Congress limps to a finish with flurry of bills

Coal miner health addressed
The bill also renewed, with increased federal contributions, a program dealing with abandoned coal mines and the health issues of former miners.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., said the legislation would shift $4 billion in health care costs from the coal companies to the taxpayers, and criticized his own party for failing to check indiscriminate federal spending. “We’re supposed to be the party of fiscal discipline and we haven’t been,” he said.

As one of its final acts, Congress approved a stopgap measure keeping federal programs running at or slightly below current levels through Feb. 15. President Bush quickly signed it on Saturday.

The action was necessary because lawmakers failed to pass the annual spending bills covering the budget year that began Oct. 1, except those dealing with defense and homeland security.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., who will become House Appropriations Committee chairman when the Democrats take over, said the bill was “a blatant admission of abject failure by the most useless Congress in modern times.”

Democrats also pointed out that the House met only 102 days this session, fewer than the 110 days of the maligned “do-nothing” Congress of the Truman presidency.

The next House majority leader, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., says there will be a return to five-day workweeks. In the Senate, incoming Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he and new Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have agreed that all 100 senators will hold a private session on Jan. 4 to kick off what they hope will be a new era of civility and less partisanship.

Republicans claim some major accomplishments this year: passing a pension overhaul; renewing the Patriot Act; enacting a port security bill; and endorsing Bush’s plans to create military commissions to prosecute suspected terrorists.

But this Congress could not move ahead on promised lobbying and ethics changes; failed to reach a consensus on the administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program; and did not develop a plan to deal with the 12 million illegal immigrants in the country.

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