As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) desperately attempts to clear the schedule in order to try to ram cap-and-trade down Americans’ throats, Senate and House Democrats are not helping him by threatening to fight with each other this week over funding for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

They’re squabbling over $22.8 billion House appropriators added to the supplemental bill.   House lawmakers point out that it’s fully paid for with offsets, such as $11.7 billion in rescissions to government programs that no longer need funding.

The problem for Senate Democratic leaders is that the House bill may not be able to pass with the extra spending, including $10 billion for an Education Jobs Fund to supposedly save 140,000 school jobs over the next year.

President Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) has further complicated passage by the Senate with threatening to veto the bill.  Scooter does not like the House idea to pay for the education fund by rescinding money for the administration’s “Race to the Top” initiative, which rewards academically improved schools with grants.

A Senate Democratic aide said leaders are still going to go ahead and schedule a vote on the House legislation. If it fails, the aide said, “we’ll have to figure out what to do.”

Senate sources say Reid is scheduling the vote to prove to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) it can’t pass the Senate.   Reid would then ask the House to accept the Senate version, which costs $58.8 billion and provides $33 billion for the troops.

According to Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned Senate Republicans on Tuesday that if Congress didn’t come up with the money by month’s end, he could not pay the troops.

Senate Democrats have to work on unemployment benefits and small-business legislation before they can even address the military funds situation.
Carte Goodwin will take the oath of office to replace the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) this afternoon, giving Democrats 59 Senate seats.  The Senate will then move to end a Republican filibuster of legislation to extend jobless benefits through November. The legislation will also extend, by three months, the filing deadline for the homebuyers tax credit, a proposal sponsored by Reid.  I’m shocked.

The deadline to claim the tax credit was June 30, but many homebuyers with contracts missed it because of a backlog in paperwork.  The problem is especially bad in states with high foreclosure rates, such as Nevada.  Harry’s trying to get re-elected.

Democratic leaders expect to have 60 votes to file cloture and advance the bill once Goodwin joins them. Reid scheduled a vote on a similar measure before the July 4 recess. It fell one vote short after Republican turncoats Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Olympia Snowe (Maine) voted for it.

Republicans could insist on using the full 30 hours of post-cloture time mandated by Senate rules if they have the intestinal fortitude to wreck the Democrats’ carefully planned schedule.   However, Dinghy Harry believes he can work out an agreement with the BeltwayRepublicans (over cocktails) to move quickly to the small-business and supplemental bills.

 Reid bragged to colleagues late last week:

The Republican leader and I are working on a way to move forward on small business.  I think we have a pretty good path of what we’re going to do on that. After we finish that, it’s my intention to move to the supplemental appropriations bill.

Reid said he would need to file another motion to stop a filibuster of the military spending bill, but added, “I think we can work out the time on that so it doesn’t take an inordinate amount of time.”

Time is Reid’s biggest enemy.  He has promised to start the cap-and-trade debate the week of July 26.   That would allot the Democrats just two weeks to pass energy reform and confirm Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan by the August recess, scheduled to begin Aug. 6.

Reid has threatened to cut a week off the Senate recess if the Senators do not kick it into gear.

Reid told colleagues, referring to the work period that began on July 12:

As everyone knows here, we’re going to be here four or five weeks.  The two leaders, Democrat and Republican, were betting on four weeks rather than five weeks, but we’ll need a little cooperation to get that done.

What’s the rush?  The Mid-term Elections aren’t until November.

Mark Halperin in his Time.com article espouses a theory:

Under pressure, the Democrats are cracking. On both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, there is a realization that Nancy Pelosi’s hold on the speakership is in true jeopardy; that losing control of the Senate is not out of the question; and that time, once the Democrats’ best friend, is now their mortal enemy. Since January, when Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, the President’s party has tried to downplay in public what its pollsters have been saying in private: that Obama’s alienation of independents and white voters, along with the enthusiasm gap between the right and the left, means that Republicans are on a trajectory to pick up massive numbers of House and Senate seats, perhaps even to regain control of Congress.

…What has kept the easily panicked denizens of Capitol Hill from open revolt until now was a shared confidence that there was still plenty of time to turn things around, and that the White House had a strategy to do just that. 

The two-part scheme was pretty straightforward. First, Democrats planned a number of steps to head off, or at least soften, the anti-Washington, anti-incumbent, anti-Obama sentiment that cost them the Massachusetts seat. Pass health care, and other measures to demonstrate that Democrats could get things done for the middle class; continue to foster those fabled green shoots on the economy, harvesting the positive impact of the massive economic stimulus bill passed early in the Administration; heighten the contrast between the two parties by delivering on Wall Street reform and a campaign-funding law to counteract January’s controversial Supreme Court decision. Use all of those elements to contrast the Democrats’ policies under Obama with the Republicans’ policies under Bush, rather than allow the midterms to be a referendum on the incumbent party.

The second strand of the Democrats’ plan was more prosaic and mechanical. Recruit strong candidates for open seats. Leverage the White House and congressional majorities to raise more money than the other side. Make mischief by playing up the divisions between the Tea Party and the more traditional elements of the Republican Party, in part to increase the chances that more extreme, less electable candidates edge out moderates in GOP primary battles. Do extensive opposition research and targeted messaging in the fall to delegitimize Republican candidates in the minds of centrist voters. Coordinate below the radar with labor unions, environmentalists and other allies on get-out-the-vote efforts, focusing on young, nonwhite and first-time voters who came out for Obama in 2008.

The problem the Democrats face is a big one.  The sleeping giant has awakened and he’s in a foul mood.  And unless the Beltway Elitist Republicans starting legislating like they remember who elected them, they’ll have a lot in common with their Democrat colleagues:  funemployment.

Sources:  drudgereport.com, thehill.com, time.com