House GOP Tries to Shrug Off Setbacks

President Bush and first lady Laura Bush attend St. John's Church Sunday, July 9, 2006, in Washington.(AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson) (Lawrence Jackson - AP)

For some, debating proposals that have little chance of passage is a legitimate use of the full House and Senate.

"Passing bills isn't the end-all and be-all of Congress," said Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "There's also some value in debating these issues and using Congress to air out issues that are important to the American people."

Democrats ridicule as political ploys Republican decisions to bring up legislation doomed to fail, such as the constitutional amendments to ban flag desecration and gay marriage.

Congress? Political?

"They're politicians," Darling said.

Republicans point out that Democrats are not above bringing up proposals just for political gain. They note that Democrats have insisted on bringing up a proposal to raise the minimum wage, which has failed for nine years.

With two-thirds of the 2006 legislative calendar over, Congress has passed and sent President Bush only two major pieces of legislation. One renewed the terrorist-fighting USA Patriot Act; the other extended $70 billion in tax cuts, roughly divided evenly between investors and middle-income families.

Lawmakers still have high hopes of sending Bush bills to bolster pension protections for 44 million workers and extending the historic Voting Rights Act. Republicans would like to protect multimillionaires from getting sacked by high inheritance taxes after a one-year reprieve from those taxes in 2010.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., also has broken a deadlock over legislation to allow the government to pay for embryonic stem cell research. The measure has passed the House and the bill could get a vote this month in the Senate. Neither the House nor Senate, however, has displayed the two-thirds majorities required to override Bush's promised veto.

The bill intended to shield the Pledge of Allegiance from federal court challenges can still be revived on the House floor if GOP leaders so choose, Republicans say. Privately, no one pretends to be pleased about the lack of progress on legislation that should have sailed through the committee and a House floor vote.

The legislative year is littered with failed or stalled Republican priorities. Some, such as an immigration overhaul, repealing estate taxes and changing rules on lobbying in response to several ethics scandals, are disappointments for many in the GOP and for Bush.

Particularly stinging was the forced postponement last month on renewing the Voting Rights Act on the very day it was to get a vote in the full House.

The measure, which outlawed racist voting practices in the South, enjoyed support from leaders in both houses and both parties. Republicans hoped that passing it a year before it expires would insulate them against charges of racism.

But Southern Republicans rebelled against a requirement that the Justice Department continue overseeing voting rules in the South. Other conservatives then balked at the law's requirement for bilingual ballots in areas with large immigrant populations. Nonetheless, House Republican leaders say they may try to bring it up this week.

More dramatic is how the fate of overhauling immigration laws has become an implacable dispute about whether to give most of the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants a chance at citizenship.

Rather than spend the summer resolving differences between the House and Senate versions, their chief patrons scheduled new hearings to shore up their arguments, with no resolution in sight.