Roll Call: “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell today challenged his Democratic counterpart over his pledge to eliminate some filibusters, warning of unintended consequences. The Kentucky Republican questioned recent statements by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) about plans to change the rules to eliminate filibusters of motions to proceed, which must be adopted for the Senate to take up bills.”

Reuters: “Defense executives warned lawmakers on Wednesday that they must quickly come up with a plan to avert $500 billion in automatic spending cuts because the uncertainty is forcing companies to move ahead with dramatic layoffs and plant closures.”

AP: “The Obama administration unveiled plans Wednesday to create an elite corps of master teachers, a $1 billion effort to boost U.S. students’ achievement in science, technology, engineering and math.”

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NPR: “The political fight of the moment is just when (Mitt) Romney stopped running Bain Capital, which specialized in buying troubled companies and turning them around. … What does it mean that these documents listed him as the company’s top executive? From a technical standpoint, a lot — but from a practical standpoint, maybe not as much as it first seems.”

McClatchy: “In response to New York Times stories that relied on leaks of sensitive national-security information, a House of Representatives panel on Wednesday discussed legislation that could allow journalists to be prosecuted for disclosing such information.”

AP: “Any realistic effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act — as opposed to last week’s quixotic vote in the GOP-controlled House — is sure to get jumbled together with lots of other issues, including Medicare, taxes, food stamps and defense spending. And that’s because Republicans have to first pass a budget.”

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Roll Call: “Speaker John Boehner charged Democrats today with being willing to ‘tank our economy’ to secure a ‘small business tax hike’ in response to vows by top Democrats that they will use scheduled defense spending cuts as leverage on taxes.”

Smart Politics: “A Smart Politics review of broadcast media transcripts through Lexis/Nexis by ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, NBC, and NPR for the first six and a half months of 2012 finds that Republican governors have been mentioned in more than six times as many news stories as their Democratic counterparts with the Top 10 slots all held by GOP executives.”

BBC: “US President Barack Obama has announced that US companies will now be allowed to “responsibly do business in Burma.’”

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How should Congress define when the president can detain an American?

A provision in the defense authorization bill would reaffirm that American citizens cannot be indefinitely detained if suspected of terrorism, but some Democrats think it doesn’t go far enough, reports CQ’s John Donnelly.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) says that the measure mostly keeps in place current law, which “gives the executive branch too much power.”

Aides said Smith is working with Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican who led floor challenges to detention provisions in last year’s law, to amend the bill in committee or on the floor to make explicit that the executive branch cannot detain someone captured in the United States indefinitely without charge or trial. Although the Obama administration has said it would not indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without trial, some lawmakers want to definitively ban such detention in statute.

A spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union said the current language could be harmful because it creates confusion about who is protected.

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