WASHINGTON – President Bush opened the Oval Office Friday for a second day in a row to Democrats who will rule Capitol Hill next year, and both sides promised cooperation. But Democrats’ heads were shaking over Bush demands for the current lame-duck GOP Congress to enact measures they oppose.
“It’s a little bit of a mixed message, sure,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who is set to be majority leader when his party assumes power in January. “Folks are scratching their heads a little bit.”
Bush invited Reid and the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, to his office for a nearly hourlong meeting aimed at charting a way forward in a government to be divided between a Republican White House and a Democratic Congress.
Bush had had lunch a day earlier with House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, expected be the next speaker of the House.
“My attitude about this is that there is a great opportunity for us to show the country that Republicans and Democrats are equally as patriotic and equally concerned about the future, and that we can work together,” said Bush, appearing in a good-natured mood when he, Reid and Durbin appeared before reporters in the Oval Office afterward.
Reid and Durbin agreed. “The only way to move forward is with bipartisanship and openness, and to get some results,” Reid said. “And we’ve made a commitment, the four of us here today, that’s what we’re going to do.”
But one of the president’s first public acts after his party’s losses in Tuesday’s elections – voting that was widely seen as a rebuke of his leadership and policies – was to press for an aggressive agenda while Congress remains in GOP hands for the next two months.
On his list are at least two items deeply controversial to Democrats: legalizing his warrantless eavesdropping program, stalled in the Senate because of a Democratic filibuster threat, and confirming John Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, which Democrats have said is unlikely to happen.
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