| On
January 23 |
| Bush’s
State of the Union speech to focus on just
a few themes |
agencies
President
Bush’s State of the Union speech next week
will avoid the traditional laundry list of initiatives
and focus on a few issues, such as energy and
health care, where he might find common ground
with the Democratic-controlled Congress.
Bush
is considering ways to make health care more
affordable and accessible and seek the
power to raise gas mileage standards for passenger
cars, according to
former administration and industry officials.
The approach to Tuesday night’s speech, as outlined Thursday by White House
press secretary Tony Snow, reflects the current political landscape: Voters in
November ousted Republicans as the party in charge on Capitol Hill and Bush now
faces skeptical majority Democrats rather than compliant GOP lawmakers.
The speech comes less than two weeks after Bush
announced a big buildup of U.S. troops in Iraq.
With Bush’s low approval ratings, a narrowly tailored national
address might keep the public from tuning out or reaching for the remote, White
House officials reason.
”I just think some of the old State of the Union formulas have kind of
run their course,” Snow said.
The president plans to highlight the war in Iraq
and the fight against terrorism as well as
immigration and education, Snow said.
On the school front, for example, Bush is expected
to urge that Congress renew the No Child Left
Behind law, the signature domestic policy of
his first term.
In last year’s speech, Bush rebuked critics of his stay-the-course strategy
in Iraq; at the time, more than 2,240 American troops had died. This year he
will defend his plan for a war that now has claimed more than 3,000 U.S. lives.
Democrats have chosen Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia,
a vocal critic of the war who has a son serving
in Iraq, to give their party’s response. Colorado Sen.
Ken Salazar, who grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, will deliver the Democrats’ first-ever
Spanish-language preview address to the president’s State of the Union.
The costs of the war and the deficit probably
will preclude Bush from announcing expensive
new programs.
As he did last year, when he said America was ”addicted to oil,” Bush
is expected to bemoan U.S. reliance on foreign sources of energy and express
support for alternative fuels.
The president is expected to challenge Congress
to fix Social Security’s
long-term solvency problem, preserve tax cuts, join him in balancing the budget
within five years and work to make the costs of the war more transparent in the
federal budget.
According to two auto industry officials, the
president may seek the power to raise fuel
economy standards for passenger cars. The two
officials, who
spoke
only condition of anonymity because they did not want to pre-empt Bush’s
address, said it probably would be part of a plan to offer more incentives for
increasing alternative fuels and accelerating the number of vehicles running
on alternative fuel.
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| U.S.
Attorney General at the Senate |
| Gonzales
defends Bush's revised domestic spying |
agencies
U.S.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fended off
lawmakers on Thursday 18 who demanded to know
why the administration took more than five years
to obtain court approval of its war-time domestic
spying.
"
I somewhat take issue ... with (Republican) Senator
Arlen Specter's innuendo that this is something
we could have pulled off the shelf and done in
a matter of days or weeks," Gonzales told
the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"This is
a very complicated application. We worked on
it a long time." Gonzales announced an abrupt end to the warrantless
electronic surveillance program on Wednesday,
just two weeks after Democrats took control
of the U.S. Congress, promising investigations
and
legislation to bring the program in line with
the law. Critics have charged that President George
W. Bush overstepped his authority after the
September
11 attacks with the domestic spying program
as well as other measures such as holding
terrorism
suspects indefinitely without charges, and
interrogations that some said amounted to
torture. Gonzales said the Justice Department had recently
reached an agreement with a secret court, which
gives out warrants under the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, that would allow swift approval
to monitor international communications. Specter of Pennsylvania, who headed the Judiciary
Committee when Congress was controlled by Republicans
the past two years, said the administration should
have moved faster to get court approval of the
spying.
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