2009 Democratic agenda severely weakened by Republican opposition

[alp227]

by Shailagh Murray, Michael D. Shear and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 24, 2010; A01

The breathless pace that President Obama set after taking office last January jolted lawmakers from the soporific haze of the final George W. Bush years, revving up dormant committees and lighting up phone lines with a frenzy of dealmaking.

Wielding large Democratic majorities, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) relied on their expert vote-counting skills to send Obama 13 major bills and bring an overhaul of the nation's health-care system to the brink of final passage. By Christmas Eve, when the Senate finally adjourned, lawmakers were exuberant, if exhausted.

Then the bullet train screeched to a halt. Republican Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts special election on Tuesday cost the Democrats' their filibuster-proof Senate majority. Obama's biggest priorities -- overhauling health care, expanding college aid, reducing climate change -- are now in limbo, facing dim prospects as Republicans show little interest in cooperating, and Democrats brace for a 2010 midterm election year potentially as volatile as 1994, when the GOP captured the Senate and the House two years after Bill Clinton was elected president.

The agenda, Obama acknowledged Friday, had run into a "buzz saw" of opposition. "It's just an ugly process," he told an audience at an Ohio community college. "You're running headlong into special interests, and armies of lobbyists, and partisan politics that's aimed at exploiting fears instead of getting things done. And the longer it takes, the uglier it looks. . . . I can promise you there will be more fights ahead."

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/23/AR2010012302967_pf.html - before the newspaper is delivered to subscribers' front doors!

[BrklynLiberal]

1. it had the rug pulled out from under it, in fact.