Eric Cantor (Getty)

Cantor is, of course, the House minority whip, and his job is to make Obama’s life as hard as possible by denying him as many Republican votes as possible. So you might expect him to dump on Obama’s plan, announced today, to pull all combat troops out of Iraq by Aug. 31, 2010.

But you would be wrong.

“The President’s decision appears to be informed by the advice of our commanders and the fluid nature of the events on the ground, which was reinforced during my trip to Baghdad earlier this month,” Cantor said in a statement. “President Obama deserves credit for not listening to the chorus of voices calling for a rapid drawdown of forces regardless of the consequences for Iraq, our military and the American people.”

The Department of Health and Human Services is preparing to give notice that it's planning to rescind a Bush administration rule allowing doctors, nurses and other health care professionals to opt out of providing abortion services or procedures involving birth control on moral grounds.

The so-called "conscience clause" rule, which was finalized just before former President George W. Bush left office in December, triggered furious protests from family-planning advocates for the way it gave guidance to health care providers without explicitly defining abortion.

The National Women's Law Center said the wording allows an array of providers to refuse to provide access to, or information about, birth control on the grounds that they believe that contraception amounts to abortion. However, anti-abortion groups such as the United States Conference on Catholic Bishops say the rule upholds individuals' rights to follow their consciences and respect human life.

Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say HHS is planning to give notice of the reversal next week -- a move that would trigger a 30-day public comment period.

The Obama administration was widely expected to move to overturn the rule. In late January, it invalidated another contentious Bush policy addressing reproductive rights, overturning a prohibition on sending U.S. funds to groups that perform or promote abortion overseas.

Leon Panetta (Getty)

The CIA will take the lead role in producing the publication, CIA Dirctor Leon E. Panetta told reporters Wednesday, and it will focus on economic developments around the world and in the United States, as well as the "implications of those developments."

According to recent Senate testimony by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair -- reiterated to House members Wednesday -- the worldwide economic crisis has supplanted terrorism as the greatest near-term threat to national security.

"The purpose is to give policymakers a feel for what's going on," Panetta said, to help guide their decisions. He said the document will be shared with "key players" in the government.

The new focus on economic issues "may require some additional analysts," Panetta said, but the CIA already had considerable resources devoted to economic matters. Presidents already receive a document with a run-down of top threats and intelligence called the President's Daily Brief. Panetta said the new economic briefing came at the request of the Obama administration.

-- Tim Starks

Forget the new Commerce secretary-designate, health care overhaul and those concerns about how stimulus money is being spent.

The biggest news out of the White House on Wednesday concerned the choice of a new first pet. The Obamas have all but selected a Portuguese Water Dog, ending a months-long vetting process that pitted the mid-sized, hypoallergenic breed against the Labradoodle.

First Lady Michelle Obama broke the news to People magazine, saying the family plans to adopt a rescued dog after she and the president take daughters Sasha and Malia on vacation for spring break, in April.

Credit Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., for gaming the selection process.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad is a big believer in the “grand bargain”: dealing with health care, the tax code, Social Security, and all other aspects of the nation’s long-term fiscal pressures all at once. President Obama didn’t talk about the fiscal situation in those terms last night, and Conrad wishes he had.

But the most important thing Obama will do to set the stage for that kind of bargain, Conrad says, will happen when he releases his first budget proposal tomorrow.

Obama has already promised to end the “accounting gimmicks” the Bush administration used to hide the true scale of the mounting deficits. Last night, after Obama’s speech, Conrad told reporters he had been briefed about the budget numbers. He said he couldn’t discuss them yet, though we already know they will reveal the reality of trillion-dollar deficits.

If President Obama needed any validation for the "Green New Deal" he intends to make a cornerstone of his economic recovery plan and a part of his address to Congress tonight, he likely got it during a meeting on Tuesday with Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso.

Aso, the first foreign leader to visit Obama at the White House, proposed a four-point plan for the two governments to pursue on environmental matters that includes developing common standards for electric cars and plug-in hybrids, promoting carbon sequestration as a means to cut greenhouse gas emissions and preventing nuclear proliferation in developing countries, the Daily Yomiuri reports.

