So who are the biggest religious players in Washington advocacy?

One of the findings is that the tremendous religious diversity of America is reflected in the advocacy community in Washington. Just about every large and small religious community has some sort of Washington representative or office. In terms of the number of groups, Catholics account for about 19 percent, evangelicals for about 18 percent, Jewish groups about 12 percent, and Muslims and mainline Protestants about 8 percent each. The Muslim groups have actually come to the fore in an important way in terms of the number of groups — and they also have some sizable budgets. The largest category is actually interreligious groups — issue-based concerns that have broad religious coalitions behind them.

In terms of funding, the largest we include is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Others include the Catholic Conference; Family Research Council; American Jewish Committee; Concerned Women for America; Bread for the World; National Right to Life; Home School Legal Defense Association; and National Organization for Marriage.

There’s been growth in the conservative religious advocacy sector over the years. Why is that?

We do see some patterns here. Groups that focus on social conservative concerns — pro-life issues, marriage issues, cultural issues — have grown over the past few decades significantly. Among them are the Family Research Council, Citizen Link — which is an affiliate of Focus on the Family — and the Traditional Values Coalition. One of the explanations for some of this growth is a sense of challenge or threat. So the National Organization for Marriage in our report has the most significant increase in budget in percentage terms. It’s grown dramatically, suggesting the salience of the defense of traditional marriage to that organization.

Has this been a deliberate strategic move by conservative religious leaders to increase their presence in Washington?

Well, it’s been going on for a long time. One of the findings is the enduring nature of the social conservative concerns in Washington. In the 1990s, for example, the Christian Coalition was one of the largest religious advocacy groups operating on the national stage. It had a $12 million budget in 1994. Its budget is just a little over half a million dollars today. On the other hand, other groups have emerged to kind of take the Christian Coalition’s place.

At the press conference where we presented the report, Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) mentioned that she did make a very strategic decision to enter into the political fray. She was feeling that this was the only way to defend traditional marriage against attacks on it, as she saw them. NOM was created in 2007 and moved to Washington in 2009. Gallagher feels there has been an actual timidity on the part of social conservatives to get involved in hard-headed political engagement in terms of election campaigns and direct lobbying, and so on.

Are there progressive religious counterparts to this large segment of conservative groups?

There are particular organizations that see themselves as combating what they call the Christian right. People for the American Way has an $8 million budget, for example. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has a $6 million budget; they are certainly major players. Then you have the Secular Coalition and American Humanists.

And then you do have Jewish organizations that take more progressive stands on social issues and do see themselves as fighting against certain aspects of the Christian conservative agenda — though on other issues, like international human rights, they will form alliances. In terms of what we call self-consciously social justice advocacy, there is Sojourners with a $5 million budget, United Methodist General Board of Church & Society, and the Unitarian-Universalists.

An American president’s most lasting legacy is often the courts he leaves behind. Future Congresses can nullify or alter laws, but judges serve as long as they like and a large enough group of like-minded ones can change the course of American politics entirely. Bush and Reagan’s judges have been pushing the nation rightward for years and they’ll continue to do so for decades.

But unprecedented Senate obstruction by the Republicans combined with Obama’s completely inexplicable lack of urgency have basically guaranteed that if Obama’s judicial legacy will be next to nil, should he end up being a one-term president. And the hope that Obama will be a one-term president basically removes any incentive the GOP has to confirm anyone he wants on the bench.

Pat Leahy is complaining about GOP stalling on judicial nominees, but Republicans like Chuck Grassley are easily able to craft arguments that allow the press to portray the problem as typical bipartisan bickering. That is, when the press reports on the Senate’s sorry inability to confirm federal judges at all.

Kamen, bless him, reports the most salient fact:

Here’s one bottom line: Obama’s confirmation rate for both circuit and district court nominees is a dismal 68 percent, compared with Bush’s 81 percent and Bill Clinton’s 82 percent.

Another crucial distinction the press tends to elide for fear of seeming biased: Obama tends to nominate exceptionally well-qualified and extremely uncontroversial moderates, while Bush devoted a great deal of energy to putting conservative activists on the courts.

But I imagine you won’t see a lot of headlines about how the Senate isn’t confirming judges next year. In part because there will be an exciting campaign to report on, but mostly because the Senate not doing things is now the status quo, and thus no longer newsworthy.

“What I would support is letting people who are of the same gender form, if you will, partnership agreements,” he replied. “If they want to have a partnership with someone else and have, as a result of that, such things as hospital visitation rights and similar benefits of that nature.”

Partnership agreements! (If you will!) How will these “partnership agreements” differ from civil unions? Well, “civil unions” were the separate-and-unequal legal compromise invented to grant gay couples certain rights without allowing them to make the magical word “marriage” all gay, but even that compromise is too much for the anti-gay religious right, so Mitt Romney invented some other third thing that sounds even less marriage-y.

Romney’s history with gay marriage has been a bit all-over-the-place (he opposed marriage and civil unions, then strategically supported civil unions, then backed a gay marriage ban), but one thing that has always remained constant is his skill at employing emotion-free corporate language to describe your human romantic pairing choices.

Mitt Romney tolerates your decision to pursue a same-gender personal merger, non-heterosexual citizen. Romney, his female contractual partner, and their independent subsidiary offspring enjoy friendship-based personal contact with many similarly romantically situated entities. Please consider contributing your support as an American representative democracy shareholder to his campaign.

The glitter mostly missed him. But still: Good show, glitter-bombing folks.

Less embarrassing but probably more aggravating to Rove is the growing rift between him and his wealthy political allies, the Koch brothers, that Politico’s Kenneth Vogel reports on today.

Rove is running a shadow-RNC that will flood the airwaves with ads no matter which joker the Republicans actually nominate. In order to do this, he needs a lot of money. The Kochs have a lot of money. But the Kochs and Rove are apparently not going to coordinate their campaigns this year, because they don’t get along.

Rove is driven by partisanship and has absolutely no ideology or principles beyond winning elections. He doesn’t care what the Republican candidate believes or does, as long as the Republican candidate is electable. The Kochs, driven by principled support of a political philosophy that paints their desire to make the most amount of money with the least amount of oversight as a morally righteous mission instead of your typical plutocratic greed, only want to elect conservative Republicans. In 2010, the two camps coordinated their efforts:

In the months preceding the 2010 elections, operatives working with groups that received millions of dollars in Koch-linked funding participated in twice-a-month coordinating meetings convened by Rove that drew an array of conservative groups looking to boost Republicans. Koch-backed groups included Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Limited Government and the 60 Plus Association.

They took place in the downtown Washington office suite housing the flagship outfits conceived by Rove and Gillespie — American Crossroads and its sister group Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, plus a linked group called American Action Network.

But the philosophical split made itself apparent when Rove’s groups supported John Boehner’s debt ceiling compromise, which the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity opposed. Now the Kochs and the Rove groups are developing competing voter databases and they’re launching competing campaigns to win Latino support for Republicans.

Of course, they’ll probably kiss and make up. If someone as unpalatable to conservatives as Mitt Romney or as potentially toxic to moderates as Rick Perry wins the nomination, Karl Rove will hold his nose and get to work electing him. The Kochs will do the same, knowing they have enough leverage with the party to push any Republican president around.