WASHINGTON -- Although Democrats and Republicans disagreed on the accomplishments of the 108th Congress, one thing is certain: Hundreds of programs, from highway building to welfare reform, are being kept on life support through temporary measures because lawmakers failed to meet deadline after deadline for renewing them.\nThe Capitol was empty Tuesday, with Republican lawmakers back home pitching to their constituents the successes and Democrats pitching the failures, of the 108th Congress that is crawling toward its finish.\nRepublicans had some things to brag about, with Congress in its final hours passing a $136 billion tax break package that will bring sweeping changes to corporate tax rules and approving a disaster relief bill that will mainly benefit the pivotal election state of Florida.\nBut Democrats say the GOP-led Congress can't officially call it quits because it has failed to carry out its most essential function -- passing the spending bills that keep the federal government running -- and has yet to agree on reforms to the intelligence community called for by the Sept. 11 Commission.\nThe Senate already has scheduled a lame-duck session in mid-November to take up the spending bills, and Congress will have to reconvene at some point, before or after the Nov. 2 elections, to deal with legislation that would create a post of national intelligence director.\n"There have been frustrations," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday, the Senate's last day, of his efforts to guide a chamber where Republicans hold a bare majority of 51 seats and the traditional collegiality has been frayed by stridently partisan differences over Iraq and the effects of Republican tax cuts.\nFrist, R-Tenn., pointed with pride to "two major pieces of reform that will have generational impact:" the Medicare prescription drug measure enacted last year and the intelligence reorganization bill he hopes to pass this fall.\nHe said he was most exasperated by what Republicans regard as unprecedented Democratic efforts to block confirmation of some of President George W. Bush's judicial nominations.\nHis Democratic counterpart, Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota, countered that it was the Republican leadership that, on a number of occasions, "pursued an all-or-nothing strategy that can be poisonous to the legislative process."\nDaschle said this partisanship, even more pronounced in the House, was behind Congress' inability to pass a six-year, $300 billion highway and mass transit bill that could have created hundreds of thousands of jobs, an energy bill to make America less dependent on foreign oil and legislation enabling Americans to buy cheaper prescription drugs from abroad.\nSome of the 108th Congress' major achievements came in 2003, before election campaigning began in earnest. Besides the Medicare bill, lawmakers approved a $330 billion package of tax cuts, a $15 billion bill for international AIDS victims and an $87 billion measure for security and reconstruction in Iraq.\nIt also passed a popular do-not-call registry to bar unwanted telemarketer contacts and for the first time banned an abortion procedure, the so-called partial birth abortion. That ban is currently blocked by the courts.\nThe agenda this year has been lighter as the focus turned to the election. House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland said that as of Friday, the day before the House adjourned, it had met on only 102 days in 2004, the fewest in decades. That compared, he said, to 110 days in 1948, when President Truman won re-election by running against the "do-nothing Congress."\nBut there were some notable accomplishments, including passage of a mammoth $417.5 billion defense bill for the 2005 budget year, which began Oct. 1, including an initial $25 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.\nAmong other successes, Congress:\n-- Passed legislation, sought by social conservatives, making it a double crime to injure a pregnant woman and her fetus.\n-- Sent the president a $5.6 billion bill for developing and stockpiling antidotes for chemical and germ attacks.\n-- Approved a pensions relief package that could save employers about $80 billion.\n-- Passed a $146 billion package to extend three popular middle-class tax breaks.\nOn the negative side, lawmakers have completed only four of the 13 spending bills they must pass each year to keep the federal government operating. Besides a small bill for the District of Columbia, the other three were security-related -- two for defense and one for homeland security.
In addition to leaving the highway and energy bills for next year, this Congress also was unable to extend the 1996 welfare overhaul law and stalled on measures to limit class-action lawsuits and reduce medical malpractice claims.\nBills on asbestos compensation, patients' rights and changes in the immigration and bankruptcy laws also were postponed for another Congress.\nDemocrats made little headway again this year on their priorities: raising the minimum wage, prescription drug importation, classifying attacks on gays as hate crimes and giving mental health patients parity in insurance with other patients.\nBoth the House and the Senate fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to advance a top Republican priority, a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
