White House Week
Spoiling for a Fight? Better Be Wary of a Sucker Punch
Sparks are expected to fly at President Bush's meeting with Democratic congressional leaders this week at the White House. The topic will be Iraq, and neither side has shown much willingness to compromise. A Bush adviser says the president will tell them he wants to see legislation funding the Iraq war without a timetable for withdrawal or extraneous pork-barrel projects. Moreover, Bush wants the House and Senate to confer immediately and send up a funding bill for his consideration. (If it contains the timetable for withdrawal, he says he will veto it.) Democrats sense a trap. They suspect Bush will let them argue their views on the Iraq war, and then, afterward, he will use his bully pulpit to portray them as heading down the path toward surrender while he has a plan for victory. With Bush way down in the polls, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intend to stand up to him, but they are wary of appearing disrespectful.
The E-Mail Mystery a Child Could Solve
As Congress continues to probe the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, it has sought all related E-mails from White House aides. One thing lawmakers have learned is that some White House officials were using E-mail accounts set up for them by the Republican National Committee-a legally questionable practice since the White House is supposed to maintain all its official correspondence. Last week the RNC revealed that its system was missing four years of E-mails from senior presidential aide Karl Rove. The White House and the RNC say they are working hard to try to retrieve the E-mails. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy is skeptical; he says even a child could find them.
Time to Stop All the Gassing About Gas
Democrats say the Bush administration is all talk and no walk on fuel conservation. The same day Bush appointees gathered to tout the administration's new renewable fuel standard at a press conference, Democratic Sens. Tom Harkin and Claire McCaskill fired off a pointed letter to the White House faulting the president's recent order scaling back efforts to reduce government petroleum use. In 2000, Bush had called for a 20 percent reduction in use by 21 federal agencies by 2005. But after their petroleum use dropped only 2 percent, Bush backed off and in January issued an order calling for cuts of 2 percent a year, or a 16 percent reduction in eight years. Asked one congressional aide: "If we can't get the federal government to comply, how are we going to meet the loftier goals set for the nation?"
When Freelancing Can Be a Good Thing
While condemning House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent stop in Syria as unwelcome freelance diplomacy, the administration embraced a trip to North Korea by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democratic presidential candidate. Richardson has close contacts with North Korean diplomats, and Bush officials hoped he could persuade the North Koreans to shut down their nuclear reactor complex at Yongbyon by April 14, as they had promised. The White House even provided a plane, a Korea specialist, and former Bush official Anthony Principi to act as codiplomat. Richardson declared the mission accomplished, adding that the shutdown should now take but a "few days."
PHOTO OP: 11:04 a.m., April 10, Fairfax, Va.
President Bush met American Legionnaires at their post to push for his war supplemental bill before Congress. The next day, however, his war policy suffered a blow when Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that all soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will have their 12-month tours extended to 15 months, the longest tours for the Army since World War II.
This story appears in the April 23, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.