Clearly, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio wasn’t looking forward to his weekly press conference today. Why would he, since he knew all of the questions were going to be about one of his caucus members heckling the president’s speech like one of those Little League parents who abuses the coach?

So Boehner did what any congressional leader does in that position: He faced the music, clung to his talking points, and never admitted he was embarrassed. Even though he certainly looked embarrassed.

After a lengthy delay caused by some drawn-out House votes, Boehner walked into the press conference and cited his litany of policy objections to President Obama’s health care speech last night. If it had been any other week, the reporters might have asked him some policy questions. But not the day after Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., disrupted Obama’s speech, shouting “You lie!” when Obama claimed the health care bill wouldn’t extend coverage to illegal immigrants.

Heeding the concerns of Congress and the real estate industry, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department on Monday extended for three months an emergency program designed to unfreeze the market for mortgages and other consumer and business loans.

The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, uses Treasury seed money to leverage $1 trillion for the purchase of securities backed by a variety of consumer loans from banks that were impaired by contagion from the mortgage crisis. The expectation is that the purchases will cleanse balance sheets and free the lenders to make new loans. Monday's action extends the program to June 30 for newly issued mortgage-based securities, instead of year's end. The program previously was extended to March 31 for non real estate-backed securities.

Commercial real estate interests implored the Obama administration and the Fed to extend the program, saying it was taking longer than expected to get going because of the time involved in packaging loans into mortgage-backed securities. The concerned were echoed by 41 members of Congress, including House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., who sent Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner a July 31 letter asking for a one-year extension, through December 2010.

Charges that President Obama and House Democrats want to authorize "death panels" in their health care overhaul evoke a debate 19 years ago in which lawmakers first took up sensitive right-to-die issues.

The catalyst then was a controversial Supreme Court case, Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, in which a 5-4 ruling upheld a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that it was acceptable to require "clear and convincing evidence" that a young woman in a persistent vegetative state would not want to remain on life support for years. The court held "that the evidence adduced at trial did not amount to clear and convincing proof of Cruzan's desire to have hydration and nutrition withdrawn."

Then as now, lawmakers who wanted to make sure people knew about their rights to execute "living wills" or other advance directives clarifying their wishes in such a situation tried to insert language in a sweeping bill dealing with Medicare and Medicaid policy. And opponents quickly charged that the effort would inject government into sensitive personal care decisions.

The health care overhaul effort may be sputtering in key Senate and House committees, but White House senior adviser David Axelrod told House Democrats today to focus how far Congress has already come — and on the potential for a “historic” breakthrough after the August recess to pass badly needed fixes to the health care system.

After a two-hour meeting with the House Democratic caucus, Axelrod played down the fights in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where the conservative Blue Dogs have forced changes to the bill and some liberal Democrats think their leaders have given away too much. Instead, he said the White House and congressional Democrats will be able to deliver the same message over the recess — uniting over the need to end insurance practices such as denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and limiting how much they’ll pay to cover serious illnesses.

“We’re very close to doing something historic that will give stability and security to people who have health insurance now as well as people who don’t,” Axelrod said. “And we need to go out and make an aggressive case over August. And we just talked that through.”

The Blue Dogs aren’t the only House Democrats who can derail a health care bill. This afternoon, several members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus held a press conference to complain about all the concessions Democrats have made to the Blue Dogs — and threatened to vote against the House bill if it doesn’t have a stronger government-run health plan option.

“Many of us favor a single-payer system. We have compromised,” caucus co-chair Lynn Woolsey of California said to applause from health care activists. “We can compromise no more.”

The caucus has released a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and the chairmen of the three House health care committees — signed by 57 liberal House Democrats — threatening to vote against a bill that includes the changes to the “public option” that Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman of California made to win the support of four of his committee’s seven Blue Dogs.

Just weeks ago, President Obama characterized a public insurance option as an almost essential component of any health care overhaul and an important tool with which to discipline insurance companies. Nevermind that a government-sponsored alternative to private health plans was already emerging as a stumbling block to serious health care overhaul. The president, at a June 23 White House press conference, said an government-run plan that isn't profit-driven, provides quality care and keeps down administrative costs simply "makes sense."

