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Richard Nixon says goodbye to members of his staff outside the White House as he boards a helicopter after resigning the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974.

AP

The phrase "second term curse" is so familiar that it's become a cliche of American politics. Whether it's President Richard Nixon's resignation or President Bill Clinton's impeachment, presidents tend to have a tough time during the back half of an eight-year presidency.

Nothing on President Obama's plate comes close to those historical examples. But right now the White House is defending itself against three controversies that distract the president from the agenda he would like to be pursuing: Benghazi, the IRS and the Justice Department seizure of AP phone records all have the administration scrambling.

Why do presidential second terms tend to be so fraught?

'Troublesome' Terms

Alfred Zacher, a real estate agent in Indiana, says there's no single explanation.

After reading about Thomas Jefferson's second-term stumbles, Zacher started thinking — obsessively — about the presidencies he had watched.

"I'm old enough to remember Franklin Roosevelt's packing of the Supreme Court and his difficulty," Zacher says. "Lived through the retirement of Richard Nixon and seeing Lyndon Johnson with his difficulty. I said, 'This second term is troublesome. What's going on here?' "

So Zacher spent eight years writing a self-published book, Presidential Power in Troubled Second Terms. By his subjective tally, only about a third of the presidents who won re-election had a successful second term.

"A rather prominent historian asked me last year: Which presidents had a better second term than first term?" Zacher says. He came up with two names: James Madison and Andrew Jackson.

The downward trajectory can be traced to a variety of different pitfalls, from wars to personal scandals to congressional gridlock.

Donna Hoffman at the University of Northern Iowa studies that last measure. After analyzing the amount of legislation presidents got through Congress for the past 50 years, she's dubious that the second-term curse is all that bad.

"We oftentimes see that there is a little bit of a drop in terms of what presidents are able to accomplish in the second term," she says, "but it's not such a drop that one would go, 'Aha, there it is. They're always less successful.' "

The drop is a little more than 10 percent. She says in a second term, lawmakers start to envision Washington without the sitting president.

"So their political fortunes may start to diverge in that sense, even members of his own party," Hoffman says, while members of the other party have more interest than ever in investigations and subpoenas.

A 'Scandal Backlog'

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President Clinton walks to the White House Rose Garden to deliver a statement on the impeachment inquiry on Dec. 11, 1998.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Then there are scandals — self-inflicted wounds that seem to pop up more often after re-election. Partly that's because these things can take years to come to light.

"President Obama actually went the longest of any contemporary president without a scandal," says Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College. "So you can think about the current context as also reflecting a kind of scandal backlog."

Nyhan has studied when presidents are most vulnerable to scandal. His research shows that the danger zone comes during slow news periods when the president's popularity is especially low among members of the other party. In other words, this moment is a perfect storm for Obama.

"President Obama is unpopular with the Republican base, and there's not much going on in the news," Nyhan says. "When you add the Republicans' control of the House and the committees there to investigate the administration, President Obama is at a great deal of risk."

But no presidency is black and white. In fact, many who endure beatings after re-election go on to accomplish a lot.

Clinton was impeached. Then he worked to get legislation passed, oversaw a growing economy and left office more popular than when he started. President Reagan endured the Iran-Contra scandal. Then he had major foreign policy victories and wound up an icon.

As David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers, puts it: "In a way, if we define the curse so broadly that it could include bad policies, scandals, personal failings, then you look at presidents' first terms and there's also a first-term curse."

In fact, out of the 44 U.S. presidents, only 21 have served more than a full term. So there may be a second-term curse, but for more than half of the presidents, a first-term curse never even let them get that far.

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The Senate Judiciary Committee meets to work on immigration legislation on May 9.

Michael Reynolds/EPA/Landov

It's been a long slog already for the bipartisan immigration overhaul proposed by the Senate's Gang of Eight.

The legislation has been the target of more than 300 amendments during days of debate and votes by the Senate Judiciary Committee. But while the bill has largely held its own so far, its prospects for getting through Congress remain uncertain.

In Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy's view, the immigration overhaul is "moving very well."

"It's moving a lot faster than people said it would," says Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, one of two Republican members of the Gang of Eight who sit on the Judiciary Committee, says he thinks with the adoption of 15 GOP amendments so far, the bill has become more appealing to conservatives.

"It's a better bill for, I think, those of us who care about border security and interior enforcement — it's a stronger bill," he says.

But that's not how fellow Republican and committee member Jeff Sessions of Alabama sees it.

"None of the significant amendments have been accepted," he says. "It's pretty clear that the Gang of Eight's original statement that they would resist any significant changes to the bill is coming true."

Earlier this week, Sessions brought up an amendment putting the bill's promised path to citizenship for 11 million unauthorized immigrants on hold until biometric data, such as fingerprints or iris scans, are used to screen the entry and exit of every international traveler.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Gang of Eight, helped defeat it.

"I want biometrics as far as the eye can see, in as many ways as possible, post-9/11, to protect this nation," he says. "But to make it a trigger in light of how much it costs and how long it takes, I just think goes too far."

But the issue has exposed a crack in the Gang of Eight's unity. One of its members who is not on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., says he supports a biometric entry-exit system.

"The fundamental question is: Can it be done in a cost-effective manner? And I think that's what we're going to hopefully explore here over the next few days leading into the floor debate," he says. "I hope that we can. I think it makes the system more effective."

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And even though Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., voted against the biometric amendment, she says she would like to see it considered when the bill goes before the full Senate, probably next month.

"I don't think it's a deal-breaker," she says. "But I think we need to do our work, and I'm one Democrat that would like to see it eventually used ... if it is cost-effective — cost-efficient, I should say."

Meanwhile, opponents of that path to citizenship are warning it could doom the entire bill.

"The way to avoid the bill being voted down in the House of Representatives is to reach a reasonable common-sense compromise," says Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, "and, in particular, to take off the table a path to citizenship. So I hope that's what they choose to do."

That would be the wrong choice, says Rubio, the Florida Republican.

"If ... we can put in measures that ensure that we're ... not going to have another wave of illegal immigration, people are willing to support a bill that deals with the 11 million that are here now," Rubio says. "And if we don't, I don't think we'll have immigration reform."