Obama intends to make these kind of green initiatives a prominent part of the budget plan his administration will roll out on Thursday, and the economic stimulus package (PL 111-5) already addresses "clean coal" technologies that utilize sequestration, as well as revamping the power grid and promoting renewable energy.

The leaders also chatted about less pleasant topics, like developing a global framework for addressing the financial crisis. Aso, described as somewhat gruff and outspoken, can certainly empathize with Obama's situation; Japan also is grappling with soaring budget deficits and negative growth. But we wonder if the PM repeated remarks he made last September, when he expressed pride that Japan had not succumbed to the "money game" that dragged down the U.S. financial system.

Fun times at the White House Monday morning, when President Obama used an address to the nation’s governors to scold Republicans who have been criticizing the stimulus package and then promptly released $15 billion in emergency funds to help states cope with surging Medicaid costs.

“By the time you get home, money will be waiting to help 20 million vulnerable Americans in your states keep their health coverage,” Obama told members of the National Governors Association, who were in town for their annual Washington meeting.

Touche. The president has not concealed his displeasure with cable news-fueled chatter over stimulus costs that’s eroding his job-approval ratings. Obama looked in the direction of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and South Carolina’s Mark Sanford during remarks in which he complained that much of the criticism is, well, nitpicking.

If you’ve ever planned a wedding, you know how hard it must have been for the White House to figure out who to invite to the budget summit. If you invite John McCain, you pretty much have to invite Lindsey Graham. And Joe Lieberman, for that matter. But then you need more liberals. How about David Obey?

They’re all there, according to the official White House list of congressional invitees. And since President Obama likes to hear views from across the spectrum, they’ve got members of Congress from across the spectrum. (Though the budget hawks do seem to be more heavily represented than other groups — and the Senate leadership list is oddly heavy with Republicans.)

All in all, 53 lawmakers are on the list — including 24 senators. Yes, that’s almost a quarter of the Senate. So if the speeches go on forever and the summit runs late, don’t say you weren’t warned.

For the most part, legal experts and civil liberties watchers give President Obama credit for trying to reverse some of the most controversial claims of executive power that George W. Bush made during his presidency. (My look at their reviews of Obama’s first month in office appears in today’s CQ Weekly magazine.)

But there are still some caveats and gray areas, and a few deserve a closer look — because they’re coming out of a Justice Department whose top appointees have all talked in the past about overturning Bush’s policies.

Keith Perine, my colleague over at the Legal Beat blog, reports that the Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to freeze a district judge’s order that would have allowed a lawsuit to proceed on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.

A number of smart people in the “fiscal responsibility” debate are flocking to the idea that whatever is done to trim long-term spending, Congress should vote on the package up or down, with little or no chance to amend it.

This is one of those sleeper issues that is worth watching closely. Yes, it’s the substance of any deficit-control package that matters most, but how — or whether — anyone gets to change it matters too. If all Congress gets is an up-or-down vote, liberals will cry foul on the grounds that it’s an undemocratic (little ‘d’) approach — one more headache the Democrats (big ‘D’) probably can do without.

The up-or-down vote idea got a prominent mention in a statement yesterday from academics at several organizations in advance of Monday’s “fiscal responsibility summit” at the White House. The organizations — including think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, and two deficit-watchdog groups, the Concord Coalition and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation — said the vote should be based on the models of base closings and trade agreements, where Congress already is limited to a “yes” or “no.”

Poor President Obama. He hasn’t even held his fiscal responsibility summit yet, and already, he’s facing pressure from the left about what thet think the summit could become: a trap that forces him to cut entitlement programs.

This afternoon, on a press conference call organized by the Campaign for America’s Future, progressive economists and activists warned him not to get suckered into appointing a task force that might recommend cuts to Social Security.

They claimed that deficit watchdogs like the Peter G. Peterson Foundation have created a false atmosphere of crisis about Social Security’s fiscal health, and that it will actually be running a surplus for the next two decades, before the retirement of the baby boomers makes it spend more than it takes in.

Moreover, they argue that the cost pressures of Medicare — the entitlement program whose fiscal health is in far greater danger — are just a subset of the broader issue of rising health care costs, and that the real answer is to focus on overhauling the health care system, not to think of it as an entitlement problem.

