Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi promised the American public an energetic and ambitious agenda, to be accomplished within the first 100 hours of her tenure. With that promise in mind, the Democrat majority in the House pushed through several “progressive” agenda items including an increase in the minimum wage, reduction in student loan rates, and timed withdrawal from the central front in the war on terror in Iraq.

At the end of the first 100 days not a single of those items has reached the President’s desk, or been enacted into law. While long on rhetoric, the Democrat agenda has been short on success. Gradually, though belatedly, it has begun to dawn upon the Democrat leadership in Congress that leadership requires – well, leadership!

Promising a spirit of bi-partisanship hitherto unheard of in Washington DC, the new Democrat leadership immediately embarked on a program of minority (read that Republican) suppression, greater still than that which the Democrats had claimed the Republicans had imposed upon them, when the GOP was in control of Congress.

This tit-for-tat agenda, the very approach the Democrats had campaigned against, and the business-as-usual approach they had railed against when the Republicans held the majority, epitomizes the reason the American public distrusts and reviles Congress. The “he did it first” appeal so often heard from Washington reminds too many of us as the same type of childish nonsense we suffer with our unruly five-year-olds.

For some unfathomable reason, we expect more from our elected leaders, than we do from our five-year-olds. History would suggest these expectations to be unfounded.

Quite honestly, more than a little of the blame must be placed upon President George W Bush. When the Republicans held both the Legislative majority and the White House, had he been a little more willing to exert his Constitutional authority, and actually veto a few of the more egregious Republican sponsored legislation placed upon his desk, he would be in a better position today to threaten this Democrat majority with his disapproval.

It was the absence of veto on his part that has emboldened the new leadership to believe that he simply does not have the stomach for confrontation. The “new tone” he chose to bring to Washington, along with his non-confrontational approach to the attacks he has suffered from his first days in office, have served to convince the Democrat leadership that he will cave on his principles, once he is confronted with the legislation on his desk.

Thus far, the specter of filibuster in the Senate, where the Democrat majority is tenuous at best, is all that has prevented the President from that legislative confrontation. The “progressive” legislation the House of Representatives pushed through with little or no debate has come to a screeching halt in the Senate, where the rules prevent such a legislative railroad.

This hiatus from confrontation is soon to end, as the Appropriations Bill to provide funding to our troops in Iraq, loaded with pork-barrel spending, is expected to make its way to his desk in the coming weeks. Week-kneed Republicans, unwilling to prevent the process from derailing American troops in the field, are allowing this abomination to more forward, placing the onus on the President to veto the legislation, sending it back to Congress to be re-addressed.

The American people, meanwhile, are not fooled. Despite the machinations of the Mainstream Media to toe the Democrat line, and portray the President as the villain should he veto the bill, thus cutting off funding to the troops, the public is aware of this President’s unwavering support of the military.

A compromise will be struck, but only after much posturing and pompous rhetoric from the Democrat leadership in Congress. Congressional poll numbers, lower still than the President’s, and public outcry will convince that leadership to change their approach, or suffer the wrath the GOP saw in 2006.