The Clout Is Gone: The Republican takeover of both the House and Senate, along with the departure of some powerful veterans, has sapped much of the influence of the New England delegations. Venerable beltway publication Roll Call has put numbers to that decline, in the new iteration of its “Clout Index.”
Massachusetts is now “punching the most below its weight,” ranking 14th in population but 28th in clout. Not only are all of its members in the minority, Roll Call says, but also few are on key committees, and both senators — Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey — are low on the seniority list.
That's a big change from the days of Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, when the Clout Index regularly ranked Massachusetts in the top 10.
The other states rank even lower, although that's partly because of their size. Connecticut is 36th; Vermont 37th; Rhode Island 42nd; Maine 44th; and New Hampshire 49th, ahead of only Hawaii.
Shaheen Takes On The $20: New Hampshire has the first-ever all-woman delegation, so it's appropriate that one of that group has taken up the cause of getting a woman onto U.S. paper currency.
After a successful marketing campaign, called Women on 20s, raised the issue over the past few months, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, has introduced legislation to push the idea forward.
Responsibility for choosing who goes on currency ultimately belongs to the U.S. Treasury, but Shaheen's bill would convene an advisory panel to study the issue and make recommendations.
Women on 20s, after an online vote, chose four finalists to replace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill: Wilma Mankiller, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harriet Tubman.
Shaheen's bill has been sent to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs — where Elizabeth Warren is one of only two women among 22 members.
Post Mortem, Ayotte's AG Act: As a former state attorney general herself, New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte might be expected to have an opinion on Loretta Lynch, President Barack Obama's nominee to succeed Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General. Yet, throughout the historically long confirmation delay, Ayotte would not say how she might vote on Lynch, nor comment on Senate Republicans' increasingly criticized postponement.
Only last week, a few hours before the confirmation vote — five months after her nomination — did Ayotte publicly announce that she would vote in favor of Lynch's confirmation.
By that time, she was one of three Senators who had not declared their intention.
The way was finally cleared for the confirmation vote when the Senate reached a compromise on a seemingly irrelevant detail (involving abortion funding) of an unrelated bill (on human trafficking).
The public tends to hate these kinds of “political squabbles,” as the Concord Monitor termed it in a March editorial. The Monitor, calling the human trafficking bill “the flimsiest of pretexts to delay Lynch's confirmation,” urged Ayotte to pressure her party to act. Instead, she maintained her silence to the end.
Washington political media frequently noted that the mum senators on Lynch — Rob Portman of Ohio, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, along with Ayotte — were all Republicans from competitive states, facing re-election in 2016.
Ayotte's 2016 campaign could be particularly challenging. Popular Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan is considering running for Senate, and polls suggest a dogfight if she does.
Meanwhile, speculation about Ayotte as a vice-presidential candidate reheated this month, as the GOP's presidential contenders — and the media covering them — came to the Granite State for a Leadership Summit. The newly-created forum included a speech by Ayotte, and lots of praise about her from the candidates. Publications from the Nashua Telegraph to Fusion reported renewed talk of Ayotte as a VP choice.
That's no surprise. Many Republicans think the party needs a woman on the ticket, and there are few good options. Meanwhile, Ayotte's growing status as a foreign policy hawk fits well with the party's emphasis on the topic in this cycle. At a high-profile forum in Nashua this month for GOP presidential candidates — the state's first big dog-and-pony display of the cycle — Ayotte gave a speech heavily focused on international affairs.
But, while New Hampshire law allows her to run simultaneously for VP and re-election to the Senate, New Hampshire voters tend not to like their officeholders' eyes wandering to national ambitions.
As editorial page editor Drew Cline wrote last month in the influential Union Leader, “She is not running for vice president, and both she and her staff wish people would stop mentioning her as a potential vice presidential pick.”
They probably also wish she wouldn't need to take tough votes, like the one on Loretta Lynch.
Worth Watching: The recent Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearings on the state of the insurance industry — which could be a forum for Sen. Elizabeth Warren to unleash some confrontational theatrics. This comes as everyone digests a lengthy New Yorker magazine profile of Warren, arguing that she is deliberately playing progressive foil to Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy.
Wednesday, Seth Moulton and Niki Tsongas of Massachusetts take part in the Armed Services Committee's final markup of the National Defense Authorization Act for the 2016 fiscal year.
Also on Wednesday, Bill Keating of Massachusetts is ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade, which holds a hearing on “ISIS: Defining the Enemy.”