The White House gained another czar on Wednesday when President Obama made good on his long-rumored decision to appoint Adolfo Carrion to the new post of Director of Urban Affairs.

The job entails coordinating transportation and housing initiatives, as well as serving as a conduit for federal aid to economically hard-hit cities.

The 47-year-old Carrion has served as borough president of the Bronx in New York since 2002 and also was president of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

Looks like Judd Gregg hasn’t been excommunicated from the White House after all. The former Commerce secretary nominee, and still a conservative Republican senator from New Hampshire, announced this morning that he’ll be one of the lawmakers attending President Obama’s “fiscal responsibility summit” at the White House on Monday.

It makes sense, since Gregg has always been one of the most outspoken senators about the need to overhaul entitlement programs as retiring baby boomers start to put huge strains on their solvency. And being at the summit would allow Gregg to “be myself,” the mantra he kept repeating after he withdrew last week as a candidate for the Commerce job.

“Reform is urgently needed, especially as long-term entitlement spending threatens to strangle our economy, and action must be taken sooner rather than later,” Gregg said in a statement today. “I will certainly do everything I can to work with the President and others in Congress to set a course for the long-run that addresses the issue of how we pass on to our children a government they can afford.”

Of course, the small talk might be a little awkward. But the invitation shows that despite the embarrassment of last week’s events, Obama still considers Gregg an important enough ally — especially on entitlements — to keep talking to him in his Senate role.

And if Gregg changes his mind and skips the meeting, we’ll let you know.

The Obama administration on Tuesday sent another indication it's serious about reversing Bush White House policies on climate change when the Environmental Protection Agency notified green groups it plans to review a policy to exclude carbon dioxide from a list of pollutants the government has to regulate when approving construction projects.

The waiver from the Clean Air Act was seen as a way to speed the permitting of coal-fired power plants but amped up an already high-volume debate over how the government should cut emissions of greenhouse gases that many scientists blame for global warming.

EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, in a letter to Sierra Club chief climate counsel David Bookbinder, said her agency will reconsider the Bush administration decision -- one of many 11th-hour regulatory moves that triggered appeals, threatened lawsuits and no small amount of paperwork for the new administration.

President Obama went through another rite of passage Friday when he addressed The Business Council in the East Room of the White House.

This group of CEO's and other business elites has served as an informal sounding board to presidents since the early days of the New Deal, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's commerce secretary, Daniel C. Roper, established the body as a test bed for government-business cooperation.

Obama, perhaps channeling his inner FDR, alluded to the origins of the group in his remarks, crediting its original members for helping craft "policies that in the coming years would transform the American economy amidst brutal and unyielding Depression," including the Social Security Act, the Securities and Exchange Act and the Banking Act.

Today, Congress is voting on $789 billion in spending and tax cuts contained in a bill that wasn’t available online, in full, until about 11 p.m. (Eastern) last night.

It’s a weird turn of events, not just because of the amount of money at stake, but because the House itself voted earlier this week — unanimously — to recommend that the House shouldn’t vote on the final bill until it had been posted online for 48 hours.

Of course, that was a non-binding resolution. Really non-binding, it turns out.

So who’s worried about the fact that the lawmakers who will be voting on a bill of this scope haven’t had time to read it? Only Republicans, judging from the speeches and e-mail traffic, and almost none of them are voting for the bill anyway. The least bothered people in Washington, apparently, are those who work at the White House — for a president who campaigned on opening up the legislative process to the public.

Bothered by how quickly the stimulus has been slapped together? Wondering why, with the House scheduled to vote on the final bill tomorrow, the full text of the bill still hasn’t been released?

Here’s House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s take: It’s President Obama’s fault.

Okay, she didn’t actually put it that way. But at her weekly press conference this afternoon, Pelosi did suggest that the House couldn’t do the stimulus bill through “regular order” — meaning, all of the relevant committees get to hold hearings and write the bill — because Obama wanted Congress to pass it so quickly.

With the nearly finished economic stimulus package sure to deliver billions of dollars worth of new investment in health information technology, here's some sobering news from the Institute of Medicine about the government's inadequate guidelines for protecting personally identiable health information.