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, could end up voting next week to send the immigration bill to the full Senate, a move that could persuade other key Republicans to get behind it. But Hatch first wants the committee to vote on changes he has offered boosting the number of visas for highly skilled workers.

"If they want to pass this bill through both houses, they've got to give on those," he says. "I've got to have them."

But Hatch will have to get past the opposition of Gang of Eight member Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

"Some of his amendments are acceptable, with some changes, and some are unacceptable," Durbin says. "And, you know, when a senator basically says it's take it or leave it, [he] puts himself in a very weak bargaining position."

Adding to the bill's uncertainty is an amendment that Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, has yet to bring up that would allow gay U.S. citizens to sponsor foreign spouses for green cards. Republicans in the Gang of Eight warn such a measure, if adopted, would be a deal-breaker.

Ousted IRS chief Steve Miller (right) and J. Russell George, a Treasury inspector general, take the oath before testifying on before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday.

Charles Dharapak/AP

Of all the controversies swirling around the Obama White House, the Internal Revenue Service scandal seems likeliest to have the longest shelf life.

While the Benghazi affair has long been in the news, it's never really taken off as an issue beyond the Republican base.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration's position that national security considerations justified the Justice Department's gathering of journalists' phone records in a leak investigation may be enough to remove fuel from the outrage. Voters typically give presidents a wide berth when commanders in chief invoke national security, especially since Sept. 11.

But the IRS has a relationship with Americans that's far from warm and fuzzy. Indeed, as the agency that enforces the nation's tax laws, it's the part of government Americans most love to hate.

So the revelation that some of its workers were doing something as objectionable as singling out applications for tax-exempt status from conservative groups is just one more log tossed on a raging anti-IRS bonfire.

And that's even before you get to the IRS's role as the agency vested with enforcing the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate.

That feature of Obamacare is perhaps the one most detested by conservatives. The scandal provides them with a new and possibly potent anti-Obamacare talking point.

Add to that how readily the scandal feeds the American appetite for conspiracy theories and it's easy to see how the administration may be dealing with this crisis far longer than its other current controversies.

"Talking to my clients on the Hill, one of things you're hearing is that [of all the scandals] the IRS might be the most permanent and may be the most egregious," said Jim Innocenzi, a long-time Republican communications strategist. "From a partisan perspective, it's the gift that keeps on giving ..."

Innocenzi, whose firm makes ads for Republican political candidates, said it's still too early to know how the IRS scandal will play out. But he's fairly sure it it's not going anywhere soon unless the president goes much further than he already has. For instance, replacing one bureaucrat most of the public has never heard of, fired acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller, with another bureaucrat the public has never heard of, new acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel, is not nearly enough.

But though Innocenzi thinks the IRS scandal has legs, even he isn't willing to go so far as to say that President Obama will be plagued by it until the end of his term.

If a special prosecutor were appointed, for instance, and exonerated the White House, that could go a long way to clearing the air. "If he did nothing, if it had nothing to with him, then appoint a special prosecutor and find out who did. Because they [the IRS] trampled on a lot of Americans' civil liberties." (Obama has dismissed such calls. Congress has the power to appoint special prosecutors.)

While it's surely in Republican interests to keep the IRS story going and to say it's far from running its course, Democrats obviously hope that isn't true.

"There's absolutely no evidence that anybody at the White House was pushing any buttons or pulling any levers on that stuff," said Peter Fenn, a veteran Democratic communications strategist. "There's no there there. I just don't think this is going anywhere.

"The American people want to get something done. They want to see the Congress do something. Why is it in the latest poll today today [when] they ask if you're going for a Democrat for Congress, a Republican or independent, third party is ahead? They're so mad at Congress they can't see straight. They want to pass immigration reform. They want to see real movement on the economy and jobs. This stuff [like the IRS scandal] is just another ... sideshow."

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President Obama checks to see if it's still raining as a Marine holds an umbrella for him during a joint news conference with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the White House on Thursday.

Charles Dharapak/AP

President Obama's first term was free from the kind of scandal that consumes every ounce of political oxygen in Washington. Now, in light of a trio of controversies, his supporters find themselves in the uncomfortable and unaccustomed position of having to defend some hard-to-defend events.

Democrats have offered up a range of responses. They view the issues — Benghazi, the IRS and the Justice Department snooping on The Associated Press — as separate issues that shouldn't be lumped together.

"It is shriekingly frustrating to me to learn a narrative is taking shape that utterly misses the main contours of the event now taking place," says Rick Perlstein, a liberal journalist and historian. "Three scandals or alleged scandals, all very different from one another in substance, seriousness and nature of their relationship to presidential accountability, being packaged together in a Scandal Moment."

Democrats who hope this will all blow over may have been encouraged by a Gallup poll released Thursday, which suggested that a "comparatively low" number of Americans are closely following the IRS and Benghazi stories.

But most of those surveyed said the two cases deserve further investigation. Knowing that Obama is in for weeks, if not months, of further scrutiny and criticism, progressives have offered a range of responses about what has happened and how it should be judged.

It's not exactly akin to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief, but that well-known outline is still a useful model for looking at the state of the left in this time of trouble for the Obama White House.

1. Denial

From the White House on down, Democrats believe the controversy over the terrorist attack last September on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, has been overblown.

Much of the debate, after all, has centered not on questions of security failures, but who offered edits to which draft of talking points after the fact. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has repeatedly asserted that administration critics are attempting to "politicize" the issue.

In the case of the IRS targeting Tea Party chapters and other conservative groups, the administration initially sought to deny responsibility, suggesting it was the unfettered work of low-level officials in the Cincinnati office. It has since conceded that decision-making took place at a higher level.

The Justice Department is investigating and Obama forced the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner, Steven Miller, on Wednesday. Miller told the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday that "foolish mistakes were made," although not with partisan intent.

Still, some commentators on the left have argued that the IRS was just trying to do its job in checking out applications from politically oriented organizations that were claiming to be "social welfare" groups.

Having "slogged through" the report of the Treasury Department's inspector general, blogger Brad Friedman doesn't find any evidence of the kind of "misconduct" the president himself has complained about.

