the general election ... But it will probably make it more of a contest if Sen. Lugar is not the nominee, but I’m confident we’ll hold the seat.” Cornyn said the Indiana race “is not one of my worries.”

Darren Hauck / REUTERS

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker during a news conference at the state Capitol in Madison, Wisc., Feb. 25, 2011.

As he marks his first anniversary as governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker has accomplished what Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Ron Paul haven’t in their collective decades in politics: enacted two fundamental conservative policy changes in a traditionally Democratic-leaning state.

Walker, who spoke in Washington Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, signed into law last year a measure that abolished most collective bargaining rights for most public employees and required them to pay a greater share of their pension and health care costs.

“Collective bargaining in the public sector is not a right,” Walker said Thursday. “It is an expensive entitlement.”

He has also signed into law a voter identification measure that requires people to present a form of photo identification such as a passport or driver’s license when they show up to vote.

For Democrats and union members those actions made Walker the most infamous Republican in the nation. Walker’s collective bargaining measure sparked furious, weeks-long protests in the state capitol in Madison last winter, at one point leading Democratic lawmakers to flee to Illinois in an attempt to deny a quorum and prevent enactment of the law.

Walker’s opponents have a Jan. 17 deadline to submit the required 540,208 signatures to recall him. The recall election would take place in June.

Recalls are also being attempted of Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and of a few Republican state senators, with the potential of Democrats regaining the state Senate where they now have 16 members, compared to 17 Republicans.

Walker’s message Thursday in Washington: “I don’t plan on losing, but I’m not afraid of losing.”

The recall will be an entirely new election with a Democratic candidate on the ballot.

“People ask me who my opponent is going to be. I say the person doesn’t matter,” Walker said, adding that labor union leaders would invest huge amounts of money in trying to defeat him and that his opponent would be “someone hand-picked by the unions.”

“We’ll run ads that define the differences; we’re not going to take cheap shots … I will point out my record versus whomever the unions decide to put up to run against me.”

Walker also predicted that no matter what might happen in the recall election, his public employee reforms won’t be rescinded. He said local governments in his state, now in a stronger bargaining position towards their employees, will not want to return to the old system. “You’d be hard pressed to find many local officials who would be out there even right now arguing to rescind the collective bargaining law,” he said.

He also argued that “probably the biggest reason I am a target” was a provision in the law that ended the practice of deducting union dues from the paychecks of public employees. “That’s ultimately what this is about,” he said.

Now if a public employee wants to pay union dues, he must write a check to the union. “What it comes down to is I took away the gravy train, the free money, they (the unions) had before and gave that right back to the workers to make that decision.”

One of Walker’s Democratic opponents, state Senate Democratic Leader Mark Miller said employees have payroll deductions for all sorts of purposes: alimony payments, donations to charity, etc., and that it is “very discriminatory” to single out union dues as payments that cannot be deducted. “It’s a specific way to weaken the unions’ ability to operate effectively,” he said.

Walker said his public employee reforms were “not radical” but commonsense measures to bring public employee compensation in Wisconsin into line with that of private-sector workers. “I still get questions about that all the time from people who think we’re taking away pensions … We’re not. We’re making (public workers pay) a payroll match contribution” to pay for their health insurance and pension benefits.

He said not only Republican governors and mayors but Democratic ones, such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, are being forced to try to curtail the high cost of public workers’ benefits.  He asked, “Who would have thought a year ago when Occupy Chicago protestors came in, they’d mention my name and Rahm Emanuel’s in the same breath?”

University of Wisconsin political scientist Charles Franklin said the recall drive has collected “an impressive number of signatures in a short period of time, showing that the anti-Walker feelings remain strong and widespread. However, last year's recalls and Supreme Court election showed the state is very evenly divided, as does most polling.”

Walker predicted “a tossup election, as evenly divided as last summer” when Wisconsin had state Senate recall elections.

