It's official: Congress certifies Obama's victory

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama is officially the next president of the United States, Congress declared yesterday in fulfilling its centuries-old constitutional duty to certify and tally the electoral college vote from each state.

Republicans joined Democrats in a standing ovation as Vice President Dick Cheney, in his role as Senate president, announced from the podium that Obama had achieved a majority of votes and would be the 44th president on Jan. 20.

Speaking before a joint session of the House and Senate, Cheney confirmed the results of the Nov. 4 election that Obama and next Vice President Joe Biden had received 365 electoral votes, while the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin garnered 173 votes. The state-by-state tally took about 30 minutes.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

With a friendlier Congress in power and a new administration just over the horizon, labor groups renewed their push yesterday for two items high on their wish list.

One would make it easier to sue over past pay discrimination. House leaders joined the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Supreme Court plaintiff Lilly Ledbetter to call for a bill overturning the high court ruling to restore a rule allowing workers to challenge each paycheck as a separate act of discrimination that can be challenged.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she plans for a vote on the bill today.

"It is of the highest priority to us," Pelosi said. "It is not only about what this means to women and their families, it's very important because of what it means to the economic security of our country."

The other labor priority would make it easier for workers to organize into unions by signing check-off cards instead of voting in elections that unions say are often manipulated by companies.

The AFL-CIO released a new poll it commissioned that found that 73 percent of Americans support the legislation.

"In today's economic squeeze, workers need the freedom to bargain their way into the middle class more than ever," the AFL-CIO's president, John Sweeney, said in a statement.

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President-elect Barack Obama introduced close friend Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia yesterday as the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, casting Kaine as the future of a party adapting to its new bigfoot status in Washington.

Obama, citing his broad-based victory in November, said Kaine - a centrist, culturally conservative Democrat - represents precisely the new politics that the Democratic Party must embody to grow and thrive.

Kaine, he said, shares the "pragmatic, progressive philosophy that was at the heart of my campaign and will be at the heart of my administration."

Obama also had glowing words for outgoing chairman Howard Dean, calling him a "visionary" in his expansion of the party's electoral map.

SCOTT HELMAN

WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton is quietly building a new State Department team with seasoned diplomats as she prepares for her confirmation hearings next week, according to Democratic sources and officials who are familiar with the transition.

Clinton has settled on choices for a number of top positions, including former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke to be special adviser for Pakistan and Afghanistan, and is almost certain to appoint former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross to be her special adviser for the Middle East and Iran, they said.

Her choices for top positions appear to reflect a desire to bring back or retain current expertise in what will probably become President-elect Barack Obama's most serious foreign policy challenges.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama is considering dissolving a White House-based homeland security panel created in after the 9/11 attacks and will restructure counterterrorism policy under intelligence veteran John Brennan.

The White House Homeland Security Council will remain for a while at least, until Obama finishes a review of its mission, two officials close to the incoming administration said yesterday.

Ultimately, however, it could be folded into the National Security Council, with all counterterror policy overseen by a single adviser reporting to the president.

For that job, Obama has tapped Brennan, a career CIA official who was the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Brennan had been considered Obama's leading candidate to direct the CIA, but he bowed out late last year after critics said he was too close to the Bush administration's interrogation policies.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President-elect Barack Obama will meet Mexico's president on Monday, Obama's office confirmed yesterday.

The get-together with Felipe Calderón will be at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington.

"There is a long-standing tradition, since 1980, of US presidents meeting with the Mexican president prior to being sworn in to underscore the important relationship between the United States and Mexico," Obama's office said. "This meeting is in keeping with that tradition."

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