Lame Duck Session

So far, we have 3 items on the list...

1. Gates confirmation

2. Bolton confirmation

3. All the Fiscal Year 2007 budget bills that the Repubs put off until after the election so they wouldn't have to be accountable for their spending priorities.

Regarding #1, I suspect that the Repubs will extend every courtesy to the Dems in the confirmation hearing so as not to remind them that Repubs have tried to do everything possible to remake the Senate into the House and take away any vestiges of minority power. I suspect it will be a somewhat cordial process, but I don't expect the Dems to forget.

Regarding #2 Biden said:

Regarding #3: It would surprise me greatly if they are able to pass all the budget bills. I suspect we'll be under a Continuing Resolution (allows government to assume the same budget as last year) until the new Congress gets settled. That means Dems will have to work through two budget processes (07 and 08) in one session.

 

Well, add another one... from Glenn Greenwald, who writes well...
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Thursday, November 09, 2006
The President's designs on the lame duck Congressional session

(updated below)

When we last left the Republican Senate, in the week before they adjourned, they were so busy legalizing torture and indefinite detentions that they ran out of time to also give the President the power to eavesdrop on Americans in secret. The House had hastily passed Heather Wilson's version of the "Terrorist Surveillance Act," but the Senate had no time to vote on it prior to adjournment. As a result, warrantless eavesdropping continues to be criminal in this country (even though the President continues to engage in it).

For that reason, enactment of a warrantless eavesdropping bill remains a top priority for the President -- probably even more important to him now than even before the election -- because such a bill would not only gives him legal authority to eavesdrop with no judicial oversight, but it also would help protect himself against the legal consequences of having repeatedly broken the law. It is worth remembering that a federal court has already ruled his eavesdropping program to be both unconstitutional and in violation of the criminal law, and another judge, the highly respected District Court Judge Gerard Lynch of the Southern District of New York, is likely to issue a ruling soon on the same issues in the absence of Congressional legislation legalizing the program.

It seems highly unlikely that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi will have as one of their priorities the enactment of a bill to legalize Bush's eavesdropping program. For the new 110th Congress, a long-overdue investigation of warrantless eavesdropping seems far more likely than legalization of it, to put it mildly. For that reason, the President made clear in a Rose Garden speech today that he wants Congressional action taken on that bill during the lame duck session, to convene before Democrats take over in January:


We'll discuss the way forward for our country, and I'm going to tell them what I just told our Cabinet. It is our responsibility to put the elections behind us and work together on the great issues facing America.

Some of these issues need to be addressed before the current Congress finishes its legislative session, and that means the next few weeks are going to be busy ones.

The first order of business is for Congress to complete the work on the federal spending bills for this year with strong fiscal discipline and without diminishing our capacity to fight the war on terror.

The other important priority in the war on terror is for the Congress to pass the Terrorist Surveillance Act.


Until January, the Senate majority will still be filled with the likes of Conrad Burns, Rick Santorum, George Allen and Michael DeWine, and Republicans would almost certainly be able to scrounge up the 50 votes needed to pass the Heather Wilson "Terrorist Surveillance Act" bill. That bill was never exactly what the White House wanted, but it would certainly be better than nothing at this point.

In the lame duck session, if Republicans are really so audacious as to try to pass that bill, Democrats could stop enactment of the Wilson bill by filibuster. In its report on the President's Rose Garden speech, CNN discussed the various bills the President wants passed in the lame duck session and said:


The Terrorist Surveillance Act is likely to face the stiffest opposition, as both parties have criticized the measure that would authorize the administration's surveillance program, which allows wiretapping on phone calls between people in the United States and suspected terrorists overseas.


I don't know of any Senate Republicans who have ever criticized "The Terrorist Surveillance Act," so I am unclear what the basis is for this claim [and just, by the way, is it really too much to ask CNN not to describe the new bill as one that "allows wiretapping on phone calls between people in the United States and suspected terrorists overseas" -- can someone, somewhere, please explain to CNN that we already have a law (called FISA) that allows exactly that. Is it really any wonder that many Americans have never properly understood what is at stake with the NSA scandal in light of the highly impaired individuals who are responsible for informing them about these matters?).

It needs to be borne in mind at all times just how bowed and weakened the Republicans are. Their bellicose threats are empty and their demonizing rhetoric is impotent, and the Democrats have nothing to fear -- least of all from them. This photograph from today speaks volumes:



The Bush movement spent the last five years completely ignoring Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, except when it came time to mock them as Osama bin Defeatocrats. Now the President has to have a personal sit-down with her at the White House and treat her with the greatest respect.

