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Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, has written a letter to the speaker, John A. Boehner, requesting an estimate of the cost of defending cases concerning the Defense of Marriage Act, and suggested that to do so will be too costly to taxpayers.

Mr. Boehner, along with his Republican colleagues on the House leadership team, directed the House general counsel to initiate a legal defense of the statute following President Obama’s decision to stop doing so because he concluded that the law, which bans the federal recognition of same-sex marriage, was unconstitutional. The administration would still enforce the 1996 statute, but the Justice Department will no longer have a role in defending the roughly 10 cases now before the courts.

The House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (known by the unfortunate acronym BLAG), on which leaders of both parties in the House sit, voted 3-2 along party lines to initiate the defense of the act last week.

In her letter sent to Mr. Boehner on Friday Ms. Pelosi said: “The resolution passed by the BLAG also directs the House General Counsel to hire private lawyers rather than utilize his own office to represent the House. The General Counsel indicated that he lacked the personnel and the budget to absorb those substantial litigation duties. It is important that the House receive an estimate of the cost to taxpayers for engaging private lawyers to intervene in the pending DOMA cases. It is also important that the House know whether the BLAG, the General Counsel, or a Committee of the House have the responsibility to monitor the actions of the outside lawyers and their fees.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 12, 2011

An earlier version of this post misstated the chamber of Congress in which Nancy Pelosi is the Democratic leader. It is the House, not the Senate.

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Office of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, via Associated Press Gabrielle Giffords in March of last year. Close friends in Washington are taking steps to ensure the political standing of the Arizona congresswoman, who faces re-election in 2012.

As Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona continues to make progress toward recovery from a gunshot wound to the head, an uncomfortable question is beginning to seep into the political conversation in Arizona and Washington.

What does the future hold?

Ms. Giffords was just beginning her third term in the House when she was was shot on Jan. 8 during a meet-and-greet event in her district. She remains in a Houston area rehabilitation facility as she works to recover, a process that, in spite of reports of her early progress, could be slow and difficult.

For weeks, there has been nearly no talk about her political future as members from both parties merely said they expect her to return to Washington whenever she is healthy enough to do so.

Now some of her closest friends in Washington are beginning to take steps to ensure that Ms. Giffords is politically strong as well. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York are hosting a fund-raiser for Ms. Giffords next month. The money could be used for Ms. Giffords to mount a re-election bid in 2012.

“We want to make sure that when she does come back, she’s not starting from scratch,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz said in an interview Wednesday night. She said the fund-raiser would help Ms. Giffords be in the
“strongest possible position to run for re-election.”

And friends are also acknowledging a different possibility, prompted in part by the abrupt announcement last week that Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, a Republican, would not seek re-election in 2012. Those close to Ms. Giffords said she had begun to talk about the possibility of running for the Senate before she was shot.

“It’s something that she talked about, but not something that she talked about in any great detail,” Ms. Wasserman Schultz said. “When she does come back, she will go through the same process that everyone who considers running for higher office does.”

The Arizona Democratic Party chairman, Andrei Cherny, told The Washington Post that “it goes without saying that even before the attack, she was at the top of everyone’s list.”

It is far too early in Ms. Giffords’s recovery to have serious conversations about a statewide candidacy, Ms. Wasserman Schultz said. And she stressed that before the shooting, the congresswoman from Arizona was focused primarily on representing her district and winning re-election in November 2012.

But even a mention that Ms. Giffords had been interested in running for the Senate has consequences for the Democratic Party in Arizona, and nationally, as the race to replace Mr. Kyl takes shape.

Mr. Kyl’s departure offers Democrats a rare opportunity to pick up a seat in a state where voting behavior during presidential races has been trending in their favor. Senator John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, won his own state that year, and won re-election to the Senate in November. But senior Democratic officials have said they believe the rapid growth in the state’s Hispanic population is making it friendlier territory for them.

However, other potential candidates, like Janet Napolitano, the Department of Homeland Security secretary and the state’s former governor, are all but frozen out of a public conversation about a possible run for now. And state Democratic Party officials are understandably wary of doing anything that might be interpreted as offensive to Ms. Giffords.

The dynamics are different on the Republican side, where Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona has already announced he will run for Mr. Kyl’s seat. Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who gained national fame for his hard-line stance against illegal immigration, is reported to be actively considering a run as well.

What remains unknown is how long Democrats can wait for Ms. Giffords to improve. The election is almost two years away, but a competitive Senate contest will be very costly, and any contender will have plenty of campaigning to do.

There are precedents in other states that could help guide the Democratic Party as it carefully navigates the delicate issues of Ms. Giffords’s recovery and the party’s interests.

