US President George W. Bush and congressional Democrats were at a stalemate on Monday over federal spending, taxes, domestic surveillance and the war in Iraq -- and neither side made a move to negotiate, even though lawmakers have just a few weeks left to wrap up work for the year.
With Congress back at work after a two-week recess, Bush and the Democrats spent the day lobbing verbal grenades at one another. Bush appeared in the Rose Garden to chide lawmakers for failing to finish their work, and his aides said he would do so again at a news conference yesterday -- a rare departure for a White House that typically keeps its news conferences a secret until an hour before they occur.
"They have just two weeks to go before they leave town again," Bush said. "That's not really a lot of time to squeeze in nearly a year's worth of unfinished business."
At the Capitol, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, responded by calling Bush's arguments "pretty weak" and accusing the president of being intransigent.
"If not for the stubborn refusal of the president and his Republican enablers to work with us," Reid said, "we would accomplish a lot more."
There was little evidence that either side was trying to ease the war of words.
The White House said there were no immediate plans to invite congressional leaders in to talk to the president, and Reid said he had not spoken to Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, since before Thanksgiving. Bolten, a former budget director who has respect on Capitol Hill, has helped resolve previous White House budget battles with Congress.
Tony Fratto, Bush's deputy press secretary, said Jim Nussle, the budget director, was taking the lead in negotiations over spending.
But Nussle has not met with Representative David Obey of Wisconsin, a Democrat who is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, since Sept. 19, Obey's aides said, when the pair had drinks on the terrace of Obey's office overlooking the Washington Monument. The meeting was fruitless.
The deadlock recalls one of an earlier era -- between former president Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans at the end of 1995. That dispute ended with a government shutdown -- an outcome Bush and congressional Democrats say they intend to avoid. But with both sides digging in their heels, strategists said on Monday they did not know how the disagreements would be resolved.
"It's a huge game of chicken and I'm certain the president is not planning to back down," said Charlie Black, a Republican strategist close to the White House.
Bush, Black said, has "the zest for this combat."
But Democrats have a zest for combat as well and are calculating that the public will be paying more attention to issues like the mortgage crisis than to Bush's attacks on them.
"This country has bigger problems than the president's manufactured confrontation with the Congress," said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic caucus.
Emanuel warned of a "Bush recession" on the horizon, a signal that the Democrats plan to make the economy a major election issue.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
TOWERING FIGURE: To Republicans she was emblematic of the excesses of the liberal elite, but lawmakers admired her ability to corral her caucus through difficult votes Nancy Pelosi, a towering figure in US politics, a leading foe of US President Donald Trump and the first woman to serve as US House of Representatives speaker, on Thursday announced that she would step down at the next election. Admired as a master strategist with a no-nonsense leadership style that delivered for her party, the 85-year-old Democrat shepherded historic legislation through the US Congress as she navigated a bitter partisan divide. In later years, she was a fierce adversary of Trump, twice leading his impeachment and stunning Washington in 2020 when she ripped up a copy of his speech to the
RSS