The 109th Congress will convene tomorrow with pageantry and pleasantries, but two lurking, potentially explosive issues could turn it into one of the most partisan and contentious sessions in recent times.
Just as judicial nominations have become unusually divisive, senators are anticipating the first Supreme Court vacancy in more than a decade. And President Bush is proposing significant changes to Social Security, the popular entitlement program that many Democrats consider a vital and inviolable legacy of their party.
The new Congress will address hundreds of other questions, such as whether to limit civil liabilities, rewrite immigration laws and drill for oil in an Alaskan refuge. But politicians from left to right agree that those issues cannot rock the Capitol as much as battles over the high court and the federal retirement program.
"Those are going to be the two epic fights in 2005," said Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union.
Aides said Bush plans to kick off the Social Security debate with a major speech even before his second inauguration, on Jan. 20, then will try to keep up the pressure on Congress with a series of road trips that will include stops in areas with heavy concentrations of seniors so he can assure them they could not lose their checks under his proposal. Signaling his plans to work for all the major parts of his agenda, Bush will fly Wednesday to Illinois to make his case for medical liability reform, part of a suite of changes to laws governing lawsuits that the Senate plans to take up early in the year.
Before turning to such long-anticipated issues, both chambers plan to act to fund and perhaps even enlarge Bush's commitment of at least $350 million toward recovery from the tsunami in South Asia, where the death toll is now at least 45 times the number of deaths from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "Congress will do its part to help," House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said last week. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told CNN yesterday that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) had "made it absolutely clear that the Senate will come back in session whenever it is necessary to obtain the necessary supplemental funding to replenish these accounts."
In many respects, the 109th Congress will resemble the 108th, which adjourned last month. Republicans again control the White House as well as both chambers of Congress, though by relatively small margins. Outwardly, the 435-member House has barely changed, with Republicans gaining three seats in November and both parties keeping their leadership teams in place.
The Nov. 2 elections brought more change to the 100-seat Senate. Republicans netted four additional seats, boosting their once-tiny majority to a more comfortable 55 and, in the process, ousting the Democrats' leader of the past decade, Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.). But Democrats still hold enough seats to mount filibusters, the delaying strategy that requires 60 votes to halt. With Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 80, battling thyroid cancer, Senate Democrats soon may face a high-stakes decision on whether to filibuster a Supreme Court nomination, a move certain to ignite a ferocious fight with Bush and Republican senators.
Democrats used filibusters in 2004 to block 10 conservative appellate court nominees who they said were outside the political mainstream. Frist has called the practice intolerable and threatened to rule that filibusters against judicial nominees are unconstitutional. Democrats say they would respond with an avalanche of parliamentary maneuvers that would bring the entire Senate to a halt.
For now, both parties are playing a game of political chicken, unwilling to signal their intentions or temper their threats. Some Republicans say they cannot believe Democrats would filibuster a Supreme Court nomination, an act that would draw widespread attention. But many liberal groups will press Democrats to do just that if Bush nominates a staunch conservative who, among other things, might seek to outlaw abortion.
"Assuming that he does that, and that Republican senators rubberstamp the nominee, Democrats will likely resort to using all available tools to prevent the confirmation, including the filibuster," said Nan Aron, head of the liberal Alliance for Justice. Bush, by recently renominating several of the judges filibustered last year, has signaled "his intent to make the next four years as bitter and partisan as we've ever seen," she said.
The House plays no role in judicial nominations, but it will be amid the other major looming battle: Social Security revisions. Bush has called for allowing workers to divert some of their payroll taxes to private accounts, which could be invested in stocks and bonds. Critics from both parties say the president has not explained how he would pay for the revisions, and many Democrats oppose any change whatsoever in Social Security.
Meanwhile, some prominent Republicans have their own proposals, suggesting Bush will have to unify his own party before pushing legislation through Congress. For example, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) wants to raise the level of income subject to Social Security payroll taxes, an idea Bush rejects. Even worse for the president, the powerful lobbying group AARP is spending $5 million on advertisements opposing his plan, which the retirees' group says is too risky.
In light of such resistance, even some Bush allies are pessimistic. "The odds are probably not in favor of accomplishing something, but it's a fight worth having," Lessner said.
After Social Security and judges, Congress's toughest issues are likely to involve spending and deficit questions, with some lower priorities eventually falling away. Already, administration officials have signaled they will wait until next year for a major push to rewrite the tax code, and one congressional aide involved in the discussions predicted there will be "other bags thrown overboard."
Almost certain to be pushed, however, is a renewed attempt to pass a broad-based energy bill, including drilling for oil and gas in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Senators narrowly blocked the drilling provision last year, and supporters say the bigger GOP majority may prove the cure.
As for limiting civil liabilities, Bush has made it a high priority and the House can be counted on again to send "tort reform" legislation to the Senate. The struggle there, however, might be intense. Some Senate Republicans who are lawyers -- including Graham, Richard C. Shelby (Ala.) and newcomer Mel Martinez (Fla.) -- may have reservations about limiting victims' abilities to seek damages from hospitals, doctors, corporations or others that allegedly harmed people through neglect or other misdeeds.
"I anticipate a very contentious and partisan Congress, with much of the initial conflict centered on the budget, Social Security reform and judicial appointments but eventually extending well beyond that," said Thomas E. Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution. "Bush's best prospects are probably with the energy bill and some modest tort reform. If the situation in Iraq remains insecure and unstable after the [Jan. 30 Iraqi] elections, I expect opposition voices in Congress to begin pressing for an exit strategy."
One of the most important actions of the first week will take place behind closed doors. House Republicans will pick a new Appropriations Committee chairman, who oversees all spending bills. The contenders -- Jerry Lewis (Calif.), Ralph Regula (Ohio) and Harold Rogers (Ky.) -- will be interviewed privately tomorrow, with the result announced Wednesday.
House Republican strategists said the issue that may cause Bush the most problems with his own party is immigration, with leaders caught between their promise to take up new restrictions, which was part of the price for winning passage of intelligence reform in December, and the president's plan to give temporary legal status to undocumented workers if they have a job and register.
"The president can make his agenda as ambitious as he wants," a Republican Senate aide said. "But it is going to be constrained by time, money and will."
