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Congressional Democrats lower their bar

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Times Staff Writer

Echoing the limited agenda President Bush outlined in his State of the Union address, congressional Democrats are eyeing their second year in the majority with much-diminished expectations.

Gone are the grandiose promises of legislation to bring the troops home from Iraq, which dominated the Democratic agenda last year and nearly ground business on Capitol Hill to a halt.

Today, senior Democrats are talking of simply requiring the president to seek congressional approval for any agreement with the Iraqi government to maintain U.S. forces in the country past next year.

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There is little talk of rewriting the tax code or dramatically expanding access to health insurance, and no discussion of reviving the effort to overhaul immigration laws.

“We have the presidential election. We have a number of very important House and Senate races,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said last week. “Our time is really squeezed.”

On the environmental front, Democratic leaders are pledging to build on last year’s landmark fuel-efficiency legislation by creating a new cap-and-trade program to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The focus on global warming has been one of the most dramatic shifts since Democrats took control of Congress.

But the rest of the party’s legislative agenda is notable mainly for its modesty.

New education, healthcare and infrastructure initiatives -- recently outlined by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) -- are essentially a collection of minor proposals.

Pelosi has talked of allocating more money for medical research, creating a common electronic medical record and spending more to repair aging highways and bridges.

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Democrats continue to criticize the Bush administration’s conduct of the campaign against global terrorism. They are calling on the president to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and renounce waterboarding as an interrogation technique.

But matching their dimmed hopes of forcing an end to the war, few Democrats expect to be able to pass legislation to force the president’s hand.

Democrats, who have tried to focus on the strains the Iraq war has put on the military, may make a renewed attempt to mandate more rest between deployments for troops serving abroad. Last year, legislation to do that was twice blocked by Senate Republicans.

But even some of the staunchest war critics now acknowledge that they will have to wait until 2009 for meaningful change in Iraq policy. “We’ll have a new president. And I do think that at that time we’ll have a fresh look at it,” Pelosi said last week on MSNBC.

Congressional Democrats have been speaking expansively in recent weeks about more bipartisan cooperation in the coming year, a recognition of public disdain for the increasingly bitter tone of debate on Capitol Hill.

In the Democratic response to Bush’s speech, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who has won two elections in a traditionally Republican state and had a GOP running mate in her 2002 campaign, urged Bush to work with Democrats.

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“There is a chance . . . in the next 357 days to get real results, and give the American people renewed optimism that their challenges are the top priority,” she said, addressing her appeals directly to the president.

House Democrats last week hammered out a rare compromise with congressional Republicans and the White House on an economic stimulus package. Democrats hope to pass a bill in the House today and get a version through the Senate by the end of the week.

But much of the Democratic rhetoric following Bush’s State of the Union speech Monday night suggested little improvement in the strained relationship between the Capitol and the White House.

“Where true leadership and bold action is needed, the president gave us empty rhetoric and baby-step ideas,” said California Sen. Barbara Boxer, who wore a skeptical expression though much the speech.

California’s other senator, fellow Democrat Dianne Feinstein, said she was “disappointed.” And Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara) said she was most pleased that Monday’s State of the Union was likely Bush’s last.

“I am relieved that we are finally entering the last days of George W. Bush’s presidency,” Capps said. “Sadly, President Bush’s legacy is one of bitterly divisive partisan politics, failed policies, bureaucratic mismanagement and tragic incompetence.”

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noam.levey@latimes.com

Times staff writers Richard Simon and Nicole Gaouette contributed to this report.

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