NYT: A Modest Victory for Bush, but More Tests Lie Ahead

[DeepModem Mom]

A Modest Victory for Bush, but More Tests Lie Ahead
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
Published: May 24, 2005


WASHINGTON, May 23 - President Bush won enough from the bipartisan compromise on judicial nominees on Monday night to claim a limited victory, but he now faces a series of additional tests of his political authority, with the stakes extending to the fate of his second-term agenda.

On the plus side for Mr. Bush, the bipartisan agreement among 14 centrist senators expressly called for up-or-down votes on three of his nominees to federal appeals court seats, all but ensuring their confirmations, though it left in limbo the fate of two more.

By explicitly exempting from the agreement two additional judges opposed by Democrats, it did not meet Mr. Bush's oft-stated demand that all his nominees get a vote, and it did not foreclose the possibility that Democrats could block an eventual nominee to the Supreme Court, a matter of intense concern to the White House. The split-the-baby outcome, moreover, did little to resolve a rolling series of challenges to Mr. Bush that in coming days and weeks could do much to set the tone for his second four years in office.

On Tuesday, the House is to vote on a bill that would defy Mr. Bush and lift restrictions on federal financing of stem-cell research, legislation that stands a good chance of passing.

In the days and weeks that follow, Congress will confront a proposed trade agreement with Central America, the confirmation of Mr. Bush's embattled choice as to be ambassador to the United Nations, an effort to rein in government spending and the first legislative steps toward overhauling Social Security - all topics on which Mr. Bush faces excruciatingly close votes in Congress, where Democrats are generally united against him and his own party is splintering around the edges....


(NOTE -- At the end of the article, a "veteran Republican with close ties to the WH" is quoted: "The only reason he's still up there in the 40's is that the Democrats are really brain dead and have nothing positive to put on the table....What you see is that he's increasingly turning overseas to demonstrate leadership because he's having so much trouble in the molasses of the Beltway.")


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/24/politics/24assess.html?oref=login