The American Spectator

p> NO FEELING HIS PAYNE br> In the long simmering war that the Congressional Black Caucus has waged against this Bush administration, the president made the CBC blink. /p>

On Wednesday, Bush invited CBC chairman Rep. Elijah Cummings to the White House along with a group of other House and Senate leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Richard Lugar, Foreign Relations ranking member Sen. Russ Feingold, Rep. Nita Lowey, ranking member of the House subcommittee dealing with foreign aid, and Rep. Donald Payne, ranking member of the House subcommittee on Africa. The purpose of the meeting was to brief these leaders on Bush’s recent trip to Africa and to encourage congressional support for the pro-African legislative agenda the administration is putting forward.

Cummings, though, rejected the invitation, claiming he hadn’t been invited enough in the past for this invitation to make a difference.

“Everybody in the House and the Senate, for that matter, knows that this is the way the president operates when he does overseas trips,” says a White House legislative staffer. “On issues like this he reaches out to everybody and in this case the leader of the black caucus ignored that invitation.”

Cummings encouraged Payne, who is also a member of the CBC, to decline the invitation as well. But Payne ignored Cummings’ entreaties, in part because the Bush administration supported a version of the Sudan Peace Act which Payne had been pushing in the House.

p> THE LINE ON FEINSTEIN br> With a recall in California of Gov. Gray Davis all but certain, some Democrats who earlier publicly claimed little interest in running to replace him are privately backing off those promises to the embattled governor. According to several Democratic insiders in California, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has privately expressed a willingness to throw her hat into the ring should the political realities inside the state make it obvious that Davis has little chance of retaining his position.