US Democrats frustrated they cannot overcome Republican resistance on tax-and-spend issues

Reid told reporters Thursday that Senate Republicans have used delaying tactics to block Democratic efforts to change Iraq policy, move a farm bill and pay for the proposed one-year "fix" to the alternative minimum tax. He especially complained about Republican demands to offer farm bill amendments dealing with state drivers licenses for illegal immigrants.

"We've tried everything we can to address these issues," Reid said, citing 57 GOP filibuster threats this year.

"We have lived by pay-go," Reid said regarding the tax bill. "But what we want everyone to know is that we have tried every alternative possible."

He acknowledged handing a political dilemma to the leader of the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat. The House earlier passed an alternative minimum tax bill that would raise $80 billion (€54.6 billion) in new taxes, largely on investors and hedge fund managers.

"I admire the speaker" for adhering to the pay-as-you-go principle, Reid said. He added, however, she "has a little more flexibility from a procedural perspective than I do."

Secretly briefed, Pelosi did not object to waterboarding in 2002

Pelosi would later boot sole objector to program from chance to chair Intelligence Committee

Two senior Republicans and Democrats in Congress -- including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- were briefing on the CIA's program to use waterboarding on terror suspects in September 2002 and did not object, according to Sunday's Washington Post.

In the long-ranging article, which seemingly takes the lawmakers and the Bush Administration to task by discussing the practice's emergence in Nazi Germany and other totalitarian states, a Pelosi aide said the Speaker remembered discussion of "enhanced" interrogation techniques and "acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time."

Hill Close To Deal on War Funds

House Democratic leaders could complete work as soon as Monday on a half-trillion-dollar spending package that will include billions of dollars for the war effort in Iraq without the timelines for the withdrawal of combat forces that President Bush has refused to accept, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said yesterday.

In a complicated deal over the war funds, Democrats will include about $11 billion more in domestic spending than Bush has requested, emergency drought relief for the Southeast and legislation to address the subprime mortgage crisis, Hoyer told a meeting of the Washington Post editorial board.

If the bargain were to become law, it would be the third time since Democrats took control of Congress that they would have failed to force Bush to change course in Iraq and continued to fund a war that they have repeatedly vowed to end. But it would also be the clearest instance yet of the president bowing to a Democratic demand for more money for domestic priorities, an increase that he had promised to reject.