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Their Ranks Bolstered, and With Big Issues Ahead, Democrats Stumble (CARL HULSE, 3/06/09, NY Times)

The Republican-led blockade of overdue spending bills in the Senate is providing Congressional Democrats a quick and humbling lesson in the limits of their new power.

Despite significant electoral gains in both the House and the Senate, the Democrats have been stymied by Republicans and a few Democratic defectors in what began as a fairly routine push to enact the leftover measures, needed to finance spending in the current fiscal year and tethered together into one $410 billion catchall bill.

As a result, Congress had to pass an emergency five-day stopgap on Friday to prevent an embarrassing shutdown of the government in the opening weeks of the Obama administration.

The failure left Democrats fretting about how they would perform when dealing with more contentious and complex legislation sought by President Obama on health care, energy, taxes and education.

“What does this mean for the Obama agenda?” said the chairwoman of the House Rules Committee, Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York.

It means he's not an effective bipartisan leader, like George W. Bush, who worked with Ted Kennedy to pass things like NCLB and HSAs.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 7, 2009 10:44 AM