With odds for climate change legislation this year now hovering around zero, the Obama administration is looking for fallback positions that can ensure the United States has a strong negotiating hand at December's U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen -- where 192 nations are supposed to develop a follow-on pact to the Kyoto Protocol.

The administration had hoped enactment of a domestic cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions would send a strong signal to its negotiating partners, and enable it to strike a global-warming deal that's acceptable to both houses of Congress.

Officials are eager to avoid repeating the experiences of the Clinton administration -- which backed the Kyoto pact but never submitted it for ratification to the Senate after the chamber in 1997 passed a resolution stating it would only sign a deal that included commitments to cut emissions levels from developing countries like China and India.

The White House is in a real bind. On one hand, it can't really come up with a coherent negotiating position without concrete emissions targets. And if negotiators in Copenhagen fail to reach any substantive agreement, Congress will probably be more reluctant to move cap-and-trade legislation next year, right before the mid-term elections. The House in June narrowly passed a bill (HR 2454) that would limit emissions at 17 percent below current levels in 2020, 42 percent in 2030 and 83 percent in 2050.

The fuel economy and tailpipe emissions standards that the Obama administration unveiled on Tuesday essentially formalized a deal the White House cut in May that got the federal government, states, the auto industry and environmentalists more or less on the same track with respect to climate change.

But there were several important political statements embedded in the several hundred-page proposal.

The first is that even more sweeping regulations addressing global warming are on the way. Within weeks, the EPA is expected to issue an "endangerment finding" that would trigger a requirement for the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act (PL 101-549) -- even without new legislation. This wouldn't just cover emissions from "mobile sources" like cars and trucks, but from power plants, factories and other large facilities. That puts pressure on the Senate to begin moving a climate change bill and protect its favored industries, or watch from the sidelines while the EPA writes new rules.

Seldom does the collapse of a major financial institution qualify as a subject for presidential commemmoration. But President Obama, ever in search of a teachable moment, plans to use Monday's first anniversary of the demise of Lehman Bros. to issue a rallying cry to overhaul financial regulations -- and to prod the Senate to take action on one of his top-tier priorities.

Obama will appear at Federal Hall, on Wall Street, to discuss the need for new rules governing the trading of financial derivatives and new structures that protect consumers by approving mortgage products and imposing new disclosure rules. He'll also likely repeat his pitch to give the Federal Reserve the power to regulate systemic risk, a proposal that's aroused substantial ire from Fed critics in Congress.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs on Friday said Obama was using the occasion to remind Americans how close the economy came to the abyss, and to sell a series of steps "to ensure what happened a year ago won't happen again." He declined to say who'll be in the audience at the site, where George Washington took the oath of office as the first president and where the first Congress, Supreme Court and executive branch offices were located.

This is how weird the health care debate is getting: It’s now possible to hear Lamar Alexander talking about “revolution.”

Not singing it, but at this rate, that could be next.

On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, Alexander, the mild-mannered Senate Republican Conference chairman from Tennessee, warned Democrats that the nation would not sit still if they try to pass their health care bill through the reconciliation process, which would allow them to bypass a filibuster and approve the overhaul without any Republican support. If one party tried to rewrite the health care system on its own, Alexander said, “there would be a minor revolution in this country.”

Absence clearly isn't making hearts grow fonder in the health care debate.

The Obama administration on Monday showed its irritation with remarks Wyoming Republican Sen. Michael B. Enzi made as part of the weekly GOP address on Sunday -- particularly lines about how Democratic proposals in Congress would restrict medical choices and make the nation's "finances sicker without saving you money." Enzi, you'll recall, is part of the "Gang of Six" Senate Finance Committee members who've been meeting for months to craft a bipartisan health plan.

President Obama during recent town hall meetings singled out Enzi as one of a handful of Republicans who's still working constructively to achieve results. But Enzi on Sunday said town hall meetings he's held with constituents revealed widespread anxiety over Obama's efforts to reshape the U.S. health system.

Strong signs that the Obama administration is close to declaring that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are dangerous pollutants are prompting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to request the EPA conduct a public hearing on the scientific evidence underpinning the belief that rising temperatures threaten public health and welfare.

Last week, the powerful business lobby filed a request that the agency provide a venue to rebut "largely undocumented and, in the chamber's view, insupportable claims" about the effects of climate change. Chamber officials said they are concerned that any rules capping greenhouse gas emissions could be unduly influenced by what it contends are spurious claims, including assertions that climate change may cause mental illness and that 150,000 people die every year from the effects of global warming.

