WASHINGTON – When President Bush sets forth his goals for the year in a State of the Union address tonight, he will speak to a Republican-controlled Congress that has balked at large segments of the White House domestic agenda.
From an energy plan to welfare changes to tax breaks for people to buy health insurance, many of the White House’s policies have stalled on Capitol Hill. Last year, lawmakers killed two of the initiatives Bush talks about most frequently: bills that would have limited medical malpractice lawsuits and allowed more federal money to flow to religious groups that provide social services.
During this election year, the president and his aides will focus attention on the administration’s legislative successes, which have come on several of Bush’s central domestic priorities. At his request, Congress cut taxes three times, revised public education, created new anti-terrorism laws and added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. Lawmakers quickly passed an administration proposal last year to help African countries cope with AIDS, and they approved a plan to allow more logging in national forests to try to prevent fires.
Yet an examination of the policies Bush highlighted in his previous State of the Union speeches shows Congress has resisted more of his domestic proposals than it has embraced.
The White House pursued without success legislation to change air-pollution standards. Nor have lawmakers agreed to hand states greater control, as Bush would like, over the nation’s largest preschool, health insurance and housing programs for the poor.
Similarly, the administration has made little headway in changing Social Security so that workers could invest some of their payroll taxes in private retirement accounts. And Bush has not persuaded Congress to make permanent several tax cuts.
According to policy analysts, government scholars and congressional aides, Bush’s difficulty is partly a reflection of the GOP’s slim majorities, particularly in the Senate, which has rejected a few bills that have passed the House.
Many congressional aides interviewed for this report acknowledge that several of the White House’s proposals have little chance of passage this year.
For example, neither the House nor the Senate took action last year on a plan to shift to states vast new control over Medicaid, the insurance program for the poor that is a shared federal-state responsibility.
Similarly, House and Senate aides predicted that neither half of Congress will do more this year than debate ways to reduce the number of Americans who have no health insurance, even though White House officials have said that Bush will call in his speech for making health care more accessible and less expensive for the uninsured.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
