It was announced last summer that because the federal government could not legally recongnize same-sex marriages, same-sex couples would go uncounted. But last week, the new administration of President Barack Obama announced that DOMA did not prohibit information gathering, and thus, the couples would be included in the survey.

From the Associated Press:

One issue is that some same-sex couples in civil unions or domestic partnerships already identified themselves as husbands or wives, both in the 2000 census and in the annual American Community Survey that the bureau produces each year. So the bureau needs to figure out a way either to separate those couples from legally married couples in the next census, or to create a new designation to capture both groups. …

… Currently, if two people of the same gender in one household check “husband,” the data is rejected by the tabulation software for the American Community Survey and not included in the published information.

Since the last Census in 2000, Iowa, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire have legalized same-sex marriage.

Specter’s switch would leave a vacancy in the Ranking Member position on the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Grassley, currently serving the last two years of his term as Ranking Member on the Finance Committee, was next in line for the Judiciary slot, but he would have had to resign the Finance leadership slot this year to get it.

With President Barack Obama’s health care reform proposals being run through the Finance Committee, its Ranking Member position had become the hottest ticket in town.  (Of course, with Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s impending resignation, the Judiciary Committee was looking good, too.)  If Grassley didn’t resign and take the Judiciary slot, observers said, another Republican would have filled it, and Iowa’s senior senator would not have had a crack at it until 2014.

So Grassley had to make his decision: either keep Finance and give up Judiciary, or take Judiciary and give up the position of GOP point-person on health care.  In the end, he figured out a way to get both.

In a deal announced today, U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) will take the Ranking Member slot on Judiciary for only two years, at which point Grassley will take over for him.  The Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill reports:

Sessions and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reached the deal that will allow the Alabama Republican to take over for Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), whose departure from the GOP last week left the committee without a ranking member.

Under terms of the deal, Sessions will serve as ranking member until the 112th Congress, when he will take over the ranking member post on the Senate Budget Committee. Current Budget Committee ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) is retiring at the end of the 111th Congress.

Grassley, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, will then become ranking member on the Judiciary Committee.

Last week, Grassley had enlisted the help of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in positioning himself for the top slot on the committee. Under the deal floated then, Hatch would have taken over Judiciary for the remainder of the 111th, with Grassley taking the helm once his tenure on Finance expired.

The seven Republicans who remain on the Judiciary Committee after Specter’s departure will meet to vote on Sessions’s ascension early this week. Once they do, the decision goes to the full Republican Conference, which usually ratifies decisions the committee makes. Sources could not recall a ranking member vote made by a committee that was not, in the end, ratified by the full conference.

Earlier: Grassley hopes to have committee cake, eat it too

Update: As a commenter pointed out, and as I should have noted, Grassley faces a campaign for reelection in 2010.  In the somewhat unlikely event that he loses, this plan will be for naught.

After 20 years of collaborative efforts to procure funding for a new readiness center for Iowa National Guard troops, members of Iowa’s Democratic delegation, Sen Tom Harkin and Rep. Dave Loebsack, announced the center’s groundbreaking this summer, thanks to the procurement of $13 million in federal funds.

Sen. Harkin (right) and Rep. Loebsack (middle) talk with members from the 109th Medical Battalion

Rep. Loebsack addresses 109th Guard members while standing next to picture of proposed readiness center

The federal funds were the final notch in the funding scheme, for the state of Iowa had already earmarked $5 million in matching funds in 2003 and 2004, and the Iowa Legislature approved appropriations each year since then, Adjunct Gen. Ron Dardis said. “This journey truly has been a partnership,” Dardis said. “In addition to the federal and state funds, we couldn’t have done this without the land swap with Johnson County in 2001 and the City of Iowa City providing sewer and water capabilities.”

The new 80,000-square-foot facility will be located on approximately 25 acres, providing an assembly hall, kitchen, classrooms, and administrative and recruiting space. It will include parking for personal and military vehicles. The project has been the Guard’s top priority for the past three years and is expected to be completed by the summer of 2010.

Harkin, a Navy veteran who served during the Vietnam War, addressed some of the current readiness concerns that face Iowa’s citizen soldiers. “As you all know very well, this is a new era for the Guard. You are shouldering a major share of the combat burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Harkin said. “Many Guard members are on their third or fourth deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it speaks volumes that four times as many Guard members have been killed in Iraq than there were in the entire war in Vietnam — my war.”

“Like you, during all my years of training in the military, there was one thing that was always drilled into my head: Never leave a buddy behind,” Harkin told Guard members. “That not only applies to the battlefield but to the home front as well. We owe you the best facilities and equipment, and on that score, we have been falling woefully short. In my opinion, we have been leaving many of our guard members behind. The good news, however, is that we are not in denial.”

“What I am insistent on is that we can’t have the same arguments we had in the 1990s,” Obama said. “We’ve got to deal with climate change. We’ve got to deal with energy independence. We’ve got to deal with war. We’ve got to deal with revamping our education system and our health-care system.”