"Further investigation may uncover such behavior, but if there was purposeful or criminal misconduct by anyone in the office, the IG's report doesn't seem to offer any actual evidence of it," Friedman writes.

2. Anger

There's plenty of anger — not just at Republicans for exploiting the scandals, but at the media for playing along with them.

"The right sees these contretemps as vehicles for creating an atmosphere of scandal," writes Heather Parton, who blogs under the pseudonym Digby. "And the press, caught up in the daily churn of information, fails to see the forest for the trees every time."

But there are also Democrats who are angry at the administration for its mistakes.

"I just think this has been handled so wrong," Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said Wednesday, referring to the Justice Department's broad pursuit of phone records in its hunt for the leaker who gave the AP information about a foiled terror plot.

3. Bargaining

Bargaining is the fallback position in the early stages of any scandal. If we release such-and-such cache of documents, won't that make the questions go away? How does our guy's transgression compare to what your guy did during his administration?

A key type of bargaining that takes place in the midst of scandal is the attempt to point out that there wasn't an intent to sin. Or, sometimes, that the sins under discussion are not unique.

At DailyKos, senior political writer Joan McCarter writes that liberal groups seeking tax-exempt status received the same queries from the IRS as Tea Party affiliates. "In fact, the only group to have its application denied was a liberal group," she writes. (On average, progressive groups received far faster approvals, though.)

Obama played the ultimate bargaining chip himself when he forced Miller to resign from the IRS.

"Based on my twitter feed, Washington scandal volcano does not find Steven Miller an appropriate sacrifice," tweeted Daniel Malloy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Meanwhile, some have pointed out in the AP snooping story the DOJ may have been motivated by pressure from congressional Republicans. Those lawmakers may be piling on now, but they were demanding answers about the AP's source.

And, with last week's reports of damaging emails about Benghazi turning out to be incomplete or misleading, former Obama adviser David Plouffe tweeted, "How is this not a 'scandal' with wall to wall coverage?"

4. Depression

If, as is often said, depression is anger turned inward, some Democrats are depressed.

From the president on down, most Democrats recognize that the IRS and AP situations, at least, are serious matters. Not everyone has been happy about how the administration has responded.

"His crisis-management communications team is absent without leave," Lanny Davis, formerly a top spinmeister for President Bill Clinton, told my colleague Frank James on Monday. "I've wondered if there's anybody there trying to get out in front of the facts."

The White House has since become more aggressive about releasing documents and responding to the various charges.

Some Democrats are still unhappy. MSNBC host Chris Matthews, an Obama fan, was notably very critical. On Tuesday, Matthews said Obama's "a ship with the engine off."

By Wednesday, Matthews was complaining that Obama "obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch."

5. Acceptance

Like a diver unable to find the bottom, Democrats know the president's season of scandal is nowhere near its end.

They may believe what's been revealed so far is not crippling, especially as Obama himself has not been implicated personally in any of the three controversies. Still, no one knows what the coming weeks of congressional hearings and media coverage may bring.

Greg Sargent, an online columnist for The Washington Post, suggests that the scandals will prevent Obama from engaging in an impulse many progressives consider his true flaw: his willingness to compromise with Republicans.

"Liberals who are dreading the scandal-mania that is taking hold should note that it contains a potential upside: It could make a Grand Bargain that includes cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits even less likely than it already is," Sargent writes. "That's because when scandal grips Washington, a president actually needs his core supporters more than ever to ward it off, making it harder to do anything that will alienate them."

Appearing on MSNBC Thursday, Democratic strategist James Carville sounded optimistic, describing the Benghazi and AP stories as nonstarters and suggesting that the IRS controversy would "burn itself out" in 30 days.

Given the polarities of our time, perhaps it's not surprising that some Obama supporters took greater heart from a prediction by conservative pundit Dick Morris that Obama could ultimately face impeachment.

"Dick Morris says IRS scandal could lead to Obama's impeachment," tweeted David Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones. "Which means ... it won't."

This weekend, President Obama will give a speech that very likely won't be about the controversies of the moment.

Every year, a few schools get the president of the United States as their commencement speaker. And this Sunday, at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Obama will get an opportunity to take a step back and describe the big picture.

The graduation speeches that the president gives almost seem to be his real State of the Union addresses. An official State of the Union speech reads like an annual to-do list. But in commencement speeches, Obama talks about where the country stands and where it's going.

And his assessment has changed over the past four years.

Here's what he said at Arizona State in 2009:

"We gather here tonight in times of extraordinary difficulty, for the nation and for the world. The economy remains in the midst of a historic recession, the worst we've seen since the Great Depression."

Compare that with Ohio State earlier this month:

"Where we're going should give you hope. Because while things are still hard for a lot of people, you have every reason to believe that your future is bright. You're graduating into an economy and a job market that is steadily healing."

Here's what he said at the Naval Academy in 2009:

"In an era when too few citizens answer the call to service, to community or to country, these Americans choose to serve. They did so in a time of war, knowing they might be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice."

And, in contrast, at the Air Force Academy in 2012:

"Today, you step forward into a different world. You are the first class in nine years that will graduate into a world where there are no Americans fighting in Iraq."

Since Obama took office, he has delivered 14 commencement addresses. Among them: four at military schools. Two at high schools. One community college. One historically black college. And one women's college.

Sometimes the president road-tests lines in these speeches that come up later in more high-profile venues. Remember this, from Obama's second inaugural?

"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall."

That line echoed for days, tying together historic fights for women's suffrage, civil rights and gay equality.

Turns out, he used the same line eight months earlier in a commencement speech at Barnard College:

"What young generations have done before should give you hope. Young folks who marched and mobilized and stood up and sat in, from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, didn't just do it for themselves; they did it for other people."

That speech at a women's school focused on gender equality. And when Obama visited a historically black school, Hampton University, in 2010, the commencement speech focused on African-American struggles:

"I want you to think about Ms. Dorothy Height, a black woman, in 1929, refusing to be denied her dream of a college education. Refusing to be denied her rights."