The request is part of the widespread jockeying by business groups and environmentalists in anticipation of a finding that would trigger a requirement that the federal government regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act (PL 101-549), with or without new legislation.

Lost in all the tributes to the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is the role he played asserting congressional prerogatives and curbing presidential power in the early 1970s, by limiting chief executives' ability to employ what has come to be known as the pocket veto.

Recall from civics class that the Constitution gives the president 10 legislative days (excluding Sundays) to sign a bill into law or return it to Congress. Bills that are neither approved or vetoed after 10 days automatically become law. But if Congress adjourns before the 10 days pass and the president has not yet signed the bill, the bill dies, forcing Congress to start over in its next legislative session, if it wants to try again. Taken literally, the president "pocketed" the bill rather than acted on it.

Since the pocket veto is a classic passive-aggressive behavior and doesn't require direct action, it has become a periodic source of friction between the branches, usually because the president and Congress can't agree over what precisely constitutes "adjourment." Such was the case during President Richard M. Nixon's first term, when he pocket vetoed a bill that would have provided funds for medical training during the six-day Christmas recess in 1970, arguing that the short recess was akin to an adjournment sine die, marking the end of a two-year session.

If the Democrats decide to use budget reconciliation rules to try to pass the health care overhaul — a strategy that would allow them to push through the most contentious changes with a simple majority, rather than 60 votes — expect to hear Sen. John McCain of Arizona draw a lot of comparisons to the fight he helped lead four years ago to preserve judicial filibusters.

In 2005, McCain was the Republican co-chair of the “Gang of 14,” a bipartisan group of senators who blocked a Republican plan to stop Democrats from filibustering President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. The group vowed to vote against any procedural ruling that banned future judicial filibusters, arguing that the ability of the minority party to block objectionable things — even judicial nominations — was crucial to the traditions of the Senate.

Last night, McCain told Sean Hannity that the 60-vote principle was so important to the Senate that he’ll fight the Democratic reconciliation strategy on health care on those grounds — just as he fought the Republican leadership’s plans to end judicial filibusters.

Just five years after assuming his brother's Senate seat at age 30, Edward M. Kennedy helped enact the Medicare and Medicaid programs, beginning a 40-plus year involvement with federal health care issues. Kennedy was so passionate about extending coverage to the uninsured and fortifying the social safety net, that he made then-candidate Barack Obama pledge to make health care a first-tier priority in return for his support -- a promise the president fulfilled by staking much of his first-term agenda on an ambitious and controversial plan to retool the U.S. health care system.

Kennedy's colleagues in Congress -- including Obama's campaign opponent, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain -- have lamented the progressive warrior's absence from the Senate during this year's health care debate and speculated how his presence might have by now helped forged consensus on the broad contours of a plan.

"Had his own health allowed him to fully participate, we would be far closer to consensus today on a path to health care in America," Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., said on Wednesday.

In the hours after Kennedy's death, progressive interest groups wasted little time invoking his legacy, in an effort to rally Congress to enact a sweeping health plan when lawmakers return on Sept. 8.

Kennedy's passing could yet alter the tenor of the debate, now mired in fierce partisan battles over how to pay for an overhaul and what role the government should play in a retooled health insurance market.

The message has been sent: President Obama is deliberately not ruling out a Democrats-only strategy to break the deadlock on health care.

At an online “strategy session” this afternoon sponsored by Organizing for America — formerly the grass-roots mobilization arm of his presidential campaign — Obama promised to move ahead on a health care overhaul “one way or another,” regardless of whether the Senate Finance Committee can reach an agreement that can win the support of three Senate Republicans.

Responding to a question about whether the bipartisan talks are doing any good, Obama said he wants “a good product that includes some Republican ideas.” But, he added, “I have no control over what the other side decides is its political strategy. My commitment to the American people is, we’re going to get this done one way or another.”

Liberal Democrats and progressive groups have been increasingly frustrated at how far the Obama administration, and particularly Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, have been going to win Republican support — especially if the effort means getting rid of a proposed government-run health plan to compete with private insurers. They’ve noted that even Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, one of the three Republicans Baucus has been negotiating with, has said he might not support a deal if it can’t get substantial GOP support — a remark that has convinced them the Republicans aren’t negotiating in good faith.