How do you think Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove feel inside as they watch Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel and Barney Frank and John Conyers take over their Congress? This is a humbling and crushing blow to them -- only a fraction of what they deserve and what the country needs, but substantial nonetheless (just as an aside, for a politician widely viewed as weak, Nancy Pelosi has done everything right politically, and really nothing wrong, both before the election and since).

By stonewalling and concealing all relevant information from Congress, the White House has ensured that the very Senators and Representatives whom they want to amend FISA and legalize the NSA program know nothing about that program. Even several GOP Senators made clear that it is impossible to amend FISA in any meaningful way without first holding hearings to find out what the administration has been doing with its secret eavesdropping powers (those same GOP Senators, needless to say, shortly thereafter announced that they would support legalizing the program even without the information they said was "necessary" to make a meaningful choice).

The administration has not only kept Congress completely in the dark about how it has been eavesdropping, but they also have repeatedly violated their promises to disclose information about those activities. Their behavior was so severe that it prompted even the meek and exceedingly cooperative Jay Rockefeller to complain vociferously (for him). At the very least, Democrats cannot be pressured into hastily enacting any eavesdropping bill while they still are in the dark, and I don't expect that they will (though how the Democrats will really behave is still a big unknown).

Already the pious and wise Beltway pundits are speaking in scripted unison about how Democrats better realize that they need to be conciliatory and moderate and well-behaved. That's all well and good, but Democrats also need to realize that they have resoundingly triumphed and the Bush movement is staggering around in a weakened and humiliated state. They need to ensure that the "lame duck" sesssion of Congress lives up to its name in every respect.

UPDATE: It doesn't look like there there is excessive meekness or conciliation coming from the soon-to-be Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charlie Rangel, who "revealed yesterday that he's got his eye on Capitol Hill office space now held by . . . Vice President Dick Cheney":


"Mr. Cheney enjoys an office on the second floor of the House of Representatives that historically has been designated for the Ways and Means Committee chairman," explained Rangel . . . "I talked to [future House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi about it this morning," a giddy Rangel crowed during a news conference at his Harlem office. "I'm trying to find some way to be gentle as I restore the dignity of that office," chuckled Rangel. "You gotta go, you gotta go."


Many of the tactics Republicans used over the last five years to strip the Democrats of all power and participation in our government were psychological -- drastically reducing their staffs, shoving them into dingy and tiny basement offices. One doesn't want to replicate the worst Republican offenses, but it is necessary that they taste some of their own medicine -- for practical reasons as well as for fairness and justice.

Soon-to-be-Chairman Rangel seems eager to get a start on all of that. I wonder if Fred Hiatt and David Broder approve of his plan.

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/

 

The real question is why would those Repubs remaining go to the mat, for this Prez, for this issue, at this time? Bush was a lame duck at 00:01 Wednesday morning and everyone... EVERYONE... in DC knows it. Why would Repub Senators want to tick off Dems right before the Dems take over? I don't see it happening and I also think this election gave some spine to the Dems who have been shell-shocked since the Bush v. Gore decision... they'll filibuster if they have to.

 

Looks like I called at least one of them correctly...

So, Repubs are abdicating their responsibilities under the Constitution in order to make the Dems do the work of two years worth of appropriations in one session and all for political reasons. I bet the Dems manage to get it done, but of course, the Repubs will amplify everything to try and gain a rhetorical advantage.

With any luck, this will be the last overt example of Congressional Republican irresponsibility and incompetence in a long while.

 

House Republican group backs Senate drilling bill
Mon Nov 20, 2006 1:39 PM ET

By Tom Doggett

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday said the House should abandon its broad legislation to expand offshore drilling, giving a boost to a much narrower Senate drilling bill that could pass in Congress' lame duck session.

The Senate has approved a bill to open a small area near the Alabama-Florida offshore border in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and natural gas drilling, while the House cleared more wide-sweeping legislation that allows drilling in most U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coastal waters more than 100 miles from shore. Currently, energy exploration there is banned.

Senate and House Republican leaders have so far been unsuccessful in reconciling their differences to pass a final drilling bill before Democrats take majority control of the Congress next January. Lawmakers return in December for a short lame duck session to finish work on remaining important bills.

Senate leaders have already told their counterparts in the House that they should pass the Senate's drilling bill, because the House legislation is too expansive and controversial to clear both chambers.

A group of 18 self-described moderate House Republicans on Monday took a similar position, urging House Majority Leader John Boehner to drop the House drilling bill.

"If the House needs to consider an (offshore drilling) bill, we ought to take up the Senate-passed bill without any changes," said the lawmakers, led by House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert, in a letter to Boehner.