Many of these speeches are tailored for the specific group of graduates in the crowd. At Miami Dade College, where 90 percent of the students are minorities, in 2011 Obama talked about immigration :

"Whether your ancestors came here on the Mayflower or a slave ship, whether they signed in at Ellis Island or they crossed the Rio Grande — we are one people. We need one another."

While these speeches each have a unique message, there are also universal themes. The idea of unity and community runs through every one of Obama's 14 commencement addresses, including this one at Notre Dame in 2009.

"Unfortunately, finding that common ground — recognizing that our fates are tied up, as Dr. King said, in a 'single garment of destiny' — is not easy."

This is the brand of politics that Obama has always aspired to, but that he so rarely attains in Washington. A few times every spring, he gets to leave the capital and tell Americans: We're all in this together.

Obama pushes these values of community on a large scale, and a small one.

"You may look in the mirror tonight and you may see somebody who's not really sure what to do with their lives. That's what you may see, but a troubled child might look at you and see a mentor. A homebound senior citizen might see a lifeline."

Sometimes in these speeches when Obama talks about society and citizenship, he argues that government is the vehicle to implement those values. That's a core democratic idea that Obama has always promoted, including at the University of Michigan in 2010.

"When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us."

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In a way, this paean to citizenship, shared responsibility and government has become the central idea of the Obama presidency. It was a major part of his campaign as well.

These ideas are rooted in Obama's work as a community organizer. And today he hopes these ideas will energize people to move lawmakers.

"If they don't represent you the way you want or conduct themselves the way you expect, if they put special interests above your own, you've got to let them know that's not OK. And if they let you down often enough, there's a built-in day in November where you can really let them know it's not OK."

This is a project that Obama has been pushing since long before he reached the White House.

But today, with controversies shining a harsh light on federal bureaucrats from the Internal Revenue Service to the Justice Department, convincing these young Americans they should trust their government may be a harder sell than at any time in the past four years.

Heritage Action, the political activist offshoot of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has some advice for House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor: focus on the scandals plaguing the Obama administration and stay away from legislation that could "highlight major schisms" within the House Republican Conference.

In a letter this week to the leaders, Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham says "outrage over Benghazi" and the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups has "rightly focused the nation's attention squarely on the actions of the Obama administration." The letter goes on to say the House must continue holding oversight hearings, "but it would be imprudent to do anything that shifts the focus from the Obama administration to the ideological differences within the House Republican Conference."

The letter specifically mentions the Internet sales tax bill (which recently passed the Senate with lots of Republican support) and the farm bill (the Senate is working through it now and is likely to pass it soon). Needham says both bills, which House conservatives dislike, could prompt the press to write another " 'circular firing squad' article."

"Rather than scheduling such legislation for consideration, we urge you to keep the attention focused squarely on the Obama administration," Needham wrote in summation.

One might ask why Boehner and Cantor would even think about taking advice from a group that at times has worked at cross purposes with the House leadership agenda. But Boehner's spokesman didn't take the bait, choosing not to comment on the Heritage Action letter.

The Speaker has made it clear he thinks the House can and should walk and chew gum at the same time. On the investigations, he said at a news conference Thursday: "When you're trying to seek the truth, and if that is the goal to seek the truth, there is no line." That is, no line where they risk taking the investigations too far, something other Republicans are worrying about.

And Boehner said he doesn't think these investigations would get in the way of the House legislative agenda. "We've got a job here to legislate," he said at his on-camera Q&A Thursday. "We're trying to do everything to create jobs and we're going to continue to do everything we can to do that."

Next week the House is expected to consider a bill dealing with student loan interest rates and a measure that would approve construction of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Few things likely please the Obama White House as a political battle fought on social media. Above, President Obama participates in a "Twitter Town Hall" in 2011.

Charles Dharapak/AP

A simple idea: attack Obamacare tersely.

On the same day House Republicans scheduled their latest symbolic vote to repeal Obamacare, as part of their full-court press against the law they also took to Twitter to say, in three words, why they oppose the legislation.

Speaker John Boehner led the GOP tweet slaps that used the trending hashtag #ObamaCareInThreeWords: "Repeal for jobs" and "Scares small businesses" showed up on his timeline.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor attacked with a fusillade of his own tweets:

"Run by IRS," "21 Tax Hikes" and "2000 IRS Agents" were a few that surfed on the wave of public outrage at the Internal Revenue Service for allowing some employees to target for greater scrutiny conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

But while the White House may have had a tough time figuring out quick and effective responses to GOP hits on Benghazi and the IRS, a war fought in the succinct world of social media is one fought on a battleground the Obama White House knows as well as anyone in Washington.

The White House let slip the trolls of political war. Aides struck back with the tweet "It's.The. Law." and provided a photo of President Obama's signature on the Affordable Care Act. Later, they added "No lifetime limits" and "Young adults covered" among other tweets. And they invited those helped by the law to "Share your story."

So it went between partisans much of Thursday. "No gender discrimination," tweeted Stephanie Cutter, an official at Organizing for Action, the reincarnation of the Obama 2012 presidential campaign apparatus. "IRS in control" tweeted Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

Ah, good times.

Tea Party leaders and lawmakers in the House Republicans' Tea Party Caucus rallied Thursday on Capitol Hill, expressing alarm over the IRS's targeting of conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., invoked the axiom, "The power to tax is the power to destroy."

But elsewhere on Capitol Hill, some lawmakers want to extend the IRS debate to look at the heavily financed activities of existing nonprofit groups in the 2012 elections.

The agency has been under attack since Friday, when a top official admitted — after years of IRS denials — that groups using "Tea Party," "patriot" and other likely conservative names had received special scrutiny between 2010 and 2012, with long delays or no action at all. President Obama ousted the acting IRS chief and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation.

'Take On These Groups Or Else'

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Republican consultant Karl Rove and others say the IRS scrutiny was instigated by congressional Democrats. During an appearance on Fox News this week, Rove cited letters from congressional Democrats to IRS administrators.

"Maybe they were influenced by Democrats in the Congress writing them letters saying: 'Take on these groups or else you're going to face the consequences in front of us,' " Rove said.

