The Senate has now voted, 51-46, to approve the $142.2 billion conference report (H.R. 1591; H Rept 110-107) fully funding the president's record-sized emergency supplemental war-funding request -- but with timetable goals for American soldiers' withdrawal from Iraq and billions of dollars in spending beyond his initial request. The House passed the conference report last night, and now it goes on to the president, who has promised repeatedly to veto it.

The Congress has acted with alacrity in moving to the post-veto "Supp 2.0" phase legislation, with several ideas in circulation on the Hill. No ideas have issued from the While House other than opposition to the withdrawal timetables and spending over and above the president's request.

But Bush will have time to mull while the conference report is:

• officially "enrolled"
• printed on parchment
• presented to the president

In all likelihoodhood, President Bush will have his first opportunity to veto a bill -- one that provides more war funding than he requested, conditioned by a "suggested" target date for troop removal -- on Tuesday of next week, the fourth annivesary of his announcement:

my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

What does Congress do for a yes-able encore, once Bush vetoes its full-funding of his record-sized war request?

On the House side, senior Democrats are warming to the idea of passing a set of smaller war funding packages, akin to a sequence of CRs, providing money for as little as two months at a time. Yesterday, House Defense Appropriations chair John Murtha (D-PA) said it is likely the next step will be a two-month supplemental bill... but Senate leaders have yet to signal support for such an approach.

The Council on Foreign Relations repeats reports that, with the Democrats' bill heading for a veto they cannot override, "there are growing indications they could get behind a two-month supplemental bill."

But, we humbly submit, a president who sees a non-binding "goal" for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Iraq as grounds for veto, just might take a dim view of Congress repeating the current debates and votes ten more times before he leaves office.

House and Senate conferees have just approved a $124.2 emergency war spending supplemental conference report. The report adopts the Senate version of the supplemental, which set a goal of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq by April 1, 2008.

The bill retains House-passed language setting requirements for resting, training and equipping troops, granting the president the authority to waive those restrictions as long as he publicly justifies the waivers. It also provides for a raise in the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour over two years -- the first such raise in close to a decade -- with a $4.8 billion dollar tax package.

The House is expected to vote on the bill Wednesday, with the Senate vote expected on Thursday. The president has vowed repeatedly to veto the bill, despite the minimium wage hike and billions more for Katrina recovery, agriculture disaster aid, military base closings and construction, veterans' health programs -- and all the money he requested for the war.

Last year, President Bush sent a $72 billion emergency supplemental war spending bill to Congress on February 16, 2006. He signed the bill 119 days later, on June 15, 2006. A year earlier, the dates were: February 14, 2005, Bush submits $82 billion supplemental bill; May 11, 2005, he signs it. On February 5, 2007, Bush submitted the largest emergency appropriations request ever submitted for any purpose by any president in U.S. history -- $99.6 billion. Yesterday, he said that further delay means "the readiness of our forces will suffer. This is unacceptable to me; it's unacceptable to you, and it's unacceptable to the vast majority of the American people." Bush color-code: RED! (severe risk)

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said recently that if the supplemental is not passed by April 15, the Army may need to curtail and suspend training for Reserve and National Guard units, slow up training of units scheduled to deploy to Iraq, and possibly cut funding for the upgrade and renovation of barracks and other facilities. Gates color-code: ORANGE (high risk)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) insists he is not coming anywhere close to micromanaging or imperiling the troops by delaying emergency funding, citing a CRS memo dated March 28, 2007, stating that, "Based on monthly obligation rates, the Army could finance the O+M cost of both its baseline and war program... through most of July 2007."Reid color-code: BLUE (guarded)

Center for Defense Information (CDI):

To sort through the political babble from the Democrats in Congress, the president, the secretary of defense, his Army chief of staff, and the acting Army secretary, the CRS [memo] explains the issues [such as] how both the executive branch and Congress exploit so-called "emergency" spending to augment routine spending, the political and constitutional issues surrounding the Congress' authority to refuse to fund a conflict that Commander-in-Chief Bush seeks to pursue, reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many more.

CDI color code: Green (low-risk)

Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), whose home was recently raided as part of an FBI investigation to his ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, has resigned his seat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Rep. John Doolittle, whose house was searched by the FBI in an influence-peddling investigation, said Thursday he will step down temporarily from the House Appropriations Committee.

The announcement by the nine-term California Republican came one day after the disclosure that agents had raided his home in Oakton, Va. In the search last Friday, the FBI had a warrant for information connected with a fundraising business run by Doolittle's wife, Julie, that had done work for convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

"I understand how the most recent circumstances may lead some to question my tenure on the Appropriations Committee," Doolittle wrote House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

What remains now on the war funding front is to await the promised Bush veto of the record-sized supplemental appropriation bill Congress is expected to send to the president in the next week or so. Meanwhile, echoing the sentiment we expressed last week:

Since the funding conditions may well, for all we know, end up as ignorable timetable "goals," it seems that the president is jumping the gun in issuing veto threats...

Rep. James Moran (D-VA) asked this question yesterday:

This bill already represents a heck of a lot of compromise... Readiness standards will have a waiver, and drop-dead dates [for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Iraq] will probably be suggestions, so what's he vetoing?

