Former Clinton White House aide and Arizona prosecutor Andrei Cherny announced his run for Congress in Arizona’s 9th Congressional District. I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Andrei on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you live in Arizona get involved here.

In related news on Arizona and the House, “Ron Barber, an aide to former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) who was wounded in the shooting spree that also injured Giffords, will run to replace her in the House.” Barber announced today he would run in the special election for Giffords seat, and said that she had asked him to run.

Senator John Kerry tonight released a statement following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address:

“If Members of Congress are going to be honest about it, there was a lot of common sense and even more common ground in tonight’s address. We shouldn’t have to wait for another year or another election to act like it. Tax reform, energy security, infrastructure, and jobs matter to all of us and we’re so much closer on these issues than the shrillness of our politics pretends we are. We ought to prove peoples’ suspicions wrong and prove that Congress can actually get something done even in an election year. Dysfunction isn’t defensible.”

The full text of President Obama’s State of the Union is available here.

Senator Kerry was seen earlier today at an event at the White House, for the Boston Bruins,  sporting a couple of black eyes from a hockey game accident. Get well soon JK…

The failure this week of the so-called congressional supercommittee to agree on a package to reduce the federal budget deficit comes down not only to Republican intransigence, but really to that of just one conservative in particular, a man referred to as the “13th member” of the committee.

Specifically, many on both sides — including Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a prominent member of the supercommittee — called out Grover Norquist, the extremely powerful anti-tax activist in Washington, for his role in keeping Republicans from agreeing to any new taxes.

Norquist wields much of his power due to the anti-tax pledge signed by most Republicans in Congress, and his ability to enforce that oath by working to defeat any who renege.  All six of the GOP members of the supercommittee had signed on to the Norquist pledge.

Perhaps this doomed the supercommittee from the start, given that Norquist had blessed the Republican supercommittee members this summer.

The supercommittee was supposed to recommend more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years to be considered by Congress on a fast-track basis. The panel, known formally as the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, bogged down mostly on partisan lines, however.

Indeed, after the co-chairs of the bipartisan supercommittee announced that the panel would not be agreeing to a deal, the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined, “Thank You, Grover Norquist.”

“Democrats on the Committee made clear everything was on the table. Our offers were balanced. We walked the line of shared sacrifice, however difficult, and we proposed painful choices for programs we care about deeply,” says Kerry, who reportedly tried until the very end to get the supercomittee to forge a compromise. “However, we simply could not overcome the Republican insistence on making tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans permanent. We would not give another $550 billion tax cut to the wealthiest. Shifting the tax burden to the middle class was not the way to reduce the deficit. This was simply doctrine for some of our Republican colleagues, even as many worked very hard in good faith to find a better way forward.

“I believe it would have been unconscionable to ask middle class Americans to finance more tax cuts for the wealthy while seniors on fixed incomes paid the price,” Kerry adds. “People need to remember: The Committee was created to cut the deficit not to cut taxes for the wealthiest, the exact tax policies that didn’t create jobs and gave us deficits in the first place. The bottom line is that no Super Committee can succeed with Grover Norquist as its 13th member.”

YOU CAN WATCH A VIDEO PRODUCED BY SENATE DEMOCRATS ABOUT NORQUIST’S INFLUENCE HERE:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.