But an inspector general's report says the extra scrutiny started with lower-level IRS employees. And, in fact, those letters from Democratic lawmakers did not deal with 501(c)(4) applicants.

What they did advocate was a crackdown on big-budget 501(c)(4)s that were already active in the 2012 campaign — groups on both sides, including one co-founded by Rove himself, Crossroads GPS.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., wrote several letters citing a dozen 501(c)(4) groups, liberal and conservative. He said anonymous donors were funneling in millions of dollars.

"They do so covered by a fig leaf that the nonprofit groups to which they donate are dedicated to quote 'social welfare' rather than partisan politics," he said on the Senate floor in July 2012. "That fiction dissolves the moment one looks at these social welfare attack ads that the IRS is so far blind to."

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers were warning the IRS to back off, and some outside groups were calling for stronger enforcement.

'Dead Wrong'

Lawyers from the groups Democracy 21 and Campaign Legal Center wrote to IRS officials more than a dozen times about conservative and liberal 501(c)(4)s. Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 says nothing ever happened at the IRS.

"They were dead wrong in going after the conservative groups. And they have been dead wrong in not taking on groups that are abusing and misusing the tax laws," Wertheimer says.

One basic argument here is that there's often no difference between TV ads from the transparent political committees called superPACs and ads produced by the secretive social welfare organizations.

For example, take these two ads attacking President Obama.

The first ad comes from Crossroads GPS, with its anonymous funders:

"He's added $4 billion in debt every day. The economy's slowing, but our debt keeps growing," it says.

The second, with almost identical voice-over and music, comes from Crossroads GPS's sidekick superPAC, American Crossroads, which discloses its donors and is not as well financed:

"He wants more spending, just like his failed stimulus. After trillions in more debt, with nothing to show for it, we can't repeat those mistakes," the narrator says.

An NPR analysis found that the big 501(c)(4)s spent more than a quarter-billion dollars trying to shape the 2012 elections.

Paul Streckfus, who edits EO Tax Journal, a newsletter covering the IRS section on exempt organizations, says the IRS's response was basically: "Can we sort of ignore this? The law isn't very clear, and we don't want to make anybody unhappy on the Hill over this."

Streckfus says the IRS probably should have made an active decision on regulating the social welfare organizations. Then Congress could react, and any unhappy 501(c)(4) groups could sue.

But now it's too late for that.

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The John Weld Peck Federal Building in Cincinnati, where many of the missteps by IRS workers who targeted conservative groups occurred.

Al Behrman/AP

Scintillating isn't how you'd describe the report issued by the Treasury inspector general's report on the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups.

It was written, after all, by government bureaucrats for government bureaucrats. Enough said.

Still, peel back the careful, cautious and colorless language and there are some eyebrow-raising tidbits in the report that give a sense of the dysfunction in the tax-exempt unit that allowed the controversial targeting to occur.

Here are 10 of them:

• The IG report was our first source without skin in the game (like IRS and White House officials) to report that agency employees said no outsiders influenced them to target conservative applicants. (Page 7)
• The IRS employees responsible for applying greater scrutiny to groups with "Tea Party" or "Patriots" in their names were evidently incorrigible. After their boss told them to cease and desist they did, temporarily. Then they went back to doing their own thing, which meant using inappropriate filters to select applicants for additional review. (Page 7)
• At one point, in an agency of 106,000 workers, just one, presumably very overwhelmed, bureaucrat had the job of reviewing applications for tax-exempt status that were selected for greater scrutiny because the information raised questions about their political activities. (Page 5, Footnote 14)
• The inspector general says "it's considering" following up its first evaluation with a deeper dive into exactly how the IRS unit it studied monitors the political activities of the "social welfare" groups it grants tax-exempt status. It wants to make sure the unit knows when such organizations cross the line to engage in too much politics. (Page 4, Footnote 12)
• Even employees in the IRS's tax-exempt unit were stupefied by the rules about which they had to make decisions. They were so confused, their bosses decided they needed hands-on training — after which an absurdly low and slow 2 percent application approval rate soared. Given the political sensitivity of this part of the IRS's work, you might have expected the training to happen sooner. The problems remain, however, according to the IG, and the guidance the workers labor under is vague at best. (Page 14)
• Some applications for tax-exempt status were, astonishingly, under review for as long as three years. What's even more remarkable is that even though the law gives applicants the right to sue the IRS if they failed to get a conclusive response from the agency within 270 days, none did, at least not during the two years of the IG's investigation. Maybe Americans aren't as litigious as they're often given credit for being. (Page 16)
• Even after the IG pointed out the error of their ways, IRS officials were, to some extent, still not seeing things as clearly as the IG thought they should. For instance, IRS officials said issues the IG raised had been resolved. The IG flatly contradicted them, saying no, they hadn't been fixed. (Opening memo)
• Some applications from groups with evidence of substantial political activity weren't forwarded to the team that had the task of giving applications extra scrutiny. Others that lacked evidence of significant political activity weren't sent to the IRS review team for further investigation. (Pages 9-10)
• IRS workers must watch a lot of TV cop dramas: They described their list of names to watch for as the "be on the lookout for" or BOLO list. (Page 6)
• When the agency asked for additional information — information the IG ultimately deemed to be irrelevant to the applications in question — the IRS would ask applicants to meet their requests within three weeks even though the IRS had essentially sat on some of the applications for more than a year. That's what New Yorkers would call chutzpah. (Page 18)
  

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The sudden eruption of second-term scandals is likely to cost President Obama his fondest dream for his presidency: the opportunity to transcend the partisan wars of Washington.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

The sudden eruption of second-term scandals in his administration will have many costs for President Obama, but surely the most grievous will be the lost opportunity to transcend the partisan wars of Washington. That aspiration was his fondest dream for his second term, much as it was for his first. Now it seems destined to be dashed once again.

Of course, there are those who believe Barack Obama never intended to be anything but a conquering hero of the left. The most intractable of his detractors see the recent revelations about the IRS and certain conservative groups as caught-red-handed confirmation of a White House plot to destroy its opponents. That impression of abused power is only reinforced by news of the Justice Department's swooping down in secret on the telephone records of The Associated Press.