The IOM, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, issued a report last week urging Congress to make a clean break from the 1996 privacy rules it enacted as part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA (PL 104-191).

The law limits what information insurers, doctors and other health care providers can use or disclose to third parties but is subject to widely differing interpretations. What is more, its cumbersome requirements for subjects who are willing to submit their data for medical research shelved several heart and stroke studies, an IOM panel concluded.

Now we know what President Obama’s challenge in Congress will be for the next two years as he tries to move forward on the rest of the agenda. It’s not Democrats vs. Republicans, since his party controls Congress.

It’s the Senate vs. the House.

The temporary meltdown over the final stimulus deal yesterday was a classic example of how a president’s troubles don’t end when one party is in charge of the White House and Congress. Simply put, the House and the Senate don’t understand each other.

We’re now learning the limits of President Obama’s campaign pledge to make congressional negotiations as open as possible, now that the final talks on the stimulus bill are underway. Number one, that’s up to Congress, not Obama. Number two, they’re really busy right now.

And number three — what, exactly, counts as negotiations?

The reality of Congress is that all kinds of things happen behind the scenes, and it probably wasn’t realistic to expect every single meeting to be open to the public.

Quite a job the Obama administration did finessing the question of whether to nationalize troubled banks as part of its new financial rescue plan.

Liberal Democrats led by Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman have been lobbying the White House for weeks to take direct control of those institutions that need to be bailed out -- a view apparently embraced by a cadre of top presidential advisers, including David Axelrod.

Yet Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner prevailed in internal administration debates and chose a more centrist course in designing what's coming to be known as TARP 2 -- the second installment of the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program that was unveiled on Tuesday morning.

As he made the case for the stimulus bill in Elkhart, Indiana yesterday, President Obama declared that “this bill does not have a single earmark in it, which is unprecedented for a bill of this size.” He repeated the same claim, almost word for word, at his press conference last night.

It’s all true, according to Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, except for the part where the bill doesn’t have a single earmark in it. He claims there’s a pretty big one: $2 billion for the FutureGen near-zero emissions, coal-fired plant in Mattoon, Ill., a project that the Bush administration suspended last year.

It was part of a list of “wasteful, non-stimulative spending” that Coburn’s office circulated while Obama rallied support for the stimulus package in Indiana today. But why should Obama listen to Coburn? He’s just another carping Republican critic who just wants Obama to fail, right?

Not exactly. Actually, Coburn was one of Obama’s best Republican partners in the Senate.

Who was that dapper gent helping President Obama flog the stimulus package in Fort Myers, Fla. today?

Why, none other than Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, once a rumored running mate of John McCain, who's now sounding a bit like a New Dealer promoting deficit spending to solve the financial crisis.

Crist appears to be the president's type of Republican -- someone ready to put aside partisanship for the greater good.

So different from the members of Congress Obama kept ripping in his nationally televised news conference on Monday night.

Congratulations, Gallup. You’re David Axelrod’s favorite polling firm today.

As the White House team preps for President Obama’s prime-time press conference tonight, it makes sense that his top political adviser would be checking out a few polls on the stimulus package. And today’s Gallup poll was full of good news for Obama. It found that the public gives him a 67 percent approval rating for his handling of the stimulus — better than congressional Democrats (48 percent), and way better than congressional Republicans (31 percent).

“I think the Gallup poll this morning reflects everything I’ve seen for the last couple of weeks,” Axelrod told reporters on the flight to Elkhart, Ind. for Obama’s town hall meeting on the economy, according to the pool report. “We’ve got a good plan to deal with a deep crisis. The American people support it and we’re urging everyone in Congress to catch up with the people on this one.”

The White House says President Obama and his family will make their first trip to the Camp David retreat today, Obama's 18th full day in office.

If two-and-a-half weeks seems like a short amount time to spend at work in Washington before heading to the house in the country, consider this: no president since Jimmy Carter has even waited that long.

President Ronald Reagan first visited the camp on Jan. 30, 1981, ten days after his inauguration.

At times, it seems like the presidential campaign never ended.

President Obama will mount a two-stop tour of economically devastated communities early next week as he tries to maintain pressure on the Senate to pass the economic stimulus package.

