Election issues take center stage at Capitol

House, Senate will reconvene for three weeks

WASHINGTON - The House and Senate will reconvene today after back-to-back political conventions, and both parties are eager to use the three-week session to show voters why their candidates are the ones to fix the economy and lower energy prices.

The only matter of business that must be accomplished is passing a bill to keep the government running from Oct. 1 through the Nov. 4 election and until Congress returns. Even that might not be easy. Republicans are threatening to block the spending bill if Democrats do not give them a vote on ending a quarter-century freeze on new offshore drilling.

Some lawmakers hold out hopes that an energy bill that has eluded them all year might come together. Democratic leaders also would like to pass a Pentagon spending bill so they can tell voters that the military's needs are covered until October 2009.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday blamed President Bush and Republicans for the latest dismal unemployment statistics and said Democrats would respond with the second economic aid plan of the year. "We must take immediate action to strengthen our economy," Pelosi said.

That theme was repeated in Pennsylvania last week by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. "We've had eight consecutive months of job loss," he said at a town hall meeting.

But the odds are not good that Congress will act on energy or the economy. Republicans have made the Democrats' reluctance to open up more offshore areas to oil drilling the major theme in their effort to minimize the expected loss of GOP House and Senate seats in November. Because Republican leaders feel they have Democrats on the defensive, there is not much talk of compromise.

Republicans and the White House also object to the cost of Democratic proposals for a second economic relief measure, which could include public works investment, disaster aid, and heating subsidies to low-income families. Rebates for taxpayers, the centerpiece of the $168 billion plan that Bush signed in February, are less likely this round.

A group of eight Democrats and eight Republicans is putting together a compromise energy bill that would allow drilling off the coast of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, and Florida's Gulf Coast; invest $20 billion on developing petroleum-free motor vehicles; and extend expiring renewable energy tax credits.

Majority leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, would like to make the measure a new foundation for a debate when the Senate considers the issue, probably in the session's second week.

In the House, Pelosi has used whatever means available to prevent Republicans from getting a vote on offshore drilling. She said she will introduce a bill this month that would mirror the Senate's drilling compromise, but only as part of a proposal that makes oil companies pay higher taxes and more government royalties, and increases subsidies for renewable energy and mass transit.

Republicans were not impressed. "The reality is that this will be a political document," Representative Thaddeus McCotter, Republican of Michigan.

Lawmakers are under pressure to extend more than $50 billion in tax breaks, including for renewable energy, that either expired at the end of 2007 year or that run out at the end of this year. They also must again fix the alternative minimum tax to prevent millions of mainly upper-middle income earners from being taxed an additional $2,300 on average.