Attorney General Eric Holder has said that his department swept up the AP records last year in investigating "a very grave leak" related to national security. That is a justification Americans have heard often enough to inspire skepticism. Holder was not able to describe the security breach in question, so we are left to take its gravity on faith. And there's precious little of that in Washington, even in the best of times.

Holder has also joined the dog pile on the IRS, which has admitted it sent extra-onerous questionnaires to groups starting in 2011 if they had "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their names. While that may have begun as a way for IRS bureaucrats to prioritize within a mountain of new applications for tax exemption, it smacks of using the power to tax to persecute.

Obama's Vision

These episodes recall the excesses of previous administrations, back to Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, two strong presidents whose landslide victories propelled them to the heights of political power. Subsequent overreach brought each to earth with such force that the craters are still visible in the American political landscape.

Obama's aspirations were different. He never thought he could win 40 states or 60 percent of the popular vote. He knew he was struggling for just enough votes to win. But beyond Election Day, he was no less ambitious than his predecessors in the breadth and loft of his program. He set out to remake the health care and immigration systems, as well as to redefine financial regulation and the tax code and the nation's balance of energy and environment. And beyond these goals, he wanted to make a clear majority of Americans stakeholders in his program.

By so doing, he believed, he could build a coalition of the middle around solutions more practical than ideological. Were he able to do all that, he would be remembered as more than the champion of one party and the victor in two presidential elections. He would be a president who moved the nation, as a nation, in a certain direction. That has been the judgment of history on FDR and Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan — all partisan warriors in their rise to power who are widely revered in retrospect.

Was it hubris that made Obama hope for a place in such company? His first term began with tremendous momentum. Not only was his election itself historic, but the banking crisis of 2008-2009 forced the warring parties in Congress to act in concert — if only for a season. Early on, the new president and his inner circle thought they could negotiate on health care and other issues on a bipartisan basis. They saw a Republican Party chastened by the election of 2008 and ready to deal. They saw the prospect of a new consensus.

Opposition To President

But within the first few months of that term, a more virulent form of opposition developed within conservative ranks. It manifested itself in protest marches, angry town hall meetings and primary challenges to mainstream Republican officeholders. Call it the Tea Party or the anti-Obama movement or just the resurgence of traditional attitudes. By any name, it dominated the elections of 2010, especially at the state level. The enactments of 2009 and 2010 gave way to the fiscal wars and confrontations of the past 24 months.

The Obama team endured all that and kept its focus on November 2012. Re-elected, the president hoped his return to the Oval Office might occasion "a fever break" in Washington. There could be a sense of capitulation, a season of acceptance. Given the distinct demographic evidence from Election Day, Republicans would want to appeal to a younger, more diverse electorate.

But it hasn't happened that way. Set aside the urgings of one report offered up by the Republican National Committee in March, the standard posture of the GOP has been anything but conciliatory. From the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling to gun control and the immigration laws, the opposition party has been as unified and as oppositional as ever.

Even before the IRS and AP stories burst into view, the Republican focus was on the Benghazi tragedy of last September. And this week, the House will have yet another vote to repeal Obamacare, the 37th such attempt to repeal the law in whole or in part. In the Senate, Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee is incensed that the secretary of health and human services is coordinating efforts with private groups to promote participation in the new health care law.

We can now be sure that the capital's pre-existing condition of partisanship will worsen with complications from multiple investigations, probes and Hill hearings as far as the eye can see. Whatever else that means, it means that the President Obama we have will not be the President Obama he wanted to become.

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The controversies facing his administration could be creating a stiff headwind for President Obama's second-term agenda.

Jack Plunkett/AP

This was the critical moment, the brief time between his inaugural and when the nation's collective focus turns to whom his successor will be, when President Obama had to make real progress on his second-term agenda and thus forge his legacy.

Instead, the president finds his administration, the public, Congress and the news media distracted by controversies over Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups and a leak investigation in which the Justice Department secretly obtained months of phone records of Associated Press journalists.

The result? Precious time White House officials and other Democrats hoped to spend on pushing the president's goals is instead being spent on damage control, and with dubious effect at that.

It's certainly too early to declare that the Obama presidency is, for all intents, over. But the cluster of controversies puts the president's ambitious second-term agenda at risk, says long-time Washington watcher James Thurber, director of American University's Center for Presidential and Congressional Studies.

"He really only has about five months to deal with some major issues like gun control, but also, of course, immigration and the grand bargain," said Thurber, referring to a deficit-reduction deal with Republicans to reduce spending and increase tax revenues.

"In terms of the long-term, historical evaluation of this presidency, they're probably not going to be that important," Thurber said of the controversies.

"But certainly, given the way he has to build momentum for domestic issues, he has to reframe and it's very hard to reframe while he's being hammered over these two issues." (I talked with Thurber before news came late Monday of the Justice Department's AP probe.)

Given his sense, based on available information, that the IRS's targeting of conservative groups for higher scrutiny for tax-exemption purposes, "wasn't ordered by the White House, that there wasn't a Richard Nixon-style enemies list," Thurber said the controversies will likely fade and be supplanted by larger policy questions, like what to do about Syria.

But all the controversies taken together "takes what little central core political authority away from him and he has to pursue his policies in other ways, like through the regulatory process, executive orders and a variety of other things," Thurber said.

The greatest danger now, he said, comes in the form of the drag the controversies could create to stop major legislative efforts dead in their tracks.

"The immediate problem may be with immigration. It's so close, anything could upset it," Thurber said. "It could take the political oxygen out of the air for the survival of immigration. ... They'll have to do it between now and August or it's going to be very hard to get one through. This slows it down."

Legislation, especially of the controversial kind, requires a head of steam to overcome opposition. The confluence of controversies, "certainly slows things down. And there needs to be a certain amount of momentum and speed on that or we will not have an immigration bill," Thurber said.

The best hope the president has to save immigration and the rest of his agenda from stall speed is to get out the truth about the controversies and fast. That is the hard-earned lessons of scandals that harmed past presidencies from Nixon to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton.

"You just have to get to the basis of it quickly and reveal it and move on," Thurber said. "Yes, it hurts but it will go away. Unless he lies."