That said, speculation and evidence are mounting that Democrats plan a post-veto supplemental bill removing the language calling for a date for the return home of America's fighting men and women, or making the date "advisory".

More than anything else, the sticking point in today's discussion about the war spending supplemental appropriations bill at the White House involved the timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers on the ground. President Bush and House Minority Leader Boehner (R-OH) argued con and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) pressed the pro line, but those on the ground spoke loudest of all.

As Bloomberg reported today:

The meeting occurred on one of the worst days of violence in Baghdad since Bush in January ordered 30,000 more troops to Iraq to bolster security. Car bombings in the Iraqi capitol killed at least 166 people, including 127 who died in an attack on a market in a mainly Shiite Muslim district.

Also on the ground was Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who aided and abetted the Pelosi position at a press conference in Amman, Jordan:

I think the debate itself, and I think that the strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably has had a positive impact [by signalling to Iraqis] that this is not an open-ended commitment."

Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly (CQ $) met with key House Democrats and members of the Out of Iraq Caucus Tuesday to discuss reconciling differences regarding Iraq troop withdrawal language in the House and Senate supplemental bills.

According to a Democratic aide briefed after the meeting, "The [conference] committee will likely keep the [waivable House] readiness components but take the [non-binding] Senate language on goals" for a withdrawal date.

We speculated here that the post-veto conference committee "may yet emerge with the Senate's non-binding troop withdrawal language," but also noted:

Given close votes in both the House (218-212) and Senate (51-47), any significant changes in the conference report could reduce vital Democratic support that would likely be needed to pass a final version of the bill.

Ask a friend (who doesn't do fiscal policy) to sum up the fiscal policy of the Bush era, and more likely than not, they'll tell you it's been one of "big spending."

That's been my experience, at least. And Republican presidential candidates seem to be playing off that perception. Many of them have been issuing a call for greater fiscal discipline, achieved by spending restraint and reductions.

None of the candidates are terribly specific about where the spending reductions would come from. That could be because, aside from homeland security and the military, the Bush era has not seen a substantial uptick in spending. Many agency budgets have been cut. And these spending cuts are making a visible impact on people- the Katrina disaster and the tragic conditions at Walter Reed hospital are a good examples of where underfunding has affected the quality of government services.

Spending will probably go up just to recover lost ground or maintain the current level of services, as well as to meet the nation's growing needs in health care, education, and public investment.

In his column today, Stan Collender ($) asserts that the inevitability of increased spending will make a tax increase necessary.

In other words, unless there is far more tolerance for higher deficits than has yet been the case, a significant tax increase is in the offing.

This is not a political statement and should not be taken as an indictment of either party. Republicans and Democrats will both want to boost spending in some areas and be powerless to stop increases in other areas.

But it's impossible to read the federal budget tea leaves these days without honestly admitting that federal spending is going to rise in every category to meet the country's needs and our expectations of how well the government should perform.

Collender thinks that public perceptions about fiscal policy will change as people feel the impact of the decline in the quantity and quality of government services. That seems right. But I also think the people who shape public perceptions (the media, politicians, advocates, etc.) about government could speed this transformation along, too, if they did a better job of contextualizing and disaggregating government spending, as well as playing up the real impact that spending cuts have made on people all over the country.

Craig excerpts an interesting article below that reminds us that there was once a time when the median wage tracked productivity- or, as I like to think, a time when people were paid what they earned.

It was the post-WW II era, from 1945 to 1973, the time modern liberals want to return the economy to. Society was more equal. CEOs were paid a fraction of what they're paid now, the minimum wage was higher, and strong unions extracted fair wages from stingy employers. What's more, productivity rate and GDP growth was high, despite (or maybe because?!?) high tax rates on the wealthy. Everything was gravy.

But this paper (via TAPPED) shows that all wasn't right in one important area: fiscal policy. The U.S. still spent about half as much of its GDP as European countries did on education, health, unemployment, family benefits, and other non-military types of spending. Take a look at this chart

As best I can tell, this chart doesn't take into account corporate or charitable spending on similar things. However, it seems unlikely that these actors could make up the wide gulf between US and European spending levels. It'd be worth checking out, regardless.

The point is that better labor market policies are necessary but insufficient remedies to inequality. Good redistributive fiscal policy has to be a part of the solution, too.

After both houses of Congress moved with close to record speed right before recess to pass the president's appropriations request -- the largest in history -- the president wasted no time in pushing everything back to square one by promising to veto whatever might emerge from conference once Congress returns from recess.

Today, President Bush appeared to castigate Congress for wasting everybody's time by adding conditions to a funding bill:

The Democrat leaders in, Democratic leaders in Congress are bent using a bill that funds our troops to make a political statement about the war. They need to do it quickly and get it to my desk, so I can veto it. And then Congress can get down to the business of funding our troops without strings and without further delay.

Since the funding conditions may well, for all we know, end up as ignorable timetable "goals," it seems that the president is jumping the gun in issuing veto threats that bring us back to go again.

Tax day is coming up; want to be disgusted by what your income taxes are actually paying for? Check out this new report from the National Priorities Project.