Under the leadership of Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, America's first female speaker of the House, the new Democratic majority in the House passed legislation to raise the minimum wage, allow the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare recipients, expand federal funding for stem cell research, lower interest rates on federal student loans, and remove tax breaks for oil and gas companies. The Senate, where the Democratic caucus holds a slim 51-49 majority, has failed to match the House's efficiency and, as a result, none of these legislative efforts have become law. The House and the Senate did reach an agreement on a spending bill that sets goals for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. On May 1st, Bush used just the second veto of his presidency to kill it (the first killed a stem-cell research bill).
The House Energy and Commerce Committee, now chaired by Democrats, invited Al Gore to return to Capitol Hill to testify that global warming is a planetary emergency. The leading Republican on the committee, Joe Barton of Ennis, Texas (who represents Mansfield in the U.S. Congress), denied that carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global warming, telling Gore "You're not just off a little, you're totally wrong." According to greenwire.com, Barton has declared on another occasion: "I cannot imagine any objective finding that CO2 is a pollutant. If that's true, God is a polluter." 
According to the National Journal, just 13 percent of Republican congressmen believed humans caused global warming (see photo at right).
It became clearer from congressional testimony that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired eight federal prosecutors because they had resisted pressure from Karl Rove's White House to subordinate law enforcement priorities to partisan politics.
An appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the writ of habeas corpus does not apply to prisoners in the American concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In March, a U.S. district court in Washington, D.C. found Vice-President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, guilty of obstruction of justice and perjury in the Valerie Plame investigation.
The Supreme Court told the Environmental Protection Agency to stop shirking its responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases. And later ruled in a 5 to 4 decision that the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act is legal. Pro-choice advocates fear that the ruling signals a turn in the judicial tide against a woman's right to choose, a consequence of Bush's selection of Samuel Alito as a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired last fall.
