LIMPING OUT OF town after a mercifully brief meeting, the lame-duck Congress leaves as its chief legacy yet another lesson on why such post-election sessions should be avoided.
Consider its shameful record: hasty approval of a massive new bureaucracy through legislation larded up with giveaways to well-heeled special interests, but apparently not even coal in the stockings of jobless workers due to run out of unemployment benefits a few days after Christmas.
Ho. Ho. Ho.
Re-elected lawmakers probably figure voters won't remember by the time they face the polls again. Those not re-elected don't have much reason to care.
The struggle over the past few days has been mostly among Republicans. Democrats still nominally control the Senate, but Republicans are already calling the shots there as well as in the House. It was a troubling preview of what may lie ahead with the White House and Congress under total GOP leadership.
Time was the critical factor, though. The House met for a few days last week, sent key bills to the Senate on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, then blew town.
A few Senate Republicans tried to steer their party in the right direction. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island -- all GOP moderates -- extracted promises from their leaders to revisit in January three of the most egregious giveaways added by the House to a bill creating the Department of Homeland Security. These would exempt drug makers retroactively from legal liability for a vaccine that may have caused autism in children, allow government contracts with firms based offshore to avoid U.S. taxes, and design criteria for a homeland security research center to fit Texas A&M; University, a school with ties to GOP leaders in Congress and the White House.
The bill passed anyway. But the moderates made their point.
Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, a leader of his party's conservative wing, carried the banner for extending federal unemployment benefits past the Dec. 28 expiration date. The federal program provides an additional 13 weeks of benefits for jobless workers who already have exhausted the 26 weeks of benefits paid by the states. Mr. Nickles joined with Democrats to win Senate passage of a measure that would extend federal benefits through March.
But House GOP leaders deemed the $5 billion Senate plan too generous. Before going home last week, the House approved a much smaller program that would last only five additional weeks and cover only workers in a handful of states with very high unemployment. Not Maryland. Unless a compromise is reached quickly, nothing will be enacted and the program will expire Dec. 28 on schedule.
Happy New Year.
The problem won't go away. Mr. Nickles warned his colleagues they risk beginning the next term facing 800,000 angry constituents who can't find work but no longer get relief. Their ranks will grow by 90,000 a week. Not an auspicious way to start.