And for rolling back Walker’s collective bargaining law, Franklin sees that as somewhat doubtful. “It will take Democratic control of both houses of the legislature as well as the governorship to accomplish that, so unless November results in that kind of change the recall by itself won't repeal the laws.”

He added that the Democrats could take the state Senate “but have a long way to go to take the assembly. And the redistricting plan recently passed is not friendly to the Democrats, making legislative gains harder.”

For conservative Republican voters who can’t accept Ron Paul’s bring-the-troops-home foreign policy, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum seems to be emerging as the best alternative to Mitt Romney.

Saturday’s Des Moines Register poll showed Santorum with 15 percent of likely caucus goers supporting him, up from 6 percent in late November.

Four weeks ago, few people were paying close attention to Santorum. But now, with victory in the Iowa caucuses, or a strong second, seeming to be within Santorum’s reach, Republicans are digging into his record to assess how conservative he really was during his 16 years in Congress.

Best known for his outspoken stands on social issues, Santorum led the fight for a ban on the procedure known as partial birth abortion, a ban that President Bill Clinton repeatedly vetoed, but was signed into law by President George W. Bush and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007.

Santorum also was the leader of the 2004 effort to amend the Constitution to allow states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and to define marriage in federal law solely as the traditional man-woman union.

He got credit for his skillful Senate floor management of the 1996 welfare reform bill, which Clinton ultimately signed after vetoing an earlier version.

On gun owners’ rights, Santorum voted against extending the ban on so-called “assault weapons” and against the 1993 Brady bill which imposed a waiting period before the purchase of a handgun and required criminal background checks on gun purchasers.

In line with Republican tax-cutting orthodoxy, he voted for the income tax reductions which Bush proposed in 2001 and 2003 and voted to abolish the estate tax in 2002.

Santorum’s career rating from the American Conservative Union, based on dozens of roll call votes during his 16 years in Congress, was 88 out of 100, not quite as conservative as that of Ron Paul or Jim DeMint of South Carolina, for instance, but still ranking Santorum as one of most conservative Republicans in Congress.

Santorum told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie last week, “I've voted toughly over the years to cut spending and to rein in entitlements. I've led on those things.”

But there’s at least one blemish on Santorum’s conservative record: his vote for the Medicare prescription drug entitlement in 2003 -- the biggest expansion of the program since it was created in 1965 and a bill that the Congressional Budget Office said would add nearly $400 billion to cumulative budget deficits over the first ten years after its enactment.

Fiscal conservatives such as Paul, DeMint and Santorum’s fellow Pennsylvanian Pat Toomey voted against the Medicare prescription drug bill, as did Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

McCain made the case against the Medicare prescription drug bill: “Adding a new unfunded entitlement to a system that is already financially insolvent is so grossly irresponsible that it ought to outrage every fiscal conservative.”

But on the Senate floor right before the prescription drug entitlement was approved, Santorum explained his support for it: “I say to my conservative friends who are expressing concern about this bill, the most important thing in this bill, from my perspective, for conservatives is this plan allows for health savings accounts” -- which are tax-free accounts people can use to set aside money for medical expenses.

“Fundamentally, what health savings accounts will do is eventually change Medicare -- not today, not even five or 10 years from now, but over the long term, once health savings accounts become what I believe they will become, which is the method of choice that the vast majority of people in this country will do in the private sector,” he said. “This will be a very popular plan in which millions of Americans will participate, and it will fundamentally change the insurance market in this country.”

Ten years later, Santorum’s prediction has not come to pass. Most Medicare enrollees continue to choose traditional fee-for-service Medicare, and in the under-65 population, health savings accounts are used by only a few million people.

In its assessment of Santorum’s congressional career, the conservative advocacy group, The Club for Growth gave him high marks for supporting tax cuts and welfare reform but criticized him as “a prolific supporter of earmarks, having requested billions of dollars for pork projects in Pennsylvania while he was in Congress.” The Club for Growth also slammed him for voting against the North American Free Trade Agreement and for co-sponsoring a bill to impose tariffs on steel imports.