"The notion that all these insurance companies who say they're giving consumers the best possible deal, if they can't compete against a public plan as one option, with consumers making the decision what's the best deal, that defies logic, which is why I think you've seen in the polling data overwhelming support for a public plan," Obama said.

Fast forward to today. With health care talks bogged down in the House and Senate, the administration appears more receptive to fallbacks to the government-run option, including a consumer-owned "co-op" health plan that's being discussed in the Senate Finance Committee. But aides don't appear to be in a rush to learn all the messy details.

Somehow, the House got 158 Republicans — including nearly all members of the leadership — to vote for a resolution last night that declares President Obama was born in Hawaii. But it appears that the resolution wasn’t intentionally aimed at the fringe movement plaguing the Republican Party these days: the people who insist Obama isn’t actually a citizen of the United States.

Instead, aides to Democratic Rep. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii — the sponsor of the resolution — say the impact on the “birther” movement was just an amusing sideshow to a resolution that was just supposed to be a simple celebration of the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood.

“When we realized that it might stir them up, we just kind of smiled,” said Abercrombie spokesman Dave Helfert.

The resolution, adopted last night on a vote of 378-0, notes that “the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961.” To Abercrombie, who was friends with Obama’s father and knew the president when he was a toddler, any resolution celebrating Hawaii’s anniversary would naturally mention Obama because “it is a matter of great pride in Hawaii that Barack Obama is a native son,” Helfert said.

Now we know how much energy President Obama can spend on eliminating those wasteful federal programs that he expects to reduce the government’s ocean of red ink. With health care, climate change and stimulus questions all competing for his time, the answer is: not much.

In May, Obama proposed killing the Even Start family literacy program, just as President George W. Bush had tried to do. It was one of the highlights of his budget hit list. The Obama administration argued that studies show Even Start didn’t work, just as the Bush administration had claimed. The Obama team even used the same studies the Bush administration had used, which meant they were really, really out of date.

So today, the House is considering its spending bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. And guess what? Even Start survives. In fact, in its committee report on the bill, the House Appropriations Committee “strongly recommends” the $66.5 million the program would receive in the bill (the same amount it got last year).

President Obama campaigned as someone who wouldn’t use signing statements to get around provisions of new laws. But this morning, four top Democratic lawmakers accused him of doing exactly that — in a recent statement rejecting conditions on funds for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — and warned that he might not get any more money for those institutions unless he stops.

The letter from House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, House Appropriations Chairman David R. Obey of Wisconsin, and Rep. Nita M. Lowey and Gregory W. Meeks of New York — who chair the two subcommittees that deal with international financial institutions — is a strongly worded rebuke of Obama’s continued use of the signing statements after he criticized President George W. Bush for using them to thwart the will of Congress.

Although the Obama administration has assured the lawmakers that it will comply with the funding conditions, “we request that you no longer assert the right to ignore provisions that Congress adds through the normal legislative process for funding for the international financial institutions,” the letter stated. If the lawmakers see that the administrations isn’t respecting the conditions imposed by Congress, they warned, “it will make it virtually impossible to provide further allocations for these institutions.”

When the same political party controls both the White House and Congress, oversight of the executive seems suddenly to vanish from the list of urgent congressional priorities. And that usualy increases pressure on Congress’ minority party to be more innovative in the way it pushes for oversight.

So lately, House Republicans have been making more use of what’s known as a “resolution of inquiry,” a way for the minority party to try to pry information out of the White House. Just today, in fact, the Financial Services committee approved one such request. That might look surprising coming from a Democratic House. But when you dig a little deeper into how these resolutions actually work, you realize that’s probably as far as it will go.

The resolution was sponsored by House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio, and it asks for various documents about the federal government’s aid to General Motors and Chrysler, the workings of President Obama’s auto task force, and the dealership closures both companies have announced. The closures have angered House members from both parties, but Boehner has a special stake in the issue, since GM closed a dealership in his district.