In between stops, he'll also hold his first prime-time news conference Monday evening in the East Room of the White House -- just hours after Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner outlines precisely how the administration plans to stabilize the financial system and unfreeze credit markets.

For Senate and House Democrats, the emergence of the new, more aggressive President Obama — capped by his red-meat (for him) speech to House Democrats last night — was a welcome relief from weeks of outreach to Republicans on the stimulus that seemed to be getting them nowhere.

Democratic sources won’t quite come out and say that lawmakers asked Obama to turn up the heat on Republicans. But they do say that the White House and congressional Democrats all reached the same level of frustration, at about the same time, that Obama had spent so much time trying to cultivate Republican support only to have GOP senators push for major rewrites.

“This gives us cover to go on the attack,” said one Democratic leadership aide. “Before, we would have been accused of stepping on the president’s bipartisan message.”

That Leon Panetta will say anything to get the CIA director job. At his confimation hearing today, he promised the Senate intelligence committee that he’d “rebuild a close working and consultative relationship with Congress.” (In other words, not the kind the Bush administration had.)

But Panetta also touched on a specific issue that became a sore point with Congress when the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program was disclosed. He said he thought the Bush team had “abused” the system of sharing sensitive intelligence information only with the “Gang of Eight” members of Congress — a circle so narrow that it makes real congressional oversight much more difficult.

Under a system that has been formally in place since 1991, the Gang of Eight — the Senate majority and minority leader, the House Speaker and minority leader, and the chairmen and ranking minority party members of the two Intelligence committees — is the designated group to receive the most top-secret briefings from the executive branch, usually on covert activities.

First came the flap over Pastor Rick Warren delivering the invocation at the inaugural.

Now, President Obama is prompting an outcry from the political left over the establishment of a new White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Obama on Thursday signed an executive order creating the office, which will partner with religious and secular groups that help the needy. Obama said the economic crisis underscored the need for a "force for good greater than government" and pledged to help community groups cut through red tape while sidestepping constitutional questions about the separation of church and state.

The office will be headed by Joshua DuBois, a 26-year-old former campaign adviser and Pentecostal minister, who also conducted religious outreach for Obama's Senate office.

Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn is doing his best impression of Elliot Ness, the famed Treasury agent who brought down Al Capone.

Coburn filed an amendment Thursday that would ban stimulus spending on a planned mob museum in Las Vegas.

The $900 billion bill doesn't specifically earmark money for the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, which goes by the alias "the Mob Museum."

Remember all of that talk that President Obama wanted a stimulus bill that would pass the Senate with 80 votes? The Senate Democratic leadership is sending the White House team a blunt message: It ain’t gonna happen.

With all of the Republican talk of drastically scaling back and rewriting the bill, Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and his colleagues appear to have decided that the price of such a strong vote — a smaller bill, heavier on tax cuts — is too much to pay.

“We’d rather pass a good bill with 65 votes than a bill that doesn’t work with 80 votes,” Charles E. Schumer of New York, the vice chairman of the Senate Democratic Conference, told reporters at a leadership press conference early this afternoon.

Wasn't that long ago that members of the Congressional Black Caucus complained about never being invited to the White House -- stepping inside the building being a barometer of whether their counsel was valued by President Bush.

President Bush's successor hasn't been in office long enough to extend all the invitations and express all the courtesies to all the interest groups whose counsel he values, but he sure moved fast to neutralize complaints from the Black Caucus.

CQ's Jonathan Allen talked to a senior White House official who says that in the new administration, the director of the Census Bureau will report directly to the White House -- even though the bureau is part of the Commerce Department.

Granted, it pales in comparison to tax scandals and stimulus troubles, but President Obama is once again about to break his campaign promise to post legislation on the White House Web site for five days before he signs it into law.

He’s scheduled to sign the rewrite of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program into law at the White House this afternoon, now that the House has cleared the final version. But the legislation was only posted on the White House Web site on Sunday — meaning the public will have had, at most, four days to read the bill and comment on it.

And that’s if you count Super Bowl Sunday, the day it was posted (sometime during the second quarter).