On the campaign trial in Iowa, Santorum has faced a few critical questions not on these votes but on his long association with Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania’s long-serving senior Republican senator, who switched parties in 2009 but lost the 2010 Democratic Senate primary to Joe Sestak

 Terry Madonna, the veteran Pennsylvania pollster and analyst at Franklin and Marshall College, said the Santorum-Specter partnership “wasn’t a bosom buddy relationship, but they developed a modus vivendi for how they’d operate. Specter stayed out of Republican politics in the state and let Santorum be the major domo.”

Although ideologically opposed on issues such as abortion and gay rights, the two men developed a pragmatic partnership. Madonna notes that Specter lent Santorum his political staff in eastern Pennsylvania in 1994 when Santorum ran for the Senate and they even shared the same campaign manager – Pat Meehan, who is now a Republican congressman in Pennsylvania. Santorum endorsed Specter’s brief bid for the 1996 GOP presidential nomination.

And Santorum helped bolster Specter in the wake of the 2004 election when conservatives tried to topple Specter from the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee after he warned Bush to not nominate anyone to the Supreme Court who might try to overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion decision.

“Sen. Santorum has been enormously helpful,” Specter said during that chairmanship fight. “He’s gone above and beyond the call of duty. My number one priority in the next two years is to reelect Sen. Santorum.”

It didn’t work out that way: Santorum lost his Senate seat in 2006. But now – in a most unlikely comeback, Santorum is poised to be the conservatives’ man of the moment in Iowa.

Stephen Morton / Getty Images

A Board of Elections volunteer watches people cast their ballots during early voting October 23, 2008 in Savannah, Georgia.

If it’s presidential campaign season, it must be time for another furor over voter fraud and voter suppression.

As the Democrats did in 2008, they are again charging that Republicans are trying to use photo identification laws and other changes in election laws to winnow out would-be Democratic voters.

The difference this time: six more states have enacted laws, or strengthened their existing laws, requiring voters to show a form of photo identification such as a driver’s license in order to cast a ballot.

The standout among the new voter ID states: Wisconsin, which may have a recall election next year for Republican Gov. Scott Walker. It also has a marquee Senate race and will likely be a battleground in the presidential race.

Last week Democratic National Committee chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz launched a new mobilization effort, saying, “Republicans across the country have engaged in a full-scale attack on the right to vote, seeking ways to restrict or limit voters’ ability to cast their ballots for their own partisan advantage.”

The strategy, she contended, disproportionally affects African-Americans, Latinos, and young people and could “skew the 2012 presidential election in the Republicans’ favor.”

Assistant Attorney for Civil Rights Thomas Perez said last week that Justice Department lawyers are reviewing some of the recently-enacted state laws to ensure that they comply with the Voting Rights Act and do not have “a racially discriminatory purpose or discriminatory effect.”

Story: Wisconsin colleges to issue IDs to comply with voter law

Advocates of broader voting rights are looking forward to a speech on voting next week by Attorney General Eric Holder. “We’ve been pushing him hard to do that because we think it is a national crisis,” said Laura Murphy, the director of the Washington Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties Union.  “The big question is what will the Justice Department do – and that’s why we’re so excited about the attorney general’s upcoming speech.”

Murphy, Wasserman Shultz and the Democrats confront one big obstacle: the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision handed down in 2008 and written by Justice John Paul Stevens, upheld Indiana’s photo identification law.

“There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters,” Stevens said.

The decision left open the possibility that future plaintiffs could try to show that, as applied in specific cases, a voter ID law is unconstitutional.

“While the cases that ACLU is bringing are much harder now, we’re still bringing them,” litigating in a number of states to challenge photo ID laws, Murphy said.  “But these cases are expensive and time-consuming because we have to provide data to show the disparate impact of these voting laws.”

And she said, “It would be a long shot for the Supreme Court to hear and decide a case before the election.”