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President Obama listens as British Prime Minister David Cameron speaks during their joint news conference Monday.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Lanny J. Davis, a former special counsel for President Clinton, is a man who knows something about managing a White House crisis. And he isn't exactly impressed by how President Obama's aides have handled the fallout from numerous crises, from Solyndra to Benghazi and now with the Internal Revenue Service controversy.

"Honestly, I voted for Obama. I support his policies," said Davis, who was a special counsel during Clinton's second term and has his own Washington firm that, among other things, handles messaging when things fly apart for his clients.

"His crisis-management communications team is absent without leave. Ever since we lost the message on health care, I've wondered if there's anybody there trying to get out in front on the facts. And I haven't seen any evidence" of it, he said.

For Davis, whose latest book is Crisis Tales: Five Rules for Coping with Crises in Business, Politics, and Life, the Obama administration has fallen into a predictable pattern. It goes into a defensive crouch in which its first instinct appears to be minimizing any political damage.

Most White Houses do this to a greater or lesser degree. But Obama may have created his own problems by setting higher expectations early on by claiming his would be the most transparent administration ever.

Only after the moment has passed where a more proactive approach might have saved the day does the ever-cautious Obama White House provide additional information, according to Davis.

Take the growing controversy over the IRS's targeting of conservative social-welfare organizations.

"This is very, very serious," said Davis, who views it as distinct from the Benghazi fallout, which he believes is "Washington politics at its worst."

The IRS story, he said, by contrast goes to the heart of government abuse of power.

"The president of the United States should hold a press conference and commit to a full 100 percent investigation in concert with the Republican leadership of the House and say, 'I want to have on my desk the list of anybody who recommended doing this. In the government, in the White House, or anywhere else.' "

Obama, during a joint Monday news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, said it would be "outrageous" if the IRS did what it's accused of.

That description, said Davis, is already "one day too late" and isn't the full-throated response he would expect to see after the IRS revelation.

Davis doesn't limit his disappointment to just the president. He faults other top Democrats, namely Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, for not acting with more assertively.

"The Democrats have to own this. They are mishandling this," Davis said. "They should get out in front by denouncing this behavior, calling for a full investigation, cooperating with the Republicans so they don't own the issue. It's called pre-emption. And the best crisis management advice is called doing the right thing."

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Eric Wilson, head of the Kentucky 9/12 Project, portrays a representative of the tyrannical kingdom as he talks to children on the first night of Vacation Liberty School at a church in Georgetown, Ky., in 2010.

Ed Reinke/AP

What would you do if the IRS wanted to see your interactions on social media?

At least one Tea Party group in Ohio received just such a request. As part of a broad inquiry for information about the group's activities after it had applied for tax-exempt status, the IRS wanted details about how the Ohio Liberty Coalition promotes or publicizes itself on social media such as Facebook.

And that's not all the IRS wanted to know. Among other things, Tea Party groups say they were asked for printed copies of every Web page, Facebook status update and tweet they'd published; complete lists of attendees of all their meetings; and lists of relatives of board members.

The former head of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, Tom Zawistowski, says he recognized that these types of requests were "onerous, invasive and politically motivated." He held conference calls addressing the matter last year with other Tea Party leaders around the country.

It turned out that dozens of other groups — 298, according to the Washington Post — were undergoing similar scrutiny.

The IRS also wanted copies of any news coverage the groups had received, as well as the names of all speakers at meetings and narrative accounts of those meetings. Oh — plus, transcripts of speeches and all handouts.

"There were 88 inquiries in this letter," says Eric Wilson, co-chairman of the Kentucky 9/12 Project. "We knew immediately it was overreaching."

Addressing that many questions, Wilson says, cost thousands of dollars and required countless hours of manpower.

He found this out the hard way. He refused to comply with the IRS's request, but the American Center for Law and Justice, which represented the targeted groups on a pro bono basis, wanted to see the Facebook printouts and all the rest to make sure they truly were not needed to file for tax-exempt status.

"It was 5,000 pages," Wilson says. "There was weeks of work from multiple people with our organization on a volunteer basis."

On April 1, the Kentucky 9/12 Project received a letter from the IRS granting the group 501(c)(4) status. The one-paragraph document offered no explanation for the 2 1/2-year delay in granting tax-exempt status, Wilson says.

That letter also did not include an apology, but the IRS has since offered a blanket apology for inappropriately scrutinizing applicants with conservative leanings.

"We are not accepting the apology of the IRS and we do expect a full investigation," says Yvonne Donnelly, national chair of the 9/12 Project.

Zawistowski notes that he went public with his complaints about the IRS targeting more than a year ago, writing a letter that drew some attention in the conservative media.

He's disappointed that the issue has taken this long to receive broader attention.

"The same information was out a year ago, yet people were not as outraged as they should have been," he says.

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An Internal Revenue Service official apologized for workers who targeted certain conservative groups. But that did little to defuse the situation.

Susan Walsh/AP

Benghazi move over, make room for IRS-gate.

As if the Obama administration's conservative critics didn't have enough fodder with last year's attacks on a U.S. Consulate that killed four Americans, now comes Friday's startling revelation that Internal Revenue Service workers between 2010 and 2012 singled out groups with "Tea Party" and "Patriots" in their name for extra scrutiny of their applications for tax-exempt status.

While the IRS news was a surprise, the political firestorm it triggered was entirely predictable: Up until Friday, agency officials had publicly denied previous allegations that it had done the very thing IRS official Lois Lerner admitted.

In comments she made at a Washington conference of tax lawyers, Lerner added that IRS workers in Cincinnati had unintentionally given deeper examination to filings from groups with names indicating Tea Party linkage. In some instances, the workers asked for donor lists, which violated laws.

"They didn't do this because there was any political bias going on," said Lerner, who described the workers as "low level." Instead the workers were trying to streamline their work. They could have avoided the whole controversy by classifying the filings as "advocacy" cases, she explained, but they weren't sensitive to the political dynamics.

"It was just wrong," she said. "We would like to apologize for that. It was not intentional. As soon as we found out what was going on we took steps to make it better and I don't expect those things to recur."

