Schadenfruede

The Senate joins the House in overriding a Presidential veto and passing the Water Resources Act. The President learns he isn't a king and things that he has nothing to do with can become law.

The words "lame" and "duck" come to mind.

UPDATE: The Employment Non-Discrimination Act, providing protections for LBG individuals, passed the House, too. There was a lot of controversy over this bill because of the eventual dropping of protections for the transgendered. This remains, however, the first major piece of civil rights legislation since the Americans With Disabilities Act.

It won't matter much until they do something on Iraq, but the Democratic Congress is moving the ball forward in other areas.

UPDATE II: Of course, not all is right with the world:

The House on Thursday approved a free trade agreement with Peru, the first under a Democratic majority in Congress that has declared that labor rights and the environment must be central parts of all such pacts.

The vote was 285-132, a comfortable margin of victory in the House. Trade deals have always been a hard sell among House members, mainly Democrats who have equated them with job losses and soaring trade deficits [...]

Still, many Democrats, including some freshmen with ties to organized labor or from districts that have seen jobs disappear overseas, remained skeptical.

Democratic freshman Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire talked of plant closures in her state. "Why can't we have a moratorium? Why rush? Why take a chance?"

The good news is that Democrats, led by the freshman, voted against the bill by a 116-109 count.

Peru is not a good place to be a worker: they just declared a mining strike illegal despite the fact that 2 million children work in their mines and the average wage is $3.60 a day. The labor and environmental protections in the bill are largely advisory. The fact that the freshman Dems voted largely against it, however, bodes well for the future.