Even if the Justice Department challenged the Wisconsin law or other photo ID laws, it’s not likely that the litigation would be resolved prior to Election Day.

While the litigation plays out in court rooms and inside the Justice Department, the battle continues in the political arena as Democrats to try to motivate voters.

It’s true that Republican-controlled state legislatures and Republican governors in Wisconsin, Kansas and other states have enacted photo identification laws.

Story: Supreme Court upholds voter ID law

But the Democrats’ argument that the voter identification effort is a purely Republican scheme got a setback last summer when Rhode Island, a state with a heavily Democratic legislature, an independent governor and a Democratic chief election official, Secretary of State Ralph Mollis, enacted a new voter ID requirement.

The Rhode Island law allows a wider variety of forms of ID than laws do in Georgia and other states. And voters can vote by provisional ballot which will be counted if the signature on it matches the one on the voter’s registration form.

Mollis said, “I think this is a bill the Democratic national party should be looking to embrace. Because I think they need to join the movement that people should be providing IDs at the polling place, but not disenfranchising voters. I think they would benefit by doing that.”

In the turnout debate, the unspoken assumption sometimes seems to be that higher turnout always benefits Democratic candidates. It isn’t true.

In the nine states which George W. Bush had won in 2004 but Barack Obama won in 2008, turnout as a percentage of citizen voting-age population went up in five, (Virginia, Colorado, Indiana, Nevada, and North Carolina) but went down in four  (Florida, Iowa, New Mexico, and Ohio).

In fact according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, nationwide voter turnout in 2008 was “not statistically different” from 2004. About 64 percent of voting-age citizens voted in both elections and yet Obama won in 2008 with the largest popular vote percentage of any Democratic candidate in 44 years.

Sometimes higher turnout benefits the Republican candidate -- take, for example, the hotly contested states of Ohio and Iowa in the 2004 presidential election. Compared to the 2000 election, turnout as a percentage of citizen voting-age population was up in both states and Bush won both of them. 

Story: Voter ID debate could change 2012 landscape

Of course, it’s who votes that makes all the difference. Research by political scientists Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler showed that on issues such as making it easier for labor unions to organize workers and federal aid to education, non-voters were more liberal in their leanings than voters were. Denver University political scientist Seth Masket said, “That suggests that if everyone voted, Democrats would do better in elections.”

Masket said, “Adopting stricter voter identification laws can depress turnout slightly, or maybe not at all. The key question is, who is being dissuaded from turning out?”

In any event, it has yet to be proven that photo identification requirements deter would-be voters and suppress turnout, either overall or among minority voters.

A study by political scientists Robert Erickson and Lorraine Minnite, who say “our sympathies lie with the plaintiffs in the voter ID cases,” found nevertheless that “the data are not up to the task of making a compelling statistical argument” that voter ID laws deter turnout or have a disproportionate impact on some types of voters.

In fact, after enactment of Indiana’s strict photo identification law in 2006 and Georgia’s in 2007, voter turnout went up – not down.

In Georgia, where voters indicate their race or ethnicity on voter registration forms, the number of African-American voters in the 2008 election increased by more than 40 percent over the 2004 election.

One could argue that was only because Obama was on the 2008 ballot and the Obama campaign had made extraordinary turnout efforts.

But compare two elections in which Obama wasn’t on the ballot, the 2010 midterm congressional elections with the 2006 midterms, which took place before the photo ID laws were in effect.

In Indiana, turnout was 22 percent higher in 2010, after photo ID, than in 2006.

In Georgia, total turnout in the 2010 midterms was 19 percent higher than in 2006.

And 44 percent more African-American voters cast ballots in the 2010 midterms in Georgia than in 2006.

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican said, “All these critics and these reports that are saying that people are going to be disenfranchised -- they have no hard data. They’re speculating. When you look at our numbers, we know, because we’ve been doing this since 2007, we know that minority participation has actually increased since photo ID laws were put in place.”