The admission had a pre-emptive feel to it since an inspector general's report on the matter is expected soon.

The calls for congressional investigations came quickly, giving every indication that this latest headache for the Obama administration won't end nearly as swiftly as it arrived.

"The IRS cannot target or intimidate any individual or organization based on their political beliefs. The House will investigate this matter," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia.

Only days after the House Oversight Committee he is chairman of held a hearing on the Benghazi attack, Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said: "The fact that Americans were targeted by the IRS because of their political beliefs is unconscionable. The committee will aggressively follow up on the IG report and hold responsible officials accountable for this political retaliation."

Meanwhile, Rep. Charles Boustany, a Louisiana Republican who is the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and has been querying the IRS about the the extra reviews given to applications from conservative groups, sent the agency a request for more details about the situation, providing a taste of the examination the administration faces in the weeks and months to come.

The timing could hardly have been worse, with Benghazi back in the headlines. Within moments of the news, conservatives took to social media with references to the tax agency — which is charged with enforcing the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate — as "Obama's IRS."

White House press secretary Jay Carney reminded reporters at Friday's briefing that the IRS doesn't take its marching orders from the White House.

"The IRS, as you know, is an independent enforcement agency with only two political appointees," Carney said. "The fact of the matter [is that] what we know about this is of concern. And we certainly find the actions taken, as reported, to be inappropriate.

"And we would fully expect the investigation to be thorough and for corrections to be made in a case like this," Carney said. "And I believe the IRS has addressed that and has taken some action. And there's an investigation ongoing. But it certainly does seem to be, based on what we've seen, to be inappropriate action that we would want to see thoroughly investigated."

That was unlikely to mollify many of the administration's most ardent conservative critics.

John Feehery, a former top Republican House aide and a communications and political strategist, predicted that besides the congressional hearings, there would be a call for a special prosecutor.

"They will go after the IRS. The IRS is not very popular anyway, especially with congressional Republicans."

What's more, "there's going be an immediate effort to link Obama to this, bringing back thoughts of Richard Nixon politicizing the IRS," Feehery said. Nixon, of course, tried to get the IRS to conduct tax audits of those on his political "enemies' list."

"I'm assuming that Obama wouldn't be so stupid to tell the IRS to do that. But that's how it's going to be seen," Feehery said. "This will get the conspiracy theorists lathered up pretty well."

Feehery was on to something. TheTeaParty.net issued a statement that included the following:

"What would Democrats have done if the Nixon administration ordered the IRS to actively target the National Organization of Women or the American Civil Liberties Union? Nixon had his own enemies list and resigned. These activities are eerily similar, and yet Obama remains in office even in light of Fast and Furious, the Benghazi tragedy, and now the active targeting of his political opposition.

Bruce Hopkins, a lawyer and expert on tax-exempt groups, said you might indeed have to return to the Nixon era to find an instance that became public knowledge of the president's political foes having real reasons be concerned about the IRS. He was stunned when he learned what the IRS workers in Cincinnati had done.

"I've been hearing rumors that the IRS was targeting Tea Party groups but, frankly, I had trouble believing it because I just didn't think in this day and age that that kind of thing would take place," Hopkins said. "And yet apparently it has."

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A Pentagon survey released this week estimated that 26,000 people in the military were sexually assaulted last year. Women on the Senate and House Armed Services committees are leveraging their clout in response to the problem.

Jason Reed /Reuters/Landov

Other bipartisan efforts on Capitol Hill may be collapsing around them, but a cadre of Democratic and Republican women serving on the Senate and House Armed Services committees are leveraging their historic clout to respond together to the sexual assault crisis engulfing the U.S. military.

In a Thursday gathering notable not just for its composition but for what it signaled about the direction of two of the oldest and most powerful panels in Congress, 16 legislators from both parties — just two of them men — sat in the White House with top presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett to talk about the path forward on the issue.

Four other top women in the Obama administration also attended. They were Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama's chief of staff; Kathryn Ruemmler, counsel to the president; Liz Sherwood-Randall, White House coordinator for Defense Policy, National Security Staff; and Lynn Rosenthal, White House adviser on violence against women.

One Republican participant, speaking on background, characterized the meeting, held in the Roosevelt Room just across from the Oval Office, as a "huge sign that President Obama has taken a zero-tolerance approach to the crisis."

Those in attendance included Democratic Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana.

"The response," one participant said of the sexual assault crisis, "is going to be led by a brigade of women from across political boundaries.

"It was amazing to be at that table," she said. "We're passionate about this, and women are going to get it done."

Other participants characterized the meeting as an open discussion that focused on addressing two issues — creating a "safety zone" for the reporting of sexual assault so those affected won't fear retribution, and addressing the military's system of prosecuting allegations of rape and other sexual assaults.

Much of the current heat around the issue was generated by a Pentagon survey released this week that estimated that 26,000 people in the military were sexually assaulted last year.

The issue, of course, is as old as the military itself, but the record number of women serving on Congress' armed services committees — seven on the Senate panel, a dozen on the House committee — has given heft and urgency to the response.

Gillibrand, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, plans to introduce legislation next week that would shift control of prosecutorial decisions from military commanders to military prosecutors. Top military brass have already begun pushing back on the proposal.

Her bill would also prevent commanders from changing — either reversing or dismissing — verdicts in sexual assault cases.

There has already been a slew of legislation sponsored by female members of Congress, including:

— a House bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier of California and Republican Rep. Joe Heck of Nevada, that would amend the Uniform Code of Military Justice to prohibit sexual acts and sexual contact between military instructors including drill instructors and recruiting commanders and their trainees;

— a Senate bill, co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a member of the Judiciary Committee, and Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, that among its aims would require commanding offers who receive a report of a sexual assault to act on it within 24 hours and would prohibit convicted sexual offenders from enlisting or being commissioned in the armed forces;

— a Senate bill, co-sponsored by Ayotte and Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, that would create a special counsel for victims of sexual assault committed by a member of the armed forces;

— a House bill, co-sponsored by Walorski and Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez of California, that would require an investigation of allegations of "retaliatory personnel actions" taken against military personnel who have made a report of sexual assault.