In South Dakota, for example, the state’s senior senator, Tim Johnson, had bleeding in the brain in December 2006 and underwent emergency surgery. He remained in a rehabilitation hospital for months and returned to the Senate for the first time nearly a year later, in September 2007.

Similarly with Ms. Giffords, colleagues helped raise money for Mr. Johnson while he was recuperating. And in 2008, he won another six-year term in the Senate.

Ms. Wasserman Schultz said that the fund-raiser for Ms. Giffords would be a reception that will take place in Washington. She said there is “no specific ask” in terms of the amount of money donors might contribute.

“We are encouraging people to come and join us and celebrate Gabby and make whatever contributions they are comfortable making,” she said.

Ms. Giffords had $285,000 cash on hand in her campaign account at the end of 2010, according to Ms. Wasserman Schultz.

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Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Sarah Palin spoke to the Long Island Association in Woodbury on Thursday.

WOODBURY, N.Y. — Sarah Palin urged Congressional Republicans on Thursday to stand against raising the nation’s debt ceiling when the issue is debated this spring, declaring, “It doesn’t necessarily have to result in a government shutdown.”

Ms. Palin said she believed that increasing the Treasury Department’s legal borrowing limit would simply “create the allowance for big spenders to get in there,” rather than save the country from defaulting on its financial burdens. She said that “the government receives so much revenue” every day that she doubted the money would run out to pay for critical operations.

In a luncheon appearance before the Long Island Association, which bills itself as the state’s largest business organization, Ms. Palin engaged in an animated exchange as she took questions about current affairs, her worldview and, of course, her political future. She said that she was still weighing whether to join the 2012 Republican presidential race, but said voters craved an unconventional candidate.

“People are ready for our governmental establishment to be shaken up,” Ms. Palin said, adding that if she decided to become a candidate, she would campaign aggressively face-to-face with voters, not simply from a distance. “In a heated primary, it allows for some great debate – very heated discourse – all those things we need in order for those voters to decide.”

At the conclusion of more than an hour of discussion, Ms. Palin did not offer a definitive answer about whether she would be a candidate:

I’m not saying it’s going to be me offering my name up in the name of service. There is so much to be considered, but I certainly believe that this is going to be an unconventional political cycle.

It was a rare public outing for Ms. Palin and unlike nearly any other public appearance that she has recently made. She did not deliver a prepared speech or simply offer her opinions on television through her role as an analyst on the Fox News Channel. Instead, Ms. Palin took a seat at the front of a country club ballroom and took questions from the president of the Long Island Association, Kevin Law.

The tone was friendly, but the length of the event offered at least a small and unscripted window into Ms. Palin, the former Alaska governor, that is seldom seen since she made her debut on the national political stage as Senator John McCain’s presidential running mate more than two years ago.

When asked why her approval rating had fallen in public opinion surveys, she said, “In a lot of those polls, yeah, I get my butt kicked.”

When asked why she opposed all types of gun control – with the moderator openly disagreeing with her – she said that the “bad guys” aren’t going to follow the laws, anyway.

And as she talked about the escalating price of gas and groceries, she said, “It’s no wonder Michelle Obama is telling everybody you better breast-feed your baby – yeah, you better – because the price of milk is so high right now!”

As the crowd broke into laughter, she added, “And may that not be the takeaway, please, of this speech.”

The Long Island Association invited Ms. Palin to speak about a month ago. She was paid for her appearance, but officials with the group declined to disclose details of the arrangement.

Ms. Palin arrived at the Crest Hollow Country Club late Thursday morning and appeared on a private photo line with members of the business association before taking her seat at the head table. Bristol Palin, who often accompanies her mother to speaking engagements, was also at the luncheon that drew nearly 1,000 paying guests [pdf].

Ms. Palin was the latest in a long string of political figures to appear before the annual meeting of the Long Island Association. As people ate a tomato salad and chicken breast lunch, a video played that featured highlights from a joint appearance by George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush, along with other political leaders like Newt Gingrich and Colin Powell.

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Senator Lisa Murkowski is back, but that does not mean she is on message.

The Republican senator from Alaska, who recaptured her seat in November though a write-in campaign, told an Anchorage television reporter that while she would vote to repeal the health care overhaul in the unlikely event that such a bill hit the Senate floor, she is not sure that the Republicans in that body should be talking about it.

“We’re in a situation where there’s some messaging going on,” said Ms. Murkowski, during an interview with KTVA-TV, in an apparent reference to the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s announcement that the Senate would take up the repeal bill passed this week in the House, in spite of the fact that Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, had already said in a one-word news release that the chances of such a vote were “unlikely.”