In an interview with Iowa Independent, the Carroll Daily Times Herald and La Prensa, a western Iowa Spanish-language newspaper, Obama, an Illinois Democrat seeking the presidency, responded to a question about a recent Atlantic monthly story in which writer Andrew Sullivan suggests front-runners Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani would fill traditional roles in a divisive culture war that has raged since Vietnam.  “She and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war,” Sullivan wrote, “To their respective sides, they are war heroes.”

Asked specifically about the quote, Obama said, “I do think because I’m a new face on the scene that I have an easier time of getting people to work together and listen to each other in ways that I think some of these other folks don’t.”

Obama added, “Washington has been caught up in gridlock for a long time. The country has moved past many of these arguments.”

He said people aren’t voting against him based on “whether I inhaled 30 years ago.”

“They just want some straight answers,” Obama said. In a speech in Audubon, Obama acknowledged that he had tried marijuana as a youth — and that he did inhale.

In the interview, Obama reiterated his differences with Clinton on the issue of whether to remove the $97,500 cap on income subject to the payroll tax that funds Social Security. Obama favors taxing earnings greater than that to shore up the system, while Clinton said such a move amounts to a tax increase that could affect the middle class. The issue emerged in the last Democratic debate and when asked if one difference between himself and Hillary Clinton is that she thinks $97,000 is middle-class money and he thinks it’s a lot of money, Obama said, “apparently.”

“Right now, 94 percent of Americans are paying payroll on 100 percent of their income,” Obama said. “But you have very wealthy people, people in the top 5, 6 percent, who aren’t. And top 1 percent who aren’t.”

INDIANOLA – Hillary pulled out the best line of the day.

Obama’s team orchestrated some powerhouse optics.

Edwards did that lawyer-leaping-from-the-John-Grisham-novel-to-face-the-forces-of capitalism’s-excesses-for-those-Americans-bogged-in-the-backwater thing,

The candidates had their moments, some big ones at that.

But the win at U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin’s Steak Fry, the trophy on this day of the Emmys, goes to the State of Iowa. A record number of Iowans for this event, more than 12,000 by Harkin staffers’ official count, poured into the balloon fields in this Warren County town south of Des Moines, just weeks before harvest and four months until candidates learn if their own toils and tending yield a bump for New Hampshire or South Carolina or Nevada in the chase for the White House.

“Whoever comes out of Iowa is going to get one heck of a boost,” Harkin told members of the media before the formal speeches.

Six Democratic presidential candidates appeared before a boisterous crowd on a hay-bail lined stage with a serene countryside, the solitude of a Sunday sun tea on the porch only a light breeze away and stretching as far as the eye could strain.

As Edward R. Murrow may have said: This is Iowa.

Yes it is. And love him or hate him, you have to give it to Harkin for showcasing the state in a genuine manner like this.

At Sunday’s steak fry – the event Harkin used to launch his own presidential candidacy in 1991 with clever attacks on Bush – the activists came to eat the read meat and digest it by getting an ear full of some. Like in 1991, it was a Bush, this one hemorrhaging like a pi

Again and again, (Florida) party officials presented themselves as victims rather than protagonists, and asked the party to grant them relief because of that.

“We’re asking you for mercy, not judgment,” Jon Ausman, a Democratic leader, told the committee.

But James Roosevelt Jr., the rules committee’s co-chairman, said he was not convinced that Florida Democrats had done all they could do. He said it was “clear that the Republicans were the moving force behind the selection of a date that violated both the Republican and the Democratic rules, but that the efforts to oppose that were form over substance.”

Or, the DNC rules committee saw that the Florida Democrats’ “efforts” to get the GOP legislature to move back to a later date were just so much please don’t throw us in the briar patch.Florida fought hard, says the Miami Herald:

Party leaders and members of Congress dispatched indignant e-mails to voters, staged conference calls with reporters and even threatened to take (DNC chair Howard) Dean to court.

They blamed the Republicans who control the Florida Legislature and invoked the biggest bogeyman of all: the 2000 presidential recount.

The Republicans, who run Florida, tend to let states do what they want in the nomination process, and they’re unlikely to move from Jan. 29.  So the Florida Democrats can capitulate — hold the Jan. 29 primary but make it a beauty contest, then have a caucus or party-run primary on Feb. 5 or later for delegate selection.  Or they can choose defiance and fight, either in court over voting rights issues (playing that 2000 card again) or at the convention.

Kos, who is in the running with Michigan Sen. Carl Levin for the title of Biggest Iowa Caucus Hater, urges defiance:

Does anyone really think that Democrats will disenfranchise the delegates of a large swing state, whether it’s Florida or Michigan?

The DNC is powerless. All it has is bluster. And as soon as we have a nominee, the first thing that person will do is rescind any such decision.

This isn’t even close to done yet.  The main thing we’ve learned from Saturday is that the DNC is going to stand up for its calendar.  So the standoff continues.

Back home, The Register notes: “Iowa legislative leaders said Friday they have discussed with Gov. Chet Culver convening the Legislature for a special session to change state law concerning Iowa’s presidential caucuses.”  That eight days before everyone else law is a bit of a problem now that New Hampshire looks likely for Jan. 8.  Didn’t anyone see this was coming during the session?  Or even think “you know, better safe than sorry?”  New Hampshire’s legislature did, and they updated their legislation to give their secretary of state even wider authority to move their election date.

A couple other interesting angles: