Bush's decision last Thursday to provide federal financial backing only to researchers working with existing stem cell lines provided at least one topic of heated debate on Capitol Hill this week.
After announcing that federal grants would be available early next year for research on stem-cell colonies already derived from destroyed embryos, many research supporters and patients' advocacy groups felt that the President had taken too conservative a stance by stifling potential scientific discoveries.
On the other side, social conservatives, many of whom see such research as equivalent to the taking of pre-natal human lives, saw the policy as too liberal.
Either way, skeptics pointed out that the President's qualified support represented a shrewd -- albeit transparent -- political move that allowed him to straddle the fence between two dissenting Republican constituencies.
Fence-sitting or not, Bush's future ability to work with the legislative branch could be partially decided in the next few months, as Republicans and Democrats alike seek to pick up seats during Congressional redistricting.
"It's political hardball, state by state, and anything can happen," Representative Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, who is in charge of national Republican redistricting strategy, told The New York Times.
According to Davis, by the November 2002 election, the Republicans could be ahead eight to ten seats due to redistricting alone. Texas and California, which will both gain seats due to recent population growth, will be among the most hotly contested battlegrounds this year after the latest census statistics are released.
In its first opportunity to take a stance on affirmative action, the Bush Administration upheld Clinton's previous position by asking the Supreme Court to uphold a Transportation Department program intended to help minority contractors.
The case grew out of a challenge from a white-owned construction company that lost a bid to a minority contractor via the Transportation Department's "disadvantaged business enterprise program.
Back on the Hill, the House and Senate are working to reconcile conflicting education bills, acknowledging that their original criteria for identifying failing schools are not realistic.
As doubts are raised, some have suggested moving away from the idea of penalizing schools based on a single year's test scores, and others have questioned the very idea of retaining the yearly tests.
As Congress attempts to pen the first comprehensive federal standards for health insurance, at the state level, officials are criticizing the House's newest legislation on patient's rights, saying that it would override state laws that already provide better protection to most healthcare consumers.
How to coordinate federal and state roles has become a major point of contention as most states have created their own laws as Congress wrestled with the issue.
With lagging support in the polls, an alleged affair with a missing 24-year-old woman and calls for his resignation from a local newspaper, Representative Gary A. Condit appears to be scrambling to revamp his image just in time to run for re-election next year in his Central Valley District.
After writing a front-page editorial in The Modesto Bee, Condit, a conservative Democrat, sent his Chief of Staff Mike Lynch to CNN to publicly defend him for the first time since Chandra Levy's disappearance.
Lynch justified his boss's dodging of reporters, criticized the media's conjectures on his supposed relationship with Levy and affirmed Condit's plans to seek an eighth term in office.
