Dubya Faces A Divided Congress

George W. Bush's claim of "I'm a uniter, not a divider" faces its toughest test on Capitol Hill.

Now that the Texas governor is president-elect, Republicans will control the White House and both chambers of Congress for the first time since Ike, but with no mandate and with little room to maneuver.

"He's gonna have to fashion proposals that bring together conservatives in his own party and Democratic moderates - and hope that's he gonna be able to keep that narrow, narrow majority together for a couple of key pieces of legislation," independent political analyst Stuart Rothenberg told CBSNews.com.

In the closest and most disputed presidential outcome in more than a century, Bush won the White House following weeks of legal wrangling over Florida's vote with Democrat Al Gore. The Texas governor is the first presidential winner since 1888 to prevail only in the electoral vote and not in the popular vote.

As for the new 107th Congress, Republicans will retain control by the slimmest of margins when it convenes on Jan. 3.

In the House, the GOP under Speaker Dennis Hastert will shrink to a nine-seat majority over the Democrats under Minority Leader Dick Gephardt. And in the Senate, Majority Leader Trent Lott and his Republicans are now evenly split with the Democrats at 50 seats apiece - the second outright tie in U.S. history. While Republicans will soon have Vice President Dick Cheney to break any tie votes, they lack the numbers to overcome any Democratic procedural moves that could bring the Senate to a standstill.

Already, Senate Democrats have demanded a power-sharing arrangement with their Republican colleagues.

"We will not be satisfied with anything less than a 50-50 split in the responsibilities and opportunities presented to this caucus and their (GOP) caucus in the next Congress," Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle has said.

While sounding a note of greater bipartisan cooperation, Lott has drawn the line on sharing committee chairmanships with the Democrats.

"We've got to deal with the realm of possibility, not fondest dream," Lott has said. "Somebody has to be in charge, and we will be very clear about what we will do here."

Rothenberg said real power sharing isn't in the cards.

"Could there be some arrangements where some (Senate) committees might actually have equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans and/or adjustments for staff and the like? Yeah, I think there could be that," he said. "But anybody that thinks that most Republicans who are chairing committees or are in line to chairing committees are going to give up the gavel or give up half of the gavel are just crazy."

Looking back, you could call this déjà vu all over again. In 1953, Republican Dwight Eisenhower moved into the White House. Over in the 83rd Congress, the GOP held the House by eight seats. And in the Senate, the Democrats led with 48 seats to te Republicans' 47. But since Oregon independent Wayne Morse sided with the GOP, Vice President Richard Nixon played the Senate tiebreaker for the Republicans.

Now to the present. During the presidential campaign, Bush bragged about how he was able to bring together Republicans and Democrats in the Texas legislature to get things done. Indeed, the second President Bush could conceivably follow Bill Clinton's political playbook and "triangulate" himself between his own party and the Democrats in Congress. And talk by the Bush camp about naming Democrats to the Cabinet has bubbled for weeks.

"But once you get down to the nitty-gritty," Rothenberg said, "the issues - whether it's prescription drugs, patients' bill of rights, Social Security, taxes - the question is whether he really reaches out to swing Democratic votes rather than whether he puts a Democrat into his Cabinet."

Bush enters the Oval Office with a weak hand, given the close and disputed presidential election as well as the tight margins between the two parties on Capitol Hill. And Bush's party could give him more partisan headaches than the Democratic opposition, given the more conservative bent of GOP congressional leaders from Lott in the Senate to Hastert's colleagues Dick Armey and Tom DeLay (two fellow Texans) in the House.

"It's hard to finesse ideology," said Rothenberg. "On the other hand, if he's popular, if he can convince Republicans that there's only so much that they can get - and I think he's in a fair position to that - he might find that DeLay and Armey and the conservative activists give him more slack than one might ordinarily think."

"He's gonna have to schmooze them. He's gonna woo them. And he's gonna have to work them just like he would have to work some swing Democrats" he will need, Rothenberg added.

One potential landmine for the Bush administration: filling a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the land that was a legal pit stop in his post-election battle for the White House with Al Gore.

"The first Supreme Court nomination could be a bloodbath that would make impeachment and this post-election election period look like child's play, because everybody recognizes the importance of the judiciary," said Rothenberg. "I think they recognize it now even more than they did before we got ito this legal haggling over who got elected president, who won Florida."

And so, Rothenberg added, the first Supreme Court opening "will require the utmost skill on the part of Bush that somehow (he'll) have to convince conservatives that the person he's appointed is a conservative - and (convince) moderates that the person he's appointed is a moderate. And that will take some personal skills. It also may mean he'll have to pick somebody who's relatively obscure."

What about the federal budget surplus? In a recent op-ed piece in The Washington Post, former Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Robert Reischauer warned the surplus could be soon squandered by a government more divided than ever in modern times.

"If the new president and the 107th Congress do what comes most naturally, we may have to wait another 70 years to celebrate such an accomplishment" as a budget that's in surplus, he wrote.

Now head of the Urban Institute, Reischauer argued four factors could pressure the new president and Congress to spend the surplus money for short-term gain. First, the new president will need to prove his legitimacy. Second, more projections of new and larger surpluses will only heighten the desire to spend. Third, both parties in Congress will aim to please interest groups with federal money in time for the 2002 elections. And finally, fears - real or not - of an economic slowdown or recession will give the White House and Capitol Hill yet another reason to max out the surplus.

"Worse yet," added Reischauer, "we will wake up after the fiscal feast to discover that the surplus has been squandered while the nation's foremost fiscal challenge - providing for the baby boomers retirement - has not been addressed because that required difficult choices and political courage."

In the short term, an economic slowdown - if it occurs - could ironically offer a political silver lining for Bush.

"If we do have a soft landing and there are no foreign policy crises, the country won't demand a particularly dramatic presidency - and if he does one or two things well, that may be good enough," said Rothenberg.

"That way," he explained, Bush "could go to conservatives and say, 'We can't afford a big tax cut now.' And that way, he could go to Democrats and say, 'Sorry, we're gonna have to keep spending very tight. We can't spend money on new programs now.'"

"And in a sense, the status quo may be the best of all worlds - as long as we do have a soft landing," Rothenberg concluded.