Word: congressed
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Still, given that more than 3 million jobs have been lost since Obama took office - and in that time his approval ratings have plummeted - Congress feels more must be done. Indeed, the Congressional Black Caucus, upset that Main Street, and especially hard-hit black communities, has received little aid compared with the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, last week held up a crucial vote on financial regulatory reform, an Obama Administration priority. And some 128 House members, including 17 Republicans, have banded together to form the Jobs Now! Caucus, working with the leadership to craft a jobs bill...
...course, Congress is pretty busy right now, and not just with health care reform. There are still five of the 12 appropriations bills to pass this year as well as a much-dreaded but necessary measure to raise the federal debt ceiling to $13 trillion. With all these must-pass bills lining up and an imminent sense that the spigot will soon be turned off, Democrats are starting to treat everything as a potential jobs bill. "The appropriations bills can also be looked at as jobs bills," says a Senate Democratic leadership aide. "There's money in them for projects...
That's been most apparent in Honduras, where the country's congress this week refused to reinstate democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, a leftist who was ousted in a June 28 military coup. The Obama Administration condemned Zelaya's overthrow as an affront to Latin America's fledgling democracies. But conservatives led by GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint - who blocked Valenzuela's confirmation to protest Obama's stance - and Bush Administration holdovers such as the U.S.'s ambassador to the Organization of American States, Lewis Amselem (who was finally replaced this week), pushed Obama into brokering a deal...
...Western Hemisphere Affairs last month. But for a job with such a long title, he may find it's short on clout these days. Ostensibly, Valenzuela is President Obama's new point man on Latin America; in reality, that job looks to be under the control of Republicans in Congress and conservatives inside Obama's own diplomatic corps. In fact, when it comes to U.S. policy in Latin America - as events this week in Honduras suggest - it's often hard to tell if George W. Bush isn't still President...
...officials had been optimistic that even if the Honduran Congress refused to restore Zelaya before last Sunday's election, it would at least vote after the election to let him finish the remaining two months of his term. It would be a good-faith sign that the country was returning to constitutional order. Instead the legislators, emboldened by the success of the coup, poked both Obama and constitutional order in the eye again this week. Coup-happy forces in other Latin American countries can only feel emboldened as well. (See pictures of post-coup violence in Honduras...