Ms. Murkowski pointed out that there were probably not enough votes in the Senate — where Democrats have lost strength but remain in the majority — to pass a repeal of the law, and said that President Obama would never get on board with it, either.

“I think we’ve got to get rid of it,” she said in reference to the health care overhaul, but added, “What I don’t think people want is the kind of messaging that’s going on,” by referring to a vote that would likely not come to fruition.

Further, she said: “If we end it and do nothing else, we haven’t helped out a single American family out there. If we get rid of it and say, ‘O.K., you’re all on your own,’ we’re worse off than when we started these discussions.”

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Vin Weber was in the vanguard of conservative change before some Tea Party activists were born; he won a House seat from Minnesota in the 1980 Republican revolution led by then-President Ronald Reagan. He worked alongside Newt Gingrich in the years-long effort to break the Democrats’ grip on the House. Now a prominent Washington lobbyist, he spoke with John Harwood of The Times and CNBC about the new Republican majority in the House. Here’s a condensed, edited version of their conversation:

You’ve now seen three waves of Republican revolutionaries come to town. Compare this group to the previous groups.

The Reagan revolution really changed the Republican Party as much as anything. Ronald Reagan turned it into a much more ideological conservative party and it hasn’t really changed since then. The main difference with this group and the group that came in with Gingrich in 1995 is that we have a fairly experienced bunch of people that will be running the House. In 1995, no Republican House member had ever served in the majority. Now we’ve got a Speaker of the House, John Boehner, who was a committee chairman in the majority. Most of the major committee chairmen are people who have served in the majority on their committees. So they are much more, if you will, sophisticated. Their sense of what’s possible, given that they only control one body, is more mature.

More competent leadership?

I think that’s fair to say by virtue of experience — not smarter leadership, but they’ve been around. They’ve seen the mistakes of the past, and they’re not going to make those mistakes again.

How does it change how the House operates to have a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president?

Well, first of all, the relationship between incoming speaker Boehner and Republican leader McConnell in the Senate is an excellent relationship, There was a lot of friction between Speaker Gingrich and Senator Dole as majority leader.

No danger that these two are going to run for president against each other.

No danger of that at all. That relationship is going to be very pivotal. Republicans can accomplish some things only if the House and Senate Republicans can work well together. On the other hand, Harry Reid is still the majority leader. It’s not nearly as powerful a position as being Speaker of the House, but he is the majority leader and he has the ability to protect the Democrat agenda to a certain extent.

To what degree is the tax-cut deal forged at the end of 2010 a precursor for what’s going to happen in 2011 and 2012?

Both parties are going to have to figure out what it is that they really care about. The Republicans on the tax cut deal said what they really care about is maintaining the current rates and not allowing any of the rates to go up, and they gave up on other things. The president apparently got what he thought was most important too — the extension of unemployment benefits and things like that. Republicans are not going to be able to get everything they want, but if they set their priorities and decide this is what we clearly care about most, there’s a chance they can accomplish part of their agenda and we won’t face a shutdown of the government like we did in the 1990’s.

What’s the biggest challenge facing Speaker Boehner to get results and manage the expectations of the Tea Party movement?

I don’t think his biggest problem is going to be his own members. They are a pretty sophisticated group. His biggest problem and the Republican Party’s biggest problem is out in grass-roots — the Tea Party movement that got all these people elected, that has all this energy has probably got unrealistic expectations about what this new Republican House can accomplish for them.

What will the activists be expecting that they can’t achieve?

They want to see big reductions in the deficit and the debt, and that can’t happen unless we get serious entitlement reform — which was not discussed in the last campaign, frankly, by either party. If you’re really going to deal with the long-term debt of the country, you’re going to deal with popular programs, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security. I think that’s going to be difficult.

Is that going to be possible before the 2012 election?

I think the president has an opening to make that happen now. The deficit reduction commission gives an opening. If the president wants to take that and lead with that in the state of the union message, I think that he could make substantial progress on a growth-oriented, but revenue-raising tax reform and probably on a Social Security reform that will probably save a lot of money and put that program on a sound basis.

You once were a Republican revolutionary. Now you’re part of the establishment. Is the Tea Party movement coming after you and people like you all across Washington?

Sure. They’re looking at a system in Washington — the government, the bureaucracy, the lobbying community, the news media, everybody else, and they’re saying this isn’t working. This whole system has given us a massive expansion of government, which many of them believe is unconstitutional. They’re trying to change the whole thing. I think it’s a healthy movement. The main thing is, the Republicans have to help them to understand that with a Democrat president and a Democrat Senate there is a limit to how much they can control.

No one should expect Washington to change too much?

