It seems like ages ago that President Barack Obama’s party lost 63 House seats in the midterms. Eons since the health care fight and a tea party rebellion against the $787 billion economic stimulus and George W. Bush’s TARP leftovers, plus seemingly intractable 9.6 percent unemployment left the president looking like an embattled – even weakened – figure.
What a difference a lame duck makes.
With Senate Democrats having discovered Republicans’ Achilles heel: their deep desire to get out of Washington for the Christmas holidays, the legislative session between the end of the current Congress and the start of the new one on January 3rd has produced what might be Obama’s two best political weeks in as many years.
To be sure, Obama in his first two years has had historic victories; notably on health care and financial reform; but the fights were long and drawn out, draining them of political punch.
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By contrast, the lame duck session, in which Democrats broke a series of GOP filibusters with the help of a handful of Republican moderates, produced a series of bipartisan bills widely seen as big wins for the president.
On December 15, the Senate overwhelmingly approved an $850 billion tax package that revived the phrase: “economic stimulus” — that most political observers thought was dead.
The bill contains more than $600 billion in tax breaks for the middle class and small businesses, plus a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits for 2 million Americans; money likely to be injected directly back into the economy next year. In exchange, Democrats granted the GOP’s demand that Bush-era tax cuts for the richest Americans be extended for two years and the estate tax reinstated at a more generous 35 percent rate, rather than the 55 percent it would have reverted to on January 1st.
The bill passed the House two days later despite howls of outrage from the president’s liberal critics, and even an expletive-laden tirade from a still anonymous Democratic representative.
But the quick approval of the deal, negotiated by Obama’s handpicked team of much-maligned Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob Lew, freed up moderate Republicans like Scott Brown (R, MA) and Olympia Snowe (R, ME) who had been holding out for the upper income tax cuts, giving Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid time to send several key pieces of legislation to the floor.
Among them: the “repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”:http://www.thegrio.com/politics/dont-ask-dont-tell-repeal-final-frontier-of-the-civil-rights-movement.php; the 17-year-old law that was the last barrier to gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. The bill passed the Senate with 65 votes on December 18th – the day after the House approved the tax compromise. And while some liberal critics have been loathe to give the president credit, his signature on the bill Wednesday vindicates his strategy of steering repeal to Congress, rather than the courts, while garnering support from military leaders.
Congress also passed a landmark nutrition bill supported by first lady Michelle Obama, as well as the Local Community Radio Act-, which could broaden local access to the airwaves.
And in an important victory on a key White House priority, Senate Democrats were able to overcome Republican opposition to the START Treaty verifying Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The treaty — which had become bogged down in partisan politics, despite overwhelming support from military leaders and former Republican and Democratic secretaries of state — is expected to garner the necessary two-thirds votes for ratification as early as Wednesday.
START will bolster Obama’s international credibility, proving he can deliver on important global matters, despite the vicious partisanship at home.
The Senate is also expected to pass a 9/11 first responders health bill that Republicans have been stalling for nearly a year; aiding ailing firefighters and police officers who risked their lives in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The lame duck had its share of failures.
Republicans blocked an omnibus budget that among other things would have funded the implementation of health care reform. And Senate Democrats were unable to break a GOP filibuster (aided by five Democrats) on the DREAM Act, which would put young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children on a path to citizenship if they serve in the military or pursue a college degree.
Obama will have to keep fighting for immigration reform, despite an even tougher climate in the in-coming Congress.
And the president ends the year with frayed relations with House liberals and organized labor, which he’ll need to repair ahead of the 2012 campaign.
But in a political season in which “shellacking” has become a daily part of the media lexicon, the president and his party emerged as the big winners out of the lame duck. As South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham put it in an interview on Fox News, “when it’s all going to be said and done, Harry Reid has eaten our lunch…. This has been a capitulation in two weeks of dramatic proportions of policies that wouldn’t have passed in the new Congress.”
Mr. Reid shares that pilfered lunch with a president who ends the year on a decisively positive note.
