A week of surprising Bush wins

Congress has produced a burst of pre-vacation activity that will shield it against a "do nothing" label while providing President Bush some victories to savor during his upcoming Texas retreat.

This week's legislative action does not mean Mr. Bush has suddenly become an LBJ-like political colossus. Yet, defying many predictions, he struck a compromise that may pave the way for a patients' bill of rights and won House approval of drilling in an oil-rich Alaska wilderness.

Added to the tax cut that remains his signature initiative to date, these represent much-needed victories that have perhaps reinvigorated the president's standing.

But when the president returns from his ranch to the wilds of Washington this fall, he will find the Democratic-controlled Senate eager to reduce or undo some of his most recent triumphs.

After senators get done picking apart the administration's energy plan, for instance, it is unlikely to bear much resemblance to the package passed by the House on Aug. 1.

At back-to-school time, Bush will likely be forcefully reminded of the fact that he must scrabble, scratch, and claw for every legislative win. "Bush can enjoy sunny skies for the month. The difficulty is that storm clouds are darkening the skies for fall," says Marshall Wittmann, government analyst at the Hudson Institute .

The 511-page energy plan passed the House by a vote of 240 to 189. It contained many of the most important provisions of the administration's original energy outline, including billions of dollars in tax breaks for petroleum producers.

Most notably, it also approved the president's proposal to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). House members reduced the acreage that would be open to such exploration from Bush's proposed 1.5 million acres to 2,000 acres.

But the Arctic drilling vote had spiraled past substance into the realm of symbolism.

For Bush to win at all on something that environmentalists called the most important green issue facing Congress was something of a surprise. It depended, in part, on the support of the Teamsters and other unions eager for high-paying petroleum-exploration jobs.

The Democratic-led Senate is unlikely to approve any ANWR drilling at all. The issue's fate is thus likely to be decided in the uncertain arena of a House-Senate conference committee.

Ironically, Bush might benefit politically if the issue now fades away. It is not a winner at the polls. Democrats are eager to exploit it to the degree that they exploited Bush's earlier decision to block implementation of Clinton-era rules on arsenic in water.

"Bush talks about compromise, and on ANWR, he better do it," notes independent pollster Del Ali. "It could become a campaign poster in 2002."

The developing compromise on the patients' bill of rights was another area where Bush appeared to be finally bending Congress to his ways.

Late Wednesday, the president had struck a compromise on the issue with Rep. Charlie Norwood, (R) of Georgia, one of his chief antagonists on the issue. The deal addressed the point that has kept the legislation stuck in the House for weeks: the ability of patients to sue their health plans.

In essence, the compromise struck a halfway point between Bush's insistence that such lawsuits be limited and the position of Representative Norwood and his allies that patients have access to both federal and state courts.

At time of writing, the House had not yet voted on the Bush-Norwood compromise.

"Bush desperately needed these victories as he left town, or else he'd be subjected to a month of stories that his presidency was flailing," says Mr. Wittmann.

In general, this week's burst of action by lawmakers was easily predictable. Their August break, as well as Bush's, is coming up. No lawmaker likes to go back home and hear the dreaded phrase, "do-nothing Congress."

"They want to report progress, not stalemate," says Larry Sabato, a professor of government at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Thus the House wasn't the only chamber whose motto suddenly seemed to be "do something - anything." In the Senate, the Foreign Relations Committee unanimously approved a high-profile resolution calling on Bush to return to the bargaining table on the Kyoto global warming pact. The Senate also approved safety restrictions on Mexican trucks entering the US, a move the administration has opposed as inimical to free trade.

These actions point up the impending problem for Bush. And while the House is still relatively reliable Bush territory, even it requires attention, as the patients' bill of rights indicates. The GOP margin remains slim enough that Bush must search for conservative Democrats or other mavericks for virtually every bill he wants passed.

And Democrats, despite their slim one-vote hold, have been effective in using the Senate as a forum to promote their views. That means this fall's House-Senate conference committees are likely to be even more contentious then they typically are.