Washington does change, but it’s going to change slowly. The whole constitution was written to make sure we don’t have dramatic radical change in this country. So we will see an evolutionary change.

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Austan D. Goolsbee, an economics professor on leave from the University of Chicago, became chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers in September. He talked with John Harwood of the Times and CNBC at the White House recently about the state of the economy and Republican criticisms of the administration’s policies. Here is a condensed, edited version of their conversation:

What does this economy need right now?

The answer is: give certainty so that we don’t have a precipitous decline in consumer spending and a big hit on the middle class, and follow through on getting the credit and tax relief to small businesses that the president has been for, encouraging business investment, and encouraging exports and innovation to get us on a growth path. We need to certainly extend the tax cuts for the middle class. We should certainly extend the unemployment benefits.

The independent economist Mark Zandi, who’s been an ally of yours on fiscal policy, says, “Yes, extend unemployment insurance.” But he also says it would be a mistake to raise any tax rates, even the top end, with the economy so fragile. Set aside the politics. As a matter of economics, is he right?

I know Mark Zandi, he’s a friend of mine. If you ask what has the most immediate impact on the economy, preserving tax cuts for the middle class, versus the high end, it doesn’t make sense…

But setting aside the comparison. On the simple economic question of whether it would be positive for the economy to leave those rates in place, at least for a short time — it sounds like you agree with him, but just don’t want to say so.

I think you’re putting words in my mouth. Let’s start from what can we afford. I personally do not think that we can afford to borrow $700 billion to pay for tax cuts we know don’t work. Didn’t work the first time. Will not work now.

It’s not $700 billion if you only do it for two years.

You start from what money you have. And then let’s do it in order of what has the highest bang for the buck. And I think there’s actually pretty bipartisan agreement on what the order of bang for the buck is — the high-income tax cuts are the bottom.

I talked to a couple of your predecessors from Republican administrations, Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard. Both said that the administration was over-emphasizing the wrong thing: stimulating consumer demand, as opposed to stimulating business investment, which is the more important source of recovery at this moment. Hubbard said the administration has a fetish for consumer demand. What’s wrong with his reasoning?

There’s nothing wrong with the reasoning. We want to encourage business investment.

The principal focus of the program that the president’s put forward is about getting the economy to grow. It isn’t about just increasing consumer spending. It’s very heavily on investments, on both the physical capital factories and equipment side, as well as the human capital side of investing and training of our workers. And trying to get people to build businesses here. That’s a different question than: ‘Should we completely disregard the fact that, if we go cut off the unemployment extensions for people that are looking for work, their spending is going to drop precipitously?’ The data shows us that that’s true. And it’s not responsible to do that at a moment like this.

Would our economy be in better shape right now if the initial stimulus when the administration took office had been bigger?

I don’t know the answer to that for sure. There’s a bit of a crystal ball in that. It obviously depends on what the things were.

Respond to the argument that the reason the economy is not healthier despite stimulus is that the Keynesian ‘multiplier’ simply doesn’t have the same impact that it once was thought to have.

Well, I’d give you one technical and one broader answer. On the technical answer, if you go look at the quarterly reports on the Recovery Act, they suggest that the overall impact on jobs saved or created is just about what was predicted. The main thing that everybody missed, not just the government, is the base line of ‘how bad is the economy.’ It was significantly worse than was forecast. So, I think that part is fair.

Glenn Hubbard said there are some times when contractionary fiscal policy is actually beneficial to growth, and this may be one of those times.

I think there’s a deep flaw in that reasoning. That contractionary fiscal policies can be expansionary centers on getting the interest rate reduced. The interest rate — we’re hitting the zero lower bound. So, it’s hard to see how contractionary fiscal policy, at a moment when we’re coming out of the worst recession since 1929 and still in a fragile state, is going to be expansionary.

Is what Britain is doing right now, with respect to budget cutbacks, the right thing economically for the world? Is it a good model for the United States?

The U.K. is engaged in significant budget-cutting and austerity, and several other countries are advocating austerity as well. As the Recovery Act is winding down, U.S. spending levels are on path to be dramatically reduced. So the U.S. does not need to take lessons in austerity from other countries.

When you think purely about business, and all of the cash that business is sitting on, and what it would take to unlock that, is what business needs right now more customers? Or, confidence in the future – which is perhaps a function of spending levels, deficits, tax rates?

There’s about one trillion dollars on the balance sheets of corporations. The question is, why have they not been using that money? And I believe that uncertainty is the most important thing. They have been afraid. By far, the biggest uncertainty has been about demand, and about where will the U.S. economy be now, and in the coming years. Not the policy uncertainty.

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