But now that initial progress has foundered as Washington policymakers have been consumed with the debate over the Iraq war. Not a single priority on the Democrats' agenda has been enacted, and some in the party are growing nervous that the "do nothing" tag they slapped on Republicans last year could come back to haunt them.
The problem they have found is one of their own making, they ran on a platform of "we will change the direction in Iraq", then proceeded to ignore the exit polls that show that "corruption" not Iraq were the major force in the voters minds and completely ignoring that, they kept insisting that the 2006 elections gave them a mandate on Iraq, instead of a mandate on corruption.
So they ignore the corruption, then fill a bill up with pork and expect the public to be too stupid to realize that this congress could very well be worse than the last congress as well as ignoring the true mandate they were given to stop playing around and get some legislating done without earmarks and without pork, without bribing and buying the votes you need for a bill that you know will be vetoed and you fully admitted that you did not have the votes to override the veto, thereby, completely wasting your time, our time and our tax dollars in the process.
More from Wapo:
The "Six for '06" policy agenda on which Democrats campaigned last year was supposed to consist of low-hanging fruit, plucked and put in the basket to allow Congress to move on to tougher targets. House Democrats took just 10 days to pass a minimum-wage increase, a bill to implement most of the homeland security recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, a measure allowing federal funding for stem cell research, another to cut student-loan rates, a bill allowing the federal government to negotiate drug prices under Medicare, and a rollback of tax breaks for oil and gas companies to finance alternative-energy research.
The Senate struck out on its own, with a broad overhaul of the rules on lobbying Congress.
Not one of those bills has been signed into law. President Bush signed 16 measures into law through April, six more than were signed by this time in the previous Congress. But beyond a huge domestic spending bill that wrapped up work left undone by Republicans last year, the list of achievements is modest: a beefed-up board to oversee congressional pages in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, and the renaming of six post offices, including one for Gerald R. Ford in Vail, Colo., as well as two courthouses, including one for Rush Limbaugh Sr. in Cape Girardeau, Mo.
The minimum-wage bill got stalled in a fight with the Senate over tax breaks to go along with the wage increase. In frustration, Democratic leaders inserted a minimum-wage agreement into a bill to fund the Iraq war, only to see it vetoed.
Similar homeland security bills were passed by the House and the Senate, only to languish as attention shifted to the Iraq debate. Last week, family members of those killed on Sept. 11, 2001, gathered in Washington to demand action.
"We've waited five and a half years since 9/11," said Carie Lemack, whose mother died aboard one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. "We waited three years since the 9/11 commission. We can't wait anymore."
Four months in and this Congress and Senate hve accomplished not a thing, but hey, they are TRYING to surrender in Iraq, that has to count for something with their voters!!!!
The voters seem to have noticed the stall. An ABC News-Washington Post poll last month found that 73 percent of Americans believe Congress has done "not too much" or "nothing at all." A memo from the Democratic polling firm Democracy Corps warned last month that the stalemate between Congress and Bush over the war spending bill has knocked down the favorable ratings of Congress and the Democrats by three percentage points and has taken a greater toll on the public's hope for a productive Congress.
"The primary message coming out of the November election was that the American people are sick and tired of the fighting and the gridlock, and they want both the president and Congress to start governing the country," warned Leon E. Panetta, a chief of staff in Bill Clinton's White House. "It just seems to me the Democrats, if they fail for whatever reason to get a domestic agenda enacted . . . will pay a price."
And so they will.
The following paragraph is spot on:
Republicans are already trying to extract that price. Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, said Democrats are just "trying to score political points on the war. . . . Part of their party can't conceive of anything else to talk about but the war."
That IS all the Democrats have, all they ran on and without Iraq they have absolutely nothing to offer their voters.
They are ineffective, incapable of rational thought when it comes to Bush and their voters are noticing, finally, that they truly never had a plan that could work, they had no way to keep all their promises they made before the 2006 elections and their only hope is to take advantage of an unpopular war to hide the fact that they aren't capable of doing their actual job.
Four months into their new "majority" the Democrats are proving everything we said before the election about them to be true.
Anyone else doubt that they will change their own course and stop trying to be the Commander in Chief as well as the Secretary of State and finally do the job they were elected to do?
LEGISLATE
1. to exercise the function of legislation; make or enact laws.
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