Congressional Democrats scale back ambitions

Gone are the grandiose promises of legislation to bring the troops home from Iraq, which dominated the Democratic agenda last year and nearly ground business on Capitol Hill to a halt.

Today, senior Democrats are talking of simply requiring the president to seek congressional approval for any agreement with the Iraqi government to maintain U.S. forces in the country past next year.

There is little talk of rewriting the tax code or dramatically expanding access to health insurance, and no discussion of reviving the effort to overhaul immigration laws.

"We have the presidential election. We have a number of very important House and Senate races," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said last week. "Our time is really squeezed."

On the environmental front, Democratic leaders are pledging to build on last year's landmark fuel-efficiency legislation by creating a new cap-and-trade program to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The focus on global warming has been one of the most dramatic shifts since Democrats took control of Congress.

But the rest of the party's legislative agenda is notable mainly for its modesty.

New education, healthcare and infrastructure initiatives -- recently outlined by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) -- are essentially a collection of minor proposals.

Pelosi has talked of allocating more money for medical research, creating a common electronic medical record and spending more to repair aging highways and bridges.

Democrats continue to criticize the Bush administration's conduct of the campaign against global terrorism. They are calling on the president to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and renounce waterboarding as an interrogation technique.

But matching their dimmed hopes of forcing an end to the war, few Democrats expect to be able to pass legislation to force the president's hand.

Democrats, who have tried to focus on the strains the Iraq war has put on the military, may make a renewed attempt to mandate more rest between deployments for troops serving abroad. Last year, legislation to do that was twice blocked by Senate Republicans.