It would be the second time Obama has signed a bill into law without the five-day review period (he did the same thing with the wage discrimination legislation he signed last week). It may be a temporary issue, though. The White House insists Obama still intends to honor his campaign pledge — once his team has had a little more time to get the five-day system in place.

From the looks of things, John McCain is adjusting to life back in the Senate. He’s now part of a group of Republican senators who hope to offer an alternative to the stimulus bill President Obama wants.

It usually takes a while for senators who run for president to raise their profile when they return, and at first McCain was no exception. Two weeks ago, at Obama’s inauguration, he was walking through the halls of the Capitol all by himself, a large cup of coffee in hand, fending off reporters with a practiced, “I don’t have any comment today, thank you.”

Then came appearances on Larry King and Fox News, promising to use his time in the Senate to be the “loyal opposition.”

Today, he was back in two familiar venues — the Senate floor and a press conference — pitching a stimulus bill heavier on tax cuts and housing relief, and lighter on spending, than the Democratic package. Cheaper, too: $445 billion, compared to the $884.5 billion cost of the Democratic bill.

He was a little rusty, but otherwise he was more or less the same McCain the Senate knew before he left for the campaign trail.

In this era of post-partisanship, the best fights in town might the ones pitting urban and rural lawmakers.

Consider the juicy electric grid spending that's being proposed in the economic stimulus package.

With the estimates of the cost of overhauling the national grid ranging from $500 billion to $1 trillion, some on Capitol Hill suspect the $11 billion outlay in the House version of the bill could be tilted toward installing so-called "smart meters" that match consumption with generating capacity in the most populated areas.

Here’s a little perspective on the tax problems that have surfaced with yet another member of President Obama’s team — and how it compares to the nominees who are sticking it out.

Nancy Killefer, Obama’s choice to be the nation’s chief performance officer, dropped out of the running for the job today because — in the words of her letter to Obama — her own troubles with the District of Columbia’s unemployment compensation taxes “could be used to create exactly the kind of distraction and delay those duties must avoid.”

Killefer, according to an Associated Press story earlier this month, failed to pay $298 in unemployment compensation taxes. (She had a $946.69 lien placed on her house as a result.)

Tim Geithner, now the Treasury secretary, had to pay $42,702 in back taxes and interest that he owed from his work at the International Monetary Fund earlier in this decade.

And Tom Daschle, Obama’s pick to be the next Health and Human Services secretary, owed $128,203 in taxes, plus $11,964 in interest.

So maybe it’s not such a surprise that Daschle just withdrew his bid. If Killefer couldn’t hang on, what was going to keep him in the game?

As past votes go, this is a biggy.

CQ's Jonathan Allen reports that President Obama's candidate to run the Commerce Department voted in favor of abolishing the agency -- in 1995.

Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., whose nomination was expected to be announced Tuesday, also worked in the Senate to trim the Commerce budget.

Gregg also fought President Bill Clinton's efforts to increase funding for the Commerce Department to administer the 2000 Census. Indeed, Gregg's commitment to basic functions of the department has been questioned at times.

Way back during the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to post “any non-emergency bill” on the White House Web site for five days before he signs it into law.

“Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them,” his campaign explained as part of a government ethics and transparency plan.

Unfortunately, the Associated Press busted President Obama last week for not doing that with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for workers to challenge wage discrimination in court. Obama signed it into law on Jan. 29, two days after the House cleared the final version of the legislation.

So this time, the White House Web producers are giving Obama a bit of a head start on the next major bill that’s expected to land on his desk: the rewrite of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Tom Daschle’s tax troubles are already reviving the “Daschle hates Baucus” storyline that has plagued Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus for years. (Baucus voted for the George W. Bush tax cuts, bucked the Democrats in other ways that used to make Daschle’s life miserable, etc.)

Normally, the relationship between Daschle and Baucus wouldn’t matter beyond the gossip value. But there’s a substantive reason it matters now. If Daschle survives a confirmation fight for Health and Human Services secretary that suddenly has gotten much tougher, he’ll have to work closely on President Obama’s health care plan with the same Finance Committee that dug up his six-figure tax problems.

And if Baucus makes Daschle’s confirmation battle harder — but doesn’t defeat it — it could make their work on a health care overhaul a lot more awkward and possibly less successful.