ANALYSIS: DOWN BUT NOT OUT, BUSH BESTS DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS
By Charles Babington, Associated Press Writer
Associated Press Worldstream
October 21, 2007 Sunday 12:17 AM GMT
By any measure, President George W. Bush had a good week in Congress.
At his urging, the Democratic-controlled Congress pulled back on an
Armenian genocide measure, withdrew a surveillance oversight bill and,
in a high-stakes showdown, sustained his veto of a bill increasing
spending for a children’s health insurance program.
His fellow Republicans may pay a high price in next November’s
elections, some people think. But that is about the only comfort
Democrats could find from those recent turnabouts, which showed the
resiliency of a lame-duck president with dismal approval ratings.
Democrats, to their shock, have learned that the 2006 elections did
not yield a mandate to start winding down the Iraq war. This month they
threw their strongest domestic punch, daring Bush to veto a $35 billion
(euro24.5 billion) increase to the popular children’s health program.
He took the dare, and on Thursday the House upheld his veto with 13
votes to spare.
Bush may be bruised and wobbly. But the president remains on his feet
after another round in which Democrats hoped for a knockout.
Whether his tenacity proves politically wise in the next election or
not, it seems to embolden Republican lawmakers and leave Democrats
looking tentative.
Facing more veto threats over spending, they have yet to send him an
appropriations bill for the new budget year, which began Oct. 1. Nor
have they resolved House-Senate differences on an important energy
bill.
Senate Democrats do not seem inclined to oppose Bush’s nominee for
attorney general even though Michael Mukasey would not say at his
confirmation hearings that an interrogation technique that simulates
drowning and is known as waterboarding amounts to torture.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gamely attributed the week’s setbacks to
"the legislative process." Republicans, meanwhile, reveled in the fact
that the Democrats’ two-week attack on lawmakers who backed Bush on
children’s health did not switch a single Republican House member’s
vote on the override question.
Minutes after the vote, the House Republican Conference issued a
taunting statement suggesting Pelosi and her allies needed Alka-Seltzer
medicine for a bad hangover.
"House Democrats are hung over, beleaguered from a very bad week of
legislative embarrassments, fatally flawed policy prescriptions,
dodged bullets, lost votes on the House floor and new record-low
approval ratings," it said.
Democratic leaders say they will have the last laugh. They predict
voters next year will punish Republicans for sticking with Bush on
Iraq, health care and other issues. But even that article of faith
seemed less certain last week.
Underfunded Republican Jim Ogonowski came within 6 percentage points
of winning a special House election in a Massachusetts district where
he was expected to do worse.
Perhaps the week’s best news for Democrats is that they began to see
the limits to Bush’s powers. The president prevailed on the children’s
insurance program only by resorting to the veto, his bluntest tool.
"It’s the veto, and the veto alone, that is the last line of defense
for a president whose administration’s life is waning away," said
Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist.
An embattled president facing a closely divided Congress almost always
can win a veto fight, Baker said, because the two-thirds majority
needed for an override in both houses is a high bar.
"But the results are not really borne by the president," he said.
"They are borne by the members of his party" at the next election. In
this case, Baker said, Bush "won’t be around to take his share."
Feeling that Bush is nearing the limits of his veto powers, Democratic
lawmakers are discussing which bills might push him over the edge. The
likeliest candidate is a long-delayed $20 billion (euro14 billion)
water projects bill.
Lawmakers in both parties like it and Bush has pledged to veto it
because it has many expensive pet projects for communities throughout
the country.
As for children’s health, Democratic leaders believe they can make
modest changes that will preserve the bill’s essence while giving a
handful of House Republicans enough political cover to drop their
opposition. Once that happens, they say, Bush is likely to claim
victory and sign it into law.
Progress in other areas, they acknowledge, may not come until
more House and Senate Republicans conclude that loyalty to Bush is
endangering their careers. The approaching presidential primaries
may focus their thoughts, said the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat,
Richard Durbin of Illinois.
"After the primaries are behind us, a lot of Republican members are
thinking seriously about November, and I think the dynamics will
change," Durbin told reporters.
For the time being, however, the president can savor one of his best
weeks in a long while.
EDITOR’s NOTE Charles Babington has covered politics in Washington
for 14 years.