"Continuing efforts to promote the House bill - which could open the entire U.S. coastline to oil drilling, and which would sweep away environmental protections, undermine local control, and increase the deficit - would signal that we have not gotten the message of Election Day," they wrote.

Republicans lost their 12-year control of the House in the November 7 election, and after the counting was finished in two close races Republicans also became the minority party in the Senate.

The Bush administration has said that at this point the Senate bill has the best chance of passing the Congress.

Natural gas users, from farmers to manufacturers, are pushing for more supplies which they believe will lower their energy costs. They argue passing the Senate bill, even it opens a much smaller area to drilling compared to the House legislation, is better than getting nothing.

Environmental groups, which worked hard to get more pro-green Democrats elected to serve in the new Congress, are against expanded offshore drilling areas because they fear it would lead to more spills that would damage shorelines and ecosystems.

http://today.reuters.com/news/artic...20283078_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENERGY-OIL-DRILLING.xml

 

Wow... worse than I thought...

Thanks Republicans!
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Some Republicans Take a Scorched-Hill Tack
Leaving Budget Decisions
To Democrats Could Disrupt
New Leadership's Agenda
By DAVID ROGERS
December 6, 2006; Page A8

WASHINGTON -- Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month.

Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare, the federal health-care program for the elderly and disabled.

The unstated goal is to disrupt the Democratic agenda and make it harder for the new majority to meet its promise to reinstitute "pay-as-you-go" budget rules, under which new costs or tax cuts must be offset to protect the deficit from growing.

"I think we're trying to get an accommodation," said Speaker Dennis Hastert (R., Ill.) last evening. "You're digging a hole now and filling up with money from '08," he said of Mr. Thomas's demands. "He says he's trying to move away from that."

But with Mr. Hastert dismantling his office, House Republicans appear to be operating in a post-election leadership vacuum. The White House is watching with alarm, as are many Senate Republicans, who have a greater stake than the House in maintaining relations with Democrats.

"There are individuals who want to blow up the tracks, and there are more of those individuals in the House," said one Senate leadership aide.

The collapse of the appropriations process will be felt soon in the Justice and Commerce departments, food-safety agencies and veterans' health care. "It's not just a mess. It's a mountainous mess," complained Wisconsin Rep. David Obey, the next House Appropriations Committee chairman.

In the Medicare dispute, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) has aligned himself with Democrats against Mr. Thomas and House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton (R., Texas). Talks continued last night in hopes of reaching agreement this morning on the physician issue and a larger $38 billion tax-and-trade package important to business.

"Failure is not an option," warned John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers. New York City and Wall Street have a major stake in $682 million in tax provisions important to transportation infrastructure and redevelopment of the World Trade Center area. And the trade package, as introduced by Mr. Thomas last night, runs from Vietnam and Andean countries to a set of expired general preferences for developing countries around the globe.

"We are fairly close," said Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.), the next Finance chairman. But given the still-uncertain Republican support, the Vietnam trade bill could yet be sacrificed, Mr. Grassley warned.

With Congress turning off the lights this week, there seems no chance of saving the appropriations process. Instead, most of the government will remain on a stopgap bill through Feb. 15, and in kicking this can down the road, the Republican leadership has no idea where it will stop rolling.

"It's a demonstration of the irresponsibility of Republicans that they would leave this country with this mess," said the next House speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). "But we won, we will deal with it."

Democrats could simply extend the stopgap resolution again in February and set themselves up as a budget appeals court of sorts, to which the administration will have to come for relief. "I think we can work through it, but it is not our preference," said White House budget chief Rob Portman. But the administration admits it could yet pay a price if the spending issues become entangled with President Bush's spring supplemental-spending request for military operations in Iraq.

The stopgap resolution, which the House expects to take up today, allows no growth above 2006 spending, and as a rule, any spending cuts from 2006 levels voted by the House this past summer prevail. On balance, annual funding is about $6 billion less than the president's budget request -- without always reflecting his priorities.

In the course of the House floor debate, for example, general administration funds for the Justice Department were cut to $35.4 million, less than half the 2006 funding level and a nearly 70% cut from the president's request. House members were gambling then that at least some of the money could be restored in final talks with the Senate, but since the appropriations process has collapsed, those talks never took place, and the Justice Department must live with the results.

Mr. Portman will have greater discretion to apportion funds to deal with the crisis. But the gaps are too big in some cases to easily work around. Food-safety inspections face a $17 million shortfall by Feb 15. Veterans medical care will be funded at an annual rate $3.1 billion less than most of Congress agrees is needed, and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R., Texas) is demanding changes in the stopgap bill to recognize this shortfall.

"What a sad mess," said Sen. Robert Byrd (D., W.Va).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116537033474441872.html