"His predecessor... would have happily stayed up for an all-night bull session debating the nature of evil, quoting Schopenhauer and Niebuhr until the birds started chirping," Christopher Buckley writes in the magazine.
"Officials are likely to spend much of the session debating the pros and cons of the various stimulus options so that they can be ready to act should future data prove disappointing," Richard Berner, chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a report last week.
In the short term, this would mean a fiscal adjustment of around 2% of GDP a sizable impact on an economy as weak as America's.Given this, and general level of partisan enmity in Washington, it has been frustrating to watch Congress spend its valuable lame duck session debating earmark reform.
It will decide whether America's civilian courts have jurisdiction over the prisoners, who are held currently as "enemy combatants".See article: The Supreme Court wades into GuantIn an increasingly bitter row the Senate spent an all-night session debating who was to blame for blocking President George Bush's judicial nominees.
The timing comes on the day of a closed Senate Intelligence Committee session debating a bill that would reauthorize the controversial and not widely understood law, which is set to expire at the end of this year unless renewed by Congress.
Finding common ground on energy policy will be a test of the new majority, which spent most of the first month of its new session debating the controversial Keystone bill and a raft of amendments.
During the session debates on the law, Alejandro Robles, a lawmaker with the main Mexican leftist party, PRD, warned that the revision to the city's Public Spectacles Law is legally questionable because it does not cover the animals used in other arenas, such as cockfighting, which is still practiced in underground networks in Mexico.
Under the rules, she would be barred from speaking during the remaining 30 hours of the Sessions debate. .
At the conference, doctors and patients from North America and Europe crowded into sessions debating the merits of treating patients for only a few months at a time, or having patients take medication every other week.
During the strategy session, a debate raged for two hours over